Already seen some screenshots from people trying to reddit in their mobile browser, despite being logged in. Their popup had the classic ‘View in App’, but the ‘Continue in browser’ was replaced with ‘Take me outta here’ or something to that effect, and would take them to the previous page in their browser.
I can appreciate this distinction on NSFW content without a logged in user, because of concerns with age verification. But it seems some users were part of a selected testing group to migrate users into the app almost completely.
Considering that Firefox browser can block ads on reddit (and that browser reddit still runs better than app reddit) there’s definitely pressure for Reddit to drive users to their app with a stick. They certainly don’t offer carrots.
It’s feasible that there are other variables that have been missed, but essentially this works. The server asks us a question, and we answer it. We just skip the bit where we provide evidence.
It’s like looking up the answers in the back of the textbook on a test. The only thing the server sees is the paper we’re handing in, it has no idea if we cheated or not.
Boring technical explanation:
For a server (in this case, YouTube) to see what a client (your computer) is doing, it has to reach out and ask it. When a request is made, the two points will ‘handshake’ to confirm that they heard the request, then when they’ve done it. It looks something like this:
These steps can be repeated any number of times in response to a single user mouseclick, depending on what you’re trying to do. A ‘request timeout’ error is what happens if client/server asks “are you prepared?” and it takes too long for the server/client to answer “yes, I am”, so you hang up the phone.
For the server to treat clients differently at all, it needs to contact them for feedback. For adblocking, it has to ask your client if you’re adblocking. Usually the server does this by sending the client a request to serve an ad - if your client never answers back to confirm it was loaded, then the server knows you blocked the ad. The devs can tell the server that if it doesn’t get a certain answer, to enable the punishment effects. (They’ll technically be sent anyway; they’re just hidden/disabled by default if your client handshakes the ad.)
What these scripts do is lie to the server. The server asks the client if we received the ad, we ignore the script that checks whether the ad is loaded and instead directly change the answer to claim it has. Since all the server sees is the confirmation, it doesn’t know the difference.