What took them so long?
Anyway. I'm sure the adblocking Industry will adapt.
this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2024
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Enshittification
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What is enshittification?
The phenomenon of online platforms gradually degrading the quality of their services, often by promoting advertisements and sponsored content, in order to increase profits. (Cory Doctorow, 2022, extracted from Wikitionary) source
The lifecycle of Big Internet
We discuss how predatory big tech platforms live and die by luring people in and then decaying for profit.
Embrace, extend and extinguish
We also discuss how naturally open technologies like the Fediverse can be susceptible to corporate takeovers, rugpulls and subsequent enshittification.
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Adapt to what?
If they're mixing the content with the ads server side, it's going to be like trying to extract the flour from the bread loaf.
I've never understood why they haven't just provided a method of doing this for all their customers. Like a Google Ad service that meshes together everything on the page with the ads server side, so it's harder to target them client side.
I mean, the dream is to make the Internet like cable television, isn't it? Where it's all one signal/stream. When ads could never be targeted and blocked or skipped unless you recorded and played back later with fast forward. Feels like we'll get there eventually, with Chromium effectively calling the shots now.
If they're predictable with the timing and length then sponsorblock will still work.
And if they're not, the client can download the video twice and diff the copies.
The most pernicious thing they could do is randomize the ads across users, but serve each user the same ads each time. In that case, you'd need a peer-to-peer client to compare hashes of chunks with other users to detect the ad segments.
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They absolutely will. There are far more people (and probably smarter people to boot) working on blocking their shit than there are people at Google working on making it unblockable.
This is an arms race where they will win the occasional battle, but always lose the war.
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Even if it comes down to a browser addon placing a black rectangle over the video and muting browser audio when an ad plays, I'll be choosing that over watching ads.
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I wouldn't even mind the ads if they just played maybe one per three or four videos. That would still bring in a massive amount of money without pissing everyone off.
Instead we get up to two ads every couple of minutes.
It's all about blatant greed.
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Honestly, I am surprised it took them this long. This technology has existed for a while, there is even a standard for it (see: SCTE-35).
The harsh truth of the matter is that YouTube is a victim of its own success. The sheer scale of what is needed to keep the platform running at its current level of activity is something that I think most people don't give a second thought to. It requires a truly astonishing amount of technical expertise, infrastructure, monitoring, throughput capacity, not to mention sheer compute and storage, to keep it running. And that is considering the technical side alone, never mind the business that has evolved around it
All of the above costs money. A lot of money. So much money that only a shitty mega corporation with no moral scruples would ever be able to afford to run the platform, let alone turn a profit. And so here we are.
There are niche alternatives like PeerTube, but in practice it is currently in no state to be a drop in replacement. If the fediverse had to deal with the amount of traffic and content from YouTube in its current state, it would collapse immediately. This won't change until the user base begins to increase, but to do so requires an incentive for people to jump over. And sadly, far too many people just don't care enough about avoiding ads to do so.
I think in the long term there will be a reckoning; no matter the size of your platform you are not invulnerable to change. Nobody back in the early 2010s could foresee Twitter falling from grace, and look how that turned out. YouTube will eventually die, the only question is who will be footing the bill for what replaces it.
In the meantime, if you're unable or unwilling to deal with YouTube's ads, or pay to skip them, then just don't engage with the platform at all. Read a book. Touch some grass. They haven't found a way to monetize that (yet).
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All this enshittification might be good for me. I think i might start reading more books instead of watching youtube. Fuck you google, I'll never buy yt premium nor watch you ads.
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If they do that and Adblock doesn’t work anymore, the solution is quite simple - stop watching YouTube. Sure, there will be some content creators that I will miss. Maybe it will be time to move to Nebula.
Nebula is paid, you can also pay YouTube and remove ads.
Nebula is cheaper but it also has a very small fraction of the content that YouTube has. So I really don’t see why moving to another paid service with less content is a solution for anyone.
Nebula has most of the content creators I would pay money to support, and more of that money would be going back to them.
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it hurts so much that it is VERY hard to replicate youtube given the insane upkeep costs. I would leave in a fucking heartbeat but so many good creators only post there
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This is where we need to start harnessing AI for our advantage rather than corporations. Have it scan the videos as it buffers and automatically remove the ads.
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I've decided I'm going to do freelance ads for free for exposure on a comment by comment basis while I drink this refreshing iced cold Coca Cola.
That sounds like the perfect beverage to keep my reactions razor sharp while I enjoy the split-second thrills of playing League of Legends with my attractive, ethnically diverse friends.
When I see an ad on the internet, I purposefully look away to not look at it.
It is deeply ingrained in my brain to never let ads win.
I don't know how my parents are doing it with cable TV.
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It was about time, was always strange that Twitch did it first, and just like over there I'm hopeful some clever people will still make scripts capable of blocking ads.
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Oh well.
This sucks but they need to keep turning up the dial so more people jump over to peertube.
is there a way to experience peertube that comes even close to youtube? i took a look at some instances and they're always like here's a page that looks like it was made in 1993 and only had videos of one dude.
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Creation of a derivative work without author's consent solely for the purpose of monetisation - sounds legally dubious to me as you couldn't claim fair use.
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Damn! I wonder if yt-dlp will get a workaround for this.
It might be doable automatically. If they inject the ads at the time of viewing and not before storing the video, then it's possible that two downloads just a few sconds apart will have different ads. So if yt-dlp downloads twice and compares the two files, theoretically it can get a pretty good idea with high confidence of what content is ad and what content is... well... content.
That technique of course would require multiple downloads of the same file, but yeah. I suppose yt-dlp could also keep a backlog of "fingerprints"/"signatures" of ads its seen in the past that can be used to remove ads from later downloads with the same ads without having to download twice.
Also, even absent such a technique as what I just described, programs like NewPipe and such will still probably allow for manually skipping ads where I'm sure the official YouTube app or the web interface would deny/prevent skipping.
Edit: Actually, it also occurs to me that in order to make ads not skippable, the server will have to send messages to the *official clients saying "and here's the portion of the video you can't skip." In which case yt-dlp or NewPipe or whatever could just be like "oh, cool, that's the bits I need to skip atuomatically." And if the server doesn't send that metadata, then all ads will be skipable on the official clients. (Though I guess I'm assuming that they'll move exclusively to these injected-into-the-video-stream ads and away from the ads as they work now.)
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A funny thing. I used the "Ad Nauseam" adblocker for a time. This adblocker's gimmick is that it clicks the ad while hiding it from the user to cause monetary damage to the advertiser. It also collects the ads and displays them in an "add vault". I did browse the add vault from time to time.
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