Inside the 'arms race' between YouTube and ad blockers / Against all odds, open source hackers keep outfoxing one of the wealthiest companies.

You know… in all my time upon this earth, I cannot look back and think of a single instance where I thought: “Gosh, this advertisement which has inserted itself in between me and the desired content has actually made me want to go purchase that product.”

Ads are effective, sadly. And why so much money is poured into them. I believe there are a few effects at play but the direct, see and ad and want to go buy it now is only one ofbhem that mostly only affects some people, or a lot of people occasionally.
I think a bigger effect is familiarity. You are far more likely to pick a product you are familiar with or have seen before over something younjave never heard of. Even if you have only ever seen it on advets and completely forgotten that you have ever seen ads for it. So even if you don't think they work on you they likely do without you realizing, at least enough of the time on enough people that make them worth while running.
- I think a bigger effect is familiarity.
  Bingo. It's not about making you buy something right now, it's about brand recognition and such.
  To wit, if you listen to podcasts, do a little thought experiment. Name a VPN company.
  Was it "Nord VPN"? Ads work.
- These subconscious effects are indeed the most effective ways for an ad to work. However, if an ad is obnoxious enough for you to remember, it can get you to actively avoid the advertised product as well.
- Yeah, I like to think I'm immune to advertising until I see one that makes me think "damn, I haven't had Burger Restaurant in a while." The worst part is that I'm fully cognizant of what's happening, and yet I still want some and it'll make me think about it for a while afterward, simply because I'm familiar with the food and how it (usually) tastes.
  But, joke's on you, Burger Restaurant! I'm fucking broke, son! Now we're BOTH having our time wasted
- Yeah, people love to shit on it but everyone knows raid shadow legends
- Well, things affecting you unconsciously should be plain illegal. Though that's how ads are supposed to work since like 50s and earlier, and I think I remember a Colombo episode where what you said is mentioned.
Ads work. These companies wouldn't spend millions in them otherwise. Consumer behavior is among the most studied psychological phenomenoms in the world. If you show an ad to one person it's near impossible to tell if it had an effect or not but show it to a thousand people and you'll see it.
That's not how ads work.
Yeah I feel mostly this way too, but the data is solid, ads are effective. Even on me, very rarely. And I'm the type of person who doesn't ever click ads, out of spite. Even if it's exactly what I was already looking to actively buy. But every now and then they give me an idea that I pop open a new tab, research, and then buy.
That's not really how they work, or that is not the only way. Their point is to put the logo, slogans, company etc into your memory. This way when you're shopping for something specific, then the brand pops out to you because you've seen it and it gives you a sense of familiarity and hence, higher trust.
Likewise. I don't think I've ever been moved or compelled to buy, check out, or even pay attention to a YouTube ad.
To be honest, I once fell victim on reddit to an add that promoted AFK-Arena. It turned out to actually be a decent game.

At least one popular ad blocker, AdBlock Plus, won’t be trying to get around YouTube’s wall at all. Vergard Johnsen, chief product officer at AdBlock Plus developer eyeo, said he respects YouTube’s decision to start “a conversation” with users about how content gets monetized.

Shitty AdBlock Plus.

ABP has always been a shitty adblocker because it's meant to make money rather than actually block ads effectively. They've been accepting money from ad networks to allow their "unintrusive ads" (an oxymoron) for over a decade now, and I'm sure Google is paying for this to happen now.
- shrug
  I'm okay with unobtrusive ads as long as the place serving them up has a modicum of common sense sensibilities about their impact and has a rigorous enough vetting process that they'll never be used as payloads for malicious software. Ads can be a way to find out about products I might otherwise never know about. I'm not outright against all ads as a concept. Hell, sometimes it's an actual art form in rare cases.
  I'm just against them taking up more space than the content itself, impeding my access to the content in any way, hijacking my property, or getting hijacked by malware which then hijacks my property.
AdBlock Minus
- AdBlock Divided by Zero
Too bad Google doesn't want to have a conversation, at least one that isn't at gunpoint. I wouldn't mind unintrusive ads. If it stayed at banner ads and things like that, I would probably enable them. Shoving crap in the middle of videos just makes it a horrible experience, so I'm going to get rid of them.
An Adblocker allowing ads to.. start a conversation that's already been had and over for decades at this point.
People don't like intrusive ads. Give intrusive ads and we'll always find ways around them. It's a story as old as the internet. Google is no exception. You may have billions of dollars and thousands of employees but nearly everyone in the damned world hates ads. You can try to fight it all you want. The only reason that nearly anyone puts up with ads is they want to support the creator or don't yet know they can avoid the ads. Even those supporting the creators don't like the damned things.
I've seen so, so many people watching ads on their phones

And I am fucking loving it. With this move, Google has effectively started an arms race between the team they have implementing this Adblock-blocking crap and the vast majority of the technically competent internet users in the world.

Unless the rules of how the internet works fundamentally change, Google is not going to win.

Why do you think they were pushing so hard for WEI? They did try to fundamentally change how the internet works.
- Precisely.
i wouldn’t be surprised if this was partly a war between the team they have implementing this and the team they have implementing this, in their spare time
I'm not that optimistic. They could implement some sort of aggressive DRM. In the US, all they have to do is label protection as DRM and then it becomes illegal to even have any discussion of how to circumvent it. The overwhelming majority of users aren't going to bother with any ad blocking. In the end, this could end up hurting Google if people build decentralized Youtube alternatives and then they could take viewers away from Youtube.
- They would end up shooting themselves in the foot. They are on shaky ground already and it would only take a new platform that can entice a few of their top content producers over to lose enough chunks of their revenues to hurt. And all they have do is keep fucking around to find out what a tech-literate group of nerds who hate big corps can do when they are aligned in a certain direction.
- Well, in the US you can legally talk about it so long as you do not actually do it. It's similar to how an actor is able to talk about commiting murder without getting in trouble.

the "open source hackers" are always going to win this one, for a simple reason. if the data of the youtube video is handed to a user at any point, then the information it contains can be scrubbed and cleaned of ads. no exceptions.

if google somehow solves all ad-blocking techniques within browser, then new plugins will be developed on the operating system side to put a black square of pixels and selectively mute audio over the advert each time. if they solve that too? then people will hack the display signal going out at the graphics card level so that it is cleaned before it hits the monitor. if they beat that using some stupid encryption trick? well, then people will develop usb plugin tools that physically plug into the monitors at the display end, that artificially add the black boxes and audio mutes at the monitor display side.

if they beat that? someone, someone will jerry rig a literal black square of paper on some servos and wires, and physical audio switch to do the same thing, an actual, physical advert blocker. i'm sure once someone works that out, a mass produced version would be quite popular as a monitor attachment (in a timeline that gets so fucked that we would need this).

if that doesn't work? like, google starts coding malware to seek and destroy physical adblockers? then close your eyes and mute your headphones for 30 seconds, lol. the only way google is solving that one is with hitsquads and armed drones to make viewers RESUME VIEWING

as long as a youtube video is available to access without restriction, then google cannot dictate how the consumer experiences that video. google cannot win this.

Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
RESUME VIEWING
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
- good bot
It's how we did it with MythTV and over the air or cable tv. The algorithms will just save a file in post, that has the ads removed. And that was 15yrs ago.
- I don't see how we escape ads if YouTube splits the video in two and ads play on a third of the screen alongside the video. Or in a chiron
And if Google went nuclear and starts embedding the ad into the videos themselves?
- the current solution for that would be similar to the current "sponsor block" plugins, here's an example
  crowdsourced start and endpoints for embedded sponsorships
  something like this tool, but for future embedded google adverts
- All other hope forlorn, there's still ML to recognize and cut out ads.
  Or one can download the same video with as many as possible metrics different, so that ads would be different, and then compare the two videos. Ugh.
This type of war happened 15 years ago with Hulu vs Xbox. Hulu won because despite there always being an exploit it was always several days before a work around was uploaded. Eventually it was Hulu on xbmc for 1 day, then 3 days no Hulu on and on until everyone gave up.

YouTube can't win this race when they don't control the platform you're viewing it on. You can always install 'something' to get around it.

The solution to that is to control the platform using Chrome, Android etc.

YouTube's end game is baked in ads. There are streaming services that already do this so it's not impossible. It would not surprise me one iota if YouTube isn't working on this now.
Once this happens, I suspect that the last round of people that have been holding out to subscribe to premium will either cave and do so or people will simply abandon YouTube.
- Baked in ads run counter to googles entire ad philosophy though, to say nothing of the technical challenges that poses. Googles big selling point right now is targeted ads where the ads they serve you are based on your activities that they've tracked. With baked in ads every viewer of that stream gets the same ads, so while they could traget ads based on the contents of the stream, they would no longer be able to target the ads at specific viewers.
  There's also the problem that baked in ads are in many ways actually easier to skip. There are already extensions like sponsorblock that can skip specific segments of videos, and if it's not served as a separate stream it will be more difficult to give special treatment to the ad portion of the video.
- Wouldn't SponsorBlock be a way around this?
- A lot of people are saying this isn't possible, theyre wrong. It's called "Server Side Ad Insertion (SSAI)" and tldr it places the ads directly in the video itself. One of the popular streaming services uses SSAI, another uses SGAI. Theyre both something the CDN must implement alongside the client.
  The technical explanation: SSAI, at least with HLS, places the ad segments within the media playlist. This means there is no additional and easy to block call to the ad server to ask for ads (that's Server Guided Ad Insertion, SGAI). SGAI places markers where ads need to go in the media playlist, and the client asks the server for some ads to place there.
  There's also CSAI which is fully client side (the client decides where to place ads and how many) but I'd like to doubt youtube uses this. Doesn't seem very smart.
  Even if, lets say, youtube baked the ads into the content segments, it wouldn't solve anything. There will still be markers and metadata to find where they are (the client needs these to notify ad partners you watched the ad, and to display the yellow "ad" markers, and to display a timer) which can be used to skip them client-side with an extension.
  Overall YouTube probably won't win because there's always something to do to bypass ads. Some methods are easier to bypass than others, but they're all enforced client-side in the end. The only thing they could possibly do to have even a fraction of a chance would be to block you from getting the next content segments until the ad duration has passed in real-time. That's a last resort, however, because that will likely hurt QoS and client stability. There's a reason it isn't already done. Don't forget, also, the developers who work on this stuff don't like ads either. Nobody is going out of their way to prevent ad blocking beyond what the execs want, and the execs don't know what they want.
  Do note that although I specify HLS there is likely little to no difference with other streaming tech, I just want to be clear about my experience.
- The only reason it hasn't happened yet is because it is a fundamental change to the architecture of the platform, but will very much happen.
Twitch has increased their ad blocking techniques for the last 3 years or so. Twitch has been a lot more advanced and aggressive with their method. Yet, there are still ways to subvert the ads on twitch. If I didnt read lemmy, i wouldnt even know youtube was doing anything. I have just basic adblocking ublock
Although every once in a while, twitch will release a new technique and it might take 24 hours to solve.
- You would be surprised how many people will just uninstall the ad blocker the third time YouTube isn't working for 24 hours.
  Every time YouTube or twitch make a change, a certain percentage of users give up, which means more revenue.
I think that's a big part of why Google doesn't fight (and in fact helps) the banking and streaming companies that want to lock down Android more. It's harder to block ads if you can't block them in the browser and can't block them system wide via hosts file. (Yes you can use VPN + DNS, but it's a lot more battery intensive.)

"against all odds" lmao what. Anyone who's been paying attention since the dawn of the internet would know that youtube isn't winning this one. The odds were 100% in the favour of the hackers.

To ad blockers, thank you for your service!

Against all odds

lol someone hasn't been paying attention to how this stuff generally works...

Never under estimate the outrage of a nerd.

They even made a series of movies about it.

I remember the mini-war between AOL and third-party IM clients. There were days where AOL would send 15kB patches to AIM multiple times a day to break compatibility with the other apps. And they would then fix it within hours.

In the end, AOL gave up.

Wow that's full on antitrust surely? Or was this before the regulatory precedents were set for Internet providers?
- Well, not really.
  So AIM was built on an existing chat protocol called OSCAR. The same protocol used in other services. So people eventually figured out how to make chat clients that could log into many different IM services on one app.
  This was not sanctioned by AOL, but they allowed it at first. Then they decided you HAVE to use the official AIM client to talk to people on AIM. The third-party developers ignored AOL, so they entered into a tug-a-war match for a while.
  Because AOL was using known software to make AIM work, there was only so much they could do to keep their client working while also blocking everyone else. Eventually it became too much of a hassle, so AOL relented and third-party clients kept working until the service was shutdown.

What Google seems to forget or simply not care about is I can always just... leave.
I used reddit a lot more than I use YouTube.
If enough viewers and content creators were to jump ship, they'd scramble to change their tune.

That's a big if though. Unless an actual creator-exodus happens, it's not going to happen.
- It will happen eventually. These kinds of adversarial arrangements between parties are inherently unstable. The enshittification cycle only ends when a site properly collapses. If you think they couldn't get shittier, give it time. They'll find a way.
  All we need is for a good alternative to become more viable and for the site to have a few more exodus events and it'll lose its critical mass. Ultimately I think most platforms are going to have to become federated, it's the only way to avoid enshittification and still grow the network. Growing the network is important because it is the size of youtube and other centralised sites' networks that gives them their stability and utility. It's the network effect.
- I don't disagree with you, I'm just saying that YouTube is nothing without both its creator and viewers.
  A viewer-exodus and a creator-exodus would be tied together, they both feedback into each other.
  I even get why YouTube doubledown on catering to their advertisers over the creators and viewers, that's just money talking.
  I'm just saying I don't owe them my time or attention.
  They would hardly be the first Internet giant to fall, thinking they're too big to fail, not that I see it happening soon though.
- And creators wont leave despite making less and less from youtube and relying more and more ftom direct support from fans, like through patreon.
I went through a period of de-googling a couple of years ago. Swapping browser, mobile os, search engine, storage, maps, music, video purchases, voice assistant and even email service was relatively simple, there are alternatives out there which do the job just as well if not better than what Google offer.
The only exception is YouTube, yea there are individual sites that occasionally offer some of the videos I want (often with a subscription attached), there are some federated systems like NewPipe which have some videos but there is no one offering remotely the quantity or quality of what you can get on YouTube for free.
As the article states, it’s basically a monopoly at this point without a viable alternative.
- What FOSS mobile OS are you using?
- What are you using instead for Maps and email?
Not going to happen. Most of us, and the ones making the service profitable pay.
You have no value for Google and lemmy isn't a population Google cares about in the first place.
That is and big if though. Yeah you, me and half the people here might leave over this, but we block ads already and so are not highly valued to YouTube or a lot of the creators and are only a small drop in the ocean of viewers.
YouTube is betting on more people turning off ad blockers then those that leave. And i am glad to see that it might be having a small effect on more people actually discovering ad blockers instead. Which I bet is something YouTube did not expect to see.
- No one in the 90s could imagine the internet without AOL or Yahoo either, and yet..
  Or the great Myspace collapse of 2008. Digg before that. Tumblr most recently.
  Big sites go boom fairly often.
  Now, watching Google go Boom, that's gonna be like modules breaking loose of the ISS and rez-entering the atmosphere. Drawn out over months, as one wing goes, government breaks up another wing, class action lawsuits bankrupt another wing.
  Alphabets circling the drain. And good. Fuck em. Fuck Apple, Fuck Meta, Fuck Amazon, Fuck Reddit.
  Just a couple more years now and imma nominate Craig from Craigslist for all the years nobel prizes for officially winning the internet.
  Specific niche forums, Craigslist and Wikipedia are the last bits of honestness and fun online. And ymmv with Craigslist people being honest.
Exactly, I had people tell me that we should support YouTube, because it costs money and if we don't it will disappear.
I would celebrate the day it would happen, YouTube is actually the reason we don't have much competition there. They used their position and Google monopoly in other areas to establish this monopoly.
- There's creators out there running a non YouTube channel in parallel, mostly on Odysee. Good to see an alternative out there.
Why would creators leave? They only earn money from users that watch ads or use premium. Ad blocker users leaving doesn't affect them.
And if you "just leave", guess what? You just saved them a few bucks in bandwidth. It's a win-win for them.
It's YouTube, they don't need "exposure". They are out to make a profit.
- I donate to creators I like.

Don’t be evil turned into straight up evil with Manifest V3. Already switched to FF as my primary and started shifting my use of Evil’s services.

They ditch the "do no evil" motto years ago when seeking military contract to help them kill people
- I was suspicious the moment they said "don't be evil".
  Non-evil people don't need to say it.

"against all odds" my left asshole. This is always the way of hacker vs defense, it's always an arms race and the attacking side always has the advantage.

How many assholes do you have?
- A left one and a right one.
Not really. There are lots of protocols and such that haven't been broken in any meaningful ways. Attackers have advantage is a weird thing to say.
- Defense is always playing reactive. Attack gets to be creative and figure out how to break whatever tools defense has. Defense has to wait until the vulnerability is found and then deal with it. It's the nature of the arms race with regards to cyber security.

YouTube's users when they adhere to the YouTube TOS:

quoth Rage Against The Machine:
'fuck you, I won't do what you tell me'

Against all odds, open source hackers keep outfoxing one of the wealthiest companies.

sigh developers will ALWAYS be able to outsmart companies stealing from others.

I was gonna say, the Internet wouldn't be what it is today without those so-called open source hackers. They're the giants that Google and all the rest are standing on the shoulders of.
- We're going to relearn this lesson with LLMs. Open source is a maximalist approach to productivity.

Meshkov said that assessment [that scriptlet injection is the only reliable method of ad blocking for youtbue] is accurate if you limit yourself to browser extensions (which is how most popular ad blockers are distributed). But he pointed to network-level ad blockers and alternative YouTube clients, such as NewPipe, as other approaches that can work.

How exactly do these youtube front ends survive Google anyways? Why can't Google simply block all the traffic coming from these front ends in order to kill them off entirely? Kind of interesting that some ad blockers are having a hard time being effective on YT while these front ends seem to be having no issues accessing videos on the site.

Client side versus server.
To use a metaphor: the internet is a mailperson, and a YouTube video is a package. The mailperson hands it off to me. Then I have to fumble with opening the box to get the item inside.
Well, let's say I have a butler. The butler can take the package from the mailman, and rip out all the unnecessary stuff, and give me what's inside the box. The butler is adblock.
YouTube/Google cannot mess with my butler. Why? Because it's outside of their power. They can try to do things like force a signature before giving me the package. But guess what? My butler can sign off my package. YouTube knows to get to me, they have to go through my butler - period.
So there's no "blocking traffic" because once the package is sent, they have to deal with my butler. And they can make all sorts of detectors on the package, but we'll keep finding ways to bypass it and convince the package that my butler can totally sign for me.
There is no way to determine if the request comes from an alternative frontend or a legitimate user. Even if they start blocking all public instances of alternatives, which is highly unfeasible since most of them use VPN and blocking all VPNs is extremely restrictive for legitimate users too, you can host them locally.
If someone hosts their own front end, Google has no way of knowing whether or not it's legitimate.
Really enjoying LibreTube on my phone, for listening to long videos without the video on screen. Its audio mode is very clean in my opinion.
Google could implement Widevine DRM for all videos.
- In order for someone to experience the video, it has to go from digital to analog. That will always be the weakpoint of DRM. Someone can always put a middleman application in that point. Expect corporations to push for chip implants that allow them to directly control what you experience.

my wife watches a lot of youtube via PS4, so ads aren't blockable. but she discovered when an ad starts playing if you go to the 'i' icon, select you don't want to see this ad, then click resume video, the video starts playing again. not exactly a blocker and requires those manual steps, but beats watching 30 second unskippable ads every 5 minutes

Anybody who thinks this is "against all odds" doesn't understand the Internet very well.

Against all odds? This is a game that's been going on for year, hacker vs Corp, and the hacker always wins. Same shit as anticheat in games, it's a constant arms race but the hacker is nearly always a step ahead.

Another day and another opportunity to say. Stop using youtube. Thankyou, and goodnight.

I refuse to use it.
- You guys are missing out

$ mpv "youtube-url" best youtube adblocker.

What's this? How to use it? Can someone please ELI5 ?
Or (If you have the storage), yt-dlp.
- mpv uses that (or youtube-dl) in background. I think yt-dlp still needs a config change?
What's this?
- video player in linux. I think VLC can also do that
For some reason I'm getting:

Unable to extract uploader id; please report this issue on https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/issues?q=" [ytdl_hook] youtube-dl failed: unexpected error occurred Failed to recognize file format.
Seems weird.
- Probably need to update. With plain yt-dlp you just run "yt-dlp -U"

"opensource hackers" lol

I believe this phrase uses the original, older meaning: https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/309252/has-hacker-definitely-gained-a-negative-connotation

Open source Hackers FTW!

Please donate and keep Open Source as it is

A question for the tech savy, free alternatives to youtube like newpipe relies on youtube servers to access content, right? I mean, if youtube were to disappear magically we wouldn't have a palce where to upload and store so many Gb of videos?

Am I missing something (I know I'm probably missing a lot!)? Thanks in advance for the replies!

newpipe is just a client for accessing youtubes servers, yes, so if youtube went away we would need to use vimeo or something else (maybe peertube, open source yt alternative?)
- Thank you! Who pays for vimeo/peertube hosting costs though?

Youtube is vying X for a internet death while holding the door open for a less greedy rival

Vimeo: "Today is the day!"
- PeerTube would be preferable, all corporate monopolies turn out the same in the end.

To me it seems weird that YouTuber is doing this at all. They should know that they can't win, I doubt their CEO is that incompetent. Especially after all this time of wasted effort on their side to overpower a very small fraction of users who actually block ads online. Could it be to draw attention from something else that's actually more worrying?

Because as an AdBlock user, since I bothered configuring them and using only ublock I haven't had almost any popups and my experience, especially now on the later stages, is exactly like it was before the ban.

I can't help but think there's more to this because they can't be wasting resources, further damage their reputation and risk absolute monopoly on video platforms for a fruitless endeavor.

Even if YouTube isn't profitable by itself, which, given the user data harvesting and the ads I definitely doubt, google still is. I'd appreciate any takes on this because it's been bugging me for a while now.

There's no need to look for conspiracies when the truth is simple enough. Current YouTube CEO Neal Mohan was senior vice president of display and video ads at Google. Ads has been his wheelhouse for quite awhile.
- Could be but it's such a bad short term solution that I can't help but think there's a little more. Look at the other replies, they have some interesting perspectives on the matter.
Google = biggest advertising company in the world
Youtube = biggest money drain for Google
Adblock = a direct obstacle to the longterm feasibility of Google's ability to ever reconcile the money drain against their primary product (advertising) and end up in the black
The current state of Youtube's profitability is a long way off mattering for anything. For all it costs to run, it can be sustained indefinitely without much issue. This will remain the case until Youtube advertising reaches saturation. Given how much stuff like TV ads still cost, we can safely say this is still a long way off, regardless of the potential rise of competing platforms.
The landscape of youtube & adblockers is unlikely to be the same then, and restrictive measures taken now aren't really representative of what it'll be like. The actions taken now are for 2 reasons: maintenance of consumer expectation, so that it doesn't feel like site monetization is changed substantially when the money faucet gets switched on. And market research.
I have no doubt that a primary intent behind recent actions to do with delays or slowdowns was to measure the blowback, using it a yardstick for further actions not yet taken, which will eventually culminate in some action which actually meaningfully changes Youtube's monetization. But this may not be for many years.
None of us here are really experiencing problems, we have only heard of them and are discussing them. When something new happens, you'll hear "what else is new? they've done [something similar to] this many times before", with those people ignoring that the historic actions were totally mitigated everytime. And in the process, we the vanguard of the internet keeping Google's advertising monopoly restrained by engaging with adblockers, become conditioned to yield to advertising and a Google-controlled internet.
Because that's the only way they can win. Barring serious pro-Google changes to privacy laws around the world, the ultimate means to force advertising simply isn't available to them. Their best hope is to try and convince us that blocking ads is just too much of a hassle, ideally without ever actually making it so in a way that causes some mass migration away from Youtube. That's not a hard line to tread
- This is likely to be going on indeed. It's just that the drm failed (for now), so maybe they are trying to get the next best thing? For the short term it surely isn't but a long term goal in case the drm fails to be implemented again could be a reason for these experimental actions. It isn't bad to have a plan b I guess.
  Great response, thanks.
You look from a position of a tech-savvy user.
You know how Firefox is built different from Chrome. You know what Manifest V3 is. You know how Ublock Origin is different from other adblockers, etc.
The fact is, we are the minority. Most people would just keep using Chrome or Chromium-based browsers and won't know any better. They'll end up (and already end up) in a trap that's super easy to escape, they just don't plan to/don't know how.
And for us Firefox geniuses they prepare quite a few surprises, like the recently found artificial delay of 5s when your user agent reports you use Firefox on some experimental users. This will drag on, and while we absolutely know what to do to fuck them up, normal users, who are the majority, don't.
- You look from a position of a tech-savvy user.
  You give me too much credit, I mostly learn things by hanging around here lol. It's not difficult to follow some instructions for a few simple things.
  The fact is, we are the minority.
  This is kind of my point, actually. Why go so far for a minority? As you say, most people won't even try it because it's too big a hassle, or so they think. Those who will, however, actively engage with their systems to maximize positive user experience. As such, to simply move the goal a few more clicks away won't make give up, but instead fuel more of their aggression. This is why this whole story began in the first place. That's why it's a hilariously bad plan that I can't help but question. AdBlockers are now better than before thanks to this whole mess, so watching YouTube get beaten at their own game so effortlessly makes me suspicious.
  Or maybe the CEO is stupid lol, that's also a possibility.
They probably believed there were easy things they could do that wouldn't result in an "arms race" that would net them a larger profit than the effort they put in. Once you promise x% more revenue they won't let you take that back so they keep pushing.
- Very possible

I would argue it's not "against all odds". The add-on devs probably know better how YouTube is working than the bunch of underpaid, outsourced script writers that are tasked to implement the stuff. The latter also have to make sure that it doesn't break for legitimate viewers (oh, sorry, I meant "impressions").

The YouTube team at Google isn't all outsourced and generally Google uses it's top talent for the money making side of the business
The people in the ads side are some of the best around. The problem is: they don't necessarily care about ad blockers.
My laptop came pre installed with Firefox and ublock origin. Google Chrome had ad blocking in it as well. The devs in the company don't like ads any more than anyone else... Also ads are a major security risk, and using ad blocking is just good opsec.
Your perception of Google software engineers is way off. They're more often than not some of the best software engineers in the industry because their hiring bar is very high, and they get paid like it. YouTube is an astounding complex problem to solve with thousands of moving parts and non-trivial problems. It's honestly astounding people are able to build sites that complex, and that they're not only common but extremely reliable.
The issue is there are even more extremely intelligent software engineers outside of Google than in, and many of them spend some of their free time working on FOSS projects including ad-blockers. It's also almost always harder to be red team (attacker, or the ad-blockers devs) as opposed to blue team (defensive, or the people trying to stop them).

Could Google and ad services sue Firefox and extension writers?

I mean, nothing pisses off corporations more than someone coming between them and revenue, and the courts tend to agree.

No, it is your right to choose what code is executed in your browser and which isn’t. There’s a case to be made about accepting the EULA but if you never registered a Google account, then you never accepted any EULA. This is not the case with modded android/iOS apps as in those cases you are violating DMCA 1201.

Got this too couple of times, all I did was F5 and go on with my day. Nothing happened.

I always wondered why YouTube doesn't stream the ad intermixed into the video? Like, it's DASH, right? How does that work, can't the server send a video then switch to another stream source (the ad) and back?

Because YouTube doesn't want you to skip ads? If the ad was just another part of the show, you would just fast forward past the ad.
- Well obviously seeking would be disabled during those ads. But maybe that's not preventable.
Switching stream sources is the most easy detectable form of ads. Also the most easily blocked, simple dns blocking will suffice.
- That's interesting info, thanks!

Serious question: what is the best add blocker right now? I've been using ublock origin, but it doesn't seem to be working that well these days.

uBlock-Origin on Firefox.
- Counterpoint... Invidious...
ublock origin by far. Just refresh the filter list every now and then.
- To be absolutely sure no one gets this wrong - uBlock Origin is what you want. Not just uBlock.
- Pls consider editing and making it unlock origin. They are different and someone who won't know better will get the wrong one :)
I apologize for my strongopinion but I believe yours is misguided or similar. Ublock origin is objectively the best ad blocker , they are an extremely talented team, dedicated and have been for a long long time.
The enemy is getting stronger, not the defense not working well.
:)
- Thanks!
Apparently you need to clear the plugin's cache semi-regularly.
As sometimes it won't update itself as fast.
- That makes sense. Thanks for the advice!
Vinegar + SponsorBlock on iOS/iPadOS/MacOS.
- thank you for recommending vinegar, it is incredible

I'm on Linux and use Firefox with ghostery and AdBlock extensions. I've got hit with the "must watch ads to play video" thing on YouTube, but just end up activating a user agent extension and set it to report that I'm "running chrome on windows 10". Voila. I can magically watch YouTube videos without ads again.

Lololol it's been like 2 weeks.

as soon as they start doing some sort of client verification it's over for ad blockers

They can't afford to do anything that would lose them a large slice of viewers. Same reason websites still support IE.
- It's funny you mention that since YouTube led the web in dropping support for IE 6: https://blog.chriszacharias.com/a-conspiracy-to-kill-ie6
  That kind of thing isn't quite in their DNA anymore, but you never know.
- they would mostly be losing the ad blocking viewers though, right?
As it is over for YT, probably.