Why is Badger bad?
It’s not bad, just mostly redundant these days, as the heuristic features are no longer enabled, and the defaults ublock lists will cover a lot of the same.
Also the heuristics can be exploited to create a unique identifier for your browser, so it’s not a flawless solution.
Fyi you can still enable heuristic blocking from settings.
What’s that?
Privacy badger doesn’t require somebody to add an address to a list to block it, it figures our statistically when something should be blocked. The upside is that it can block things that are new and haven’t been added to a list. I assume it could also better adapt to new methods to get stuff through a typical blocker.
Consent-o-matic instead of cookies and adnausem instead of ublock origin.
Consent-o-matic will actively opt out of popups.
Adnausem is built on top of ublock origin and will silently “click” on the ads behind the scenes to mess up your advertising profile and cost the advertisers money.
uBlock Origin can just hide cookie pop ups if you enable said filter, and AdNauseam still loads the ad so you still have slower page loading speed and increased network traffic.
Adnausem is built on top of ublock origin and will silently “click” on the ads behind the scenes to mess up your advertising profile and cost the advertisers money.
Tried it a couple of months ago. Didn’t nearly work as well as uBlock Origin, seemed buggy as hell.
Oooo. Now that’s something to try.
What’s wrong with privacy badger?
Not OP, but what puts me off is that it calls itself badger, but really it’s just a software that has nothing in common with those glorious animals. Did you know that badgers’ keen sense of smell is about 800 times sharper than our own?
!subscribe to badger facts
Did you know that badgers keep their homes in tip-top shape by creating a latrine pit as a bathroom? They won’t defecate in their homes, instead making a pit out of dried grass and leaves just outside their burrow.
Is that where they dump the ads they block?
“Exterior plumbing for the win”
-Someone who takes demon shits
Is that how they sniff out the ads to block?
I think UBO makes it redundant.
The layered security model has redundancy built in as a feature.
Well, it can be replaced with uBlock Origin and some people dont recomend it anymore
Privacy Badger has historically allowed tracking until it successfully identifies a domain as a likely tracker. Like the air bags going off after you’ve already wrapped your car around a telephone pole. But it’s now been changed and is now closer to a list-based tracker blocker (enumerate badness):
They’ve since corrected one of the core issues with PB by doing so, but it still it is very weak. To see why, please glance through The Six Dumbest Ideas in Computer Security.
uBlock Origin in advanced mode, with default-deny rules (only allow assets by exception) is going to be much stronger at blocking crap.
Personally, I use uMatrix with pretty much all asset classes blocked by default. I never see popups. I never see banners begging “please allow our cookies, pleeeeaaase!”.
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A European shout out to Ghostery who auto refuses everything on our GDPR popups.
You could add that extension that replaces clickbait titles by community-made descriptive ones. (lemmy do your thing and find the name please)
It’s DeArrow
Thanks! I don’t use it but I want it so much on freetube and newpipe 🥲
DeArrow is on freetube though?
It is ??!
There’s a switch in settings to enable sponsorblock, and if I remember correctly that includes DeArrow. Was really happy to discover that back when I did, both of these turn YouTube into such a different, better place.
I will check this out, thanks
Check out Tubular, a fork of Newpipe, which includes Sponsorblock and ReturnYoutubeDislike
Personally I find it a lifesaver for watching YouTube videos on mobile these days
Whats that?
Need to add a pihole to that stack
I love my pie hole and I love the functionality of being able to access a VPN and use on my home network stuff on the go it’s pretty good
Truly! I have a streaming app for local TV and I recommended it to a friend and he said “no way man! Way too many ads in it!” That’s when I realized how awesome Pi-Hole is 🤣
except W instead of P. I don’t really need that shit.
the return dislike plugin is just stupid. it’s a community database now, so rather than being based on the actual number of dislikes on youtube it’s based on the dislikes of the people who have the plugin.
it used to be that it actually got the real numbers but youtube removed that endpoint so now it’s just a misanthropic echo chamber.
It’s better than nothing. Also I’d probably weigh the opinion of people who have the extension higher than of those who don’t.
Is it? personally, when i think of “people who want to see the dislike bar” my mind equates that to “people who want to dislike”, and that’s not a group of people i want to interact with.
To me it wrings more of "people who want to know before they waste 20 minutes whether this video is clickbait, just actually false, rightwing conspiracy theories, or has some massive editing flaw that makes the video pointless.
For that, I prefer DeArrow. Gets you community sourced, informative titles for videos (and removes clickbait thumbnails as well)
Tbh the removal of clickbait thumbnails made YouTube less enjoyable for me. I don’t really watch those over the top clickbait youtubers anyway, so I’ve found that this isn’t too big of a deal.
You can turn individual features off, or whitelist YouTubers you like
This is why I use it, also the more people who use it the more accurate it is
What an awful mischaracterisation. While the dislike feature may appeal to misanthropes, it also appeals to the much larger pool of people that are intelligent enough/respectful of their own time to understand the value of the feature in helping to avoid poor quality and misleading content.
It really bears out in the results. For those who recall what old ratios looked like, for sufficiently popular videos, they still hold true with this plugin.
i just think dearrow seems like the better choice for that purpose.
How so? Like/dislike ratios are a very quick and effective means of identifying problematic content. Clickbait titles and thumbnails are another issue - they aren’t a reasonable indicator of the quality of the content. It’s an emerging trend in an oversaturated environment in which even creators of high quality content feel the need to partake.
but like… the like/dislike buttons are there for the algorithm. they’re there to tweak your recommendations. always were. the problem with having the ratio visible is that people will brigade, and that “mainstreams” your recommendations, making them less useful. that’s why youtube removed the visible ratios. putting them back, and just for people with the plugin, means your recommendations will start to align only with the people who have the plugin. it literally becomes an echo chamber.
Like I said, many of us use like/dislike ratios to gain insight into quality of content; whether or not that was the intended use of the feature is really irrelevant.
You’re massively overstating the incidence of brigading. A tiny fraction of videos have experienced this. The idea that brigading is significantly affecting user recommendations and even causing them to align is hyperbolic nonsense.
well that’s good then. personally my experience with the dislike bar is mostly from siIvagunner, where videos with well-used tracks got shitloads of dislikes, more than the views of videos without them. this despite the quality of work put into them. i’m glad to be rid of that.
I have no experience with that channel. What makes you think it is being brigaded? Seems like a very unusual target. Given that it’s well-used tracks that appear to be affected, it seems to me that it may just be attracting a greater breadth of viewers - who are generally less familiar with the content and may have different expectations (and would be just as likely to downvote whether visible or not.)
It’s honestly relatively representative afaik
Even though it, SponsorBlock etc. could just be neglected by using piped or just federated alternatives.
how can we even know that though? there’s no stats anymore.
also, if peertube et al got bigger, surely sponsorblock would be useful there as well? if creators would use those services because people were on them, sponsors would contact those creators because they got the views.
It subjectively feels right, and instances where creators leaked the numbers the RTYTD stats matched pretty closely.
Until peertube grows to that size, it’s still a long time. Then it would be useful.
I read, “With Butter”
Gotta finish my coffee
Pretty soon, Firefox will need to be replaced with Waterfox and LibreWolf, unfortunately.
Why?
People at the top of Mozilla Org making crappy decisions.
I use Waterfox on my gaming computer and I love it.
I use both, and that way when I have a game I need googling while I have it open, I can have a browser that won’t open my 300 tabs, just have a second browser. I do this on my phone too, and yours
I just installed consentomatic right now and I didn’t know it existed thank you
I would 1000% add temporary containers to that list. Wish I could get it on Android too!
Advanced kit: add NoScript and block first party scripts by default. Works surprisingly well for visiting sites you don’t care about, just want to read the article etc. Just switch it off if you’re trying to buy something and get through the checkout.
AFAIK every function of NoScript exists in uBlock Origin. So just get uBO and cut the redundancy. The less vectors the better
Youtube made changes that make Invidious pretty much unfunctional, videos won’t load in my browser for me :(
Noitced their instanxce list shrunk ;-; also that Japan server does still work. Used it last night.
Is the one in the bottom left actually called “No Need YT Ads”? Cause I can’t find that one
It must be Invidious alternative frontend for youtube