Being completely annoyed by ads while watching YouTube videos is something you must undoubtedly face, let’s assume, but the real question is how to get around this problem.
Since paid subscription to YouTube Premium is apparently an expensive way to skip these ads, the most likely and spontaneous workaround is to deploy an ad blocker, which appears to have started to disrupt the YouTube experience, as some users have reported on Reddit.
Some even shared screenshots showing videos with comments disabled, possibly due to the use of ad blockers. This is something Google strongly discourages.
Although unfortunate, this event explicitly states that using workarounds allows you to get out of one problem and straight into another.
To express their frustration over the mysterious disappearance of video comments and descriptions, many users took to Reddit and other forums.
While this is certainly triggered by the use of an ad blocker, although it hasn’t been confirmed, some tech geeks have nevertheless tried it, wondering if Google, being one of the wealthiest companies, should implement this advertising, or if it’s something that’s necessary to keep the platform running and support Google’s cash outflow to creators in royalties.
While there’s a good chance that YouTube deliberately disables comments and descriptions whenever it detects the use of an ad blocker, another possibility is the innate tendency of these tools to remove descriptions and comments from videos.
What’s worth noting here is that this isn’t the first time ad blockers have become a headache on the platform. Last year, creators noticed a sharp drop in views. This is because the views of users with ad blockers were not taken into account.
Google has even reportedly resorted to slowing down playback speeds or immediately blocking access for those using ad blocking tools.
While not having comments isn’t the worst thing Google could have done, it would surely hurt the community aspect of YouTube, as comments are crucial to interacting with creators, and many creators rely on ad revenue to support their work.
If anything, this appears to be a losing battle for Google, and so the ongoing cat-and-mouse game between ad blockers and platforms like YouTube is likely to continue, with issues popping up and being fixed, only to resurface again.
