> If you dive into the yt-dlp source code, you see the insane complexity of calculations needed to download a video. There is code to handle nsig checks, internal YouTube API quirks, and constant obfuscation that makes it a nightmare(and the maintainers heroes) to keep up. Google frequently rejects download attempts, blocks certain devices or access methods, and breaks techniques that yt-dlp relies on.

This just made me incredibly grateful for the people who do this kind of work. I have no idea who writes all the uBlock Origin filters either, but blessed be the angels, long may their stay in heaven be.

I'm pretty confident I could figure it out eventually but let's be honest, the chance that I'd ever actually invest that much time and energy is approximates zero close enough that we can just say it's flat nil.

Maybe Santa Claus needs to make some donations tonight. ho ho ho

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imiric 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

As the web devolves further, the only viable long-term solution will be allow lists instead of block lists. There is too much hostility online—from websites that want to track you and monetize your data and attention, SEO scams and generated content, and an ever-increasing army of bots—that it's becoming infeasible to maintain rules to filter all of it out. It's much easier to write rules for traffic you approve of, although they will have to be more personal than block lists.

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drnick1 5 days ago | parent [-]

This is more or less what I already do with uBlock/uMatrix. By default, I filter out ALL third party content on every website, and manually allow CDNs and other legitimate third party domains. I still use DNS blacklists however so that mobile devices where this can't be easily done benefit from some protection against the most common offenders (Google Analytics, Facebook Pixel, etc.)

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noja 4 days ago | parent [-]

I’m not sure why everyone keeps repeating this. The fight is lost. Your data is being collected by the websites you visit and handed to Facebook via a proxy container. You will never see a different domain, it’s invisible to the end user.

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drnick1 4 days ago | parent [-]

Care to elaborate on the mechanisms at play? If what you claim is true, all websites would already serve ads from their own domain. The main issue I can see with this approach is that there would be an obvious incentive for webmasters to vastly overstate ad impressions to generate revenue.

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noja 3 days ago | parent [-]

Look up Facebook Conversions API Gateway

	▲	drnick1 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		As far as I understand, the objective is completely different. Ads are shown on platforms owned by Meta, and the Conversions API runs on the merchant's website (server-side), and reports interactions such as purchases back to Facebook. This is quite different from websites monetizing traffic through and trackers placed on their own webpages. Those can still be reliably blocked by preventing websites from loading third party content.

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cindyllm 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

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