I use FreeTube on my laptop. It can lose functionality at times (due to shenanigans on the part of yt), but they're pretty good about releasing updates that make it work again.

Ublock was leading to errors when a YouTube link was clicked for me, but refreshing the page just loaded the video. It seems that doesn't happen anymore today. Am I the only one?

Yes, and it has been for many many years. In 2011 Adblock Plus deemed some ads acceptable, no longer blocking them categorically. Following that controversity, uBlock Origin became the popular standard.

Honestly, given that Adblock Plus has always had an "acceptable ads" system - I guess they simply decided now YouTube ads are acceptable. Not really surprising then.

YouTube just quietly blocked Adblock Plus

They've been A/B testing anti-adblock attempts for months or even years now, idk exactly with my sense of time. Sometimes adblocker A doesn't work, sometimes adblocker B doesn't work. Sometimes switching browser makes the same adblocker work, sometimes clearing cookies helps, sometimes its dependent on your account. Different users at the same time report different experiences with different adblockers. Sometimes watching a single non-blocked ad restores adblocker functionality magically for a few days.

What I'm trying to say is, this didn't "just" happen, and it's specifically the author's current experience. I myself use Adblock Plus on Edge and Youtube works perfectly fine currently. This has been happening for a long time, and I'm sure there's uBlock Origin users currently who have the same experience while Adblock Plus works for them. Since that's how it's been the last times I've seen people talk about this, everyone talking about different experiences.

Bah, This is just an add for a YouTube premium subscription

This may not get well recieved but yt premium is worth the money imho, but again I dont wanna pay those evil corpos.

Damn sure was clickbaity. No ads? Buy YT Premium they say.

Whoopee. Saved you a click.

I stopped using ABP years ago and switched to uBlock Origin. That and some *Monkey scripts.

If you want to support a webpage, then donate to it. This ad-based business model should die.

FreeTube with an ipv6 rotator and Invidious will make sure you never have to deal with this.

Please elaborate...

FreeTube is a FOSS youtube frontend.

FreeTube occasionally has issues on videos with preroll ads where the video fails to play because the ad won't be fetched. This can sometimes be mitigated by running an ipv6 rotator script and blocking freetubes access to ipv4. The one I run reassigns my ipv6 address once every 5 seconds to a new randomly generated valid address.

Sometimes even this doesn't block the ads (again causing the video to fail to play) in which case selecting the share icon from the freetube interface and clicking "open invidious link" will open a web browser pointed to whichever invidious instance is set to your default.

The freetube folks are working on implementing DASH, which should eliminate the need for these workarounds once successful.

Thank you!!

You can also use Freetube with tor/socks5 proxy, and every time you open Freetube, you automatically get a new IP.

This is true, but I try not to put such a heavy load on the TOR network personally. Its always good to have folks using it for clearweb stuff like this though, keeps the network legitimate.

The workaround: Switch from Adblock Plus to uBlock Origin.

ABP has had random issues that break it often for years now. It's crap.

I've noticed quite a few people who used to do YouTube videos have moved to podcasts because of YT's fuckery.

It has some real "Ukraine should just stop fighting a losing war" vibes. I wonder how much Alphabet paid them for that article. Probably not much.

ublock origin non-lite is the shit to go to

DNS does nothing for youtube.

given that you know about them. they will also get removed soon according to their description.

lots of users won't get to know all this, or if they do, they won't go messing around there because "its complicated"