- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
YouTube warns it might make your viewing experience worse if you don’t turn off your ad-blocker::YouTube has been cracking down on people using ad blockers. Now, a spokesperson says that using ad blockers could lead to “suboptimal viewing.”
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which is a hilarious threat because the #1 way to make my viewing experience worse would be turning off my ad blocker, lmao
“if you don’t voluntarily make your experience 10x worse, we will make it 2x worse”
Ads have reached the level of “suboptimal viewing”.
Ive had my ad blocker turned off for a week on Youtube. Theres a preroll ad on every video and a shitload of ad break mid video and at the last 3 seconds of a video.
Its the worst viewing experience I can imagine. I cut out Twitch and even stopped all my subs when they went mandatory ad viewing. Im full on ready for third party options in the same spirit as Lemmy.
I also think they are fucking with the sound levels in the same way TV did prior to the FTC ruling. The commercials are awfully loud compared to the content.
Honestly this is what pushed me to look into alternative ways to watch YT years ago. Muting every time an ad comes on gets old quick, especially when the ad is way louder than the content
SmartTube Next for watching YT on TV and LibreTube for Android.
I just thought I would log in to Twitch just to say hi to the streamer I was in the same game with. Twitch loads, starts to play the stream with no problem. BUT when I try to login, it says Firefox is not a supported browser. It had no problem playing all the content, showing the chat, etc. - but for some reason it still says my browser is not supported and I can’t log in. I looked it up. FF is “not supported” because it has an enhanced tracking protection feature. Twitch wants to track you, and it can’t if you use Firefox. Such a petty way; this will just turn me away from Twitch even more.
S0undTV is a good app for Twitch if you have an android TV device. No ads and support for the emotes if you like having the chat up. You’ve got to login to twitch through the app though to start watching. It’s broken before and had ads play, but gets fixed within a few days. Lastly there is a delay compared to desktop. If that’ll be a deal breaker.
Why would you even subject yourself to such torture?
I think my viewing experience will be even worse if I turn off my ad blocker.
Youtube advertising is absolute trash. It’s already bad enough to sit through ads when you don’t even know if you want to watch the video. Their ads consist of fake Joe Rogans with tts voices advertising scams.
I get some dodgy casino and gambling ads … Before a children’s program. Reported the ad multiple times, but it keeps coming back under a different name.
Get fucked, YouTube.
Loving Freetube, Newpipe, and Grayjay more and more every day!
in the short term they work, but YouTube can cut those 3rd party apps access at any time for any reason. Use Peertube for the better long term.
I thought All three of the ones I listed weren’t reliant on YT APIs and instead scraped their content.
Edit: Just confirmed both NewPipe and Freetube do not use YouTube’s api. I’m not sure about GrayJay though.
Even the scrapping in theory could be restricted. I might be wrong there.
Possible maybe, but at that point if YT bascially becomes paywalled I will just stop using it entirely like I did with Reddit.
Tried to dive into Piped recently, but nothing would load.
I’m only surface-level competent with computers though, so I probably fucked something up… since you’ve poked around multiple options, which one(s) do you recommend as the most idiot proof?
For android, the stock newpipe from the fdroid repositories was just download and play for me. Easy and simple interface.
For Grayjay, I use the direct download .apk from their website. It’s been a little more buggy because it’s still new, but all in all quite stable. Less features right now, but does all the basics and has device casting to TV which Newpipe doesn’t.
For my PC, Freetube. I just use the Flatpak version for Linux. I’m on Nobara for my distro currently and it’s worked fine.
I gave up using Piped. It was really good when it worked but sadly most of the time it was frustrating. Takes ages to get a video going then breaks up multiple times.
From my experience, it depends on the instance. Sometimes, one instance of Piped will not work, but another will be OKish.
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YouTube is just messing around. They could encode ads randomly on videos if they wanted to, like podcasts.
There’s already a sponsor blocker extension that skips when a sponsor is even mentioned, it would be trivial to add other embedded ads to it.
They would just be able to create and stream 2 or more ad-encoded versions where ads are encoded in differently positions. Then no sponsorblock could save us since it would skip the wrong segments for some people…
Those ads would need to be unskippable, otherwise we could just pull the timestamps that the Skip button uses and sponsorblock will be all complete again 👌
Fair point! I wasn’t thinking they would be skippable, but boy do I hope that I was wrong…
Even if they’re not natively skippable, ads have to be indicated as such by law. Whatever indication they use can be detected and used to create blockers.
Ad blocking, uh, finds a way.
Just build a database of ads. Then use some kind of image hash to compare against the displayed content.
I like your way of thinking. This isn’t even limited to image. Comparing just a short snippet of the audio from a playing ad to a db could work very well too, thinking of how quickly Shazam etc. are able to identify a song if it’s in the db.
App/plugin idea for the sad future right there: Shazadblock, tuneBlock Origin. Succesful ID leads to skip/mute/ragequit or whatever will kill the noise. Though, the downside of this method would be if an ad in the db uses licensed music that regular content creators use in their videos too, it will eventually lead to blocking some segments wrongly, unless the db excludes this, making it less effective at its purpose… Maybe image is better.
That’s not quite how it works. It’s crowdsourced, someone has to manually add every sponsored segment from a video into Sponsorblock. It can’t detect them on its own.
I never said it did?
cheaper to just have the interns code buggy Javascript then to reencode millions of videos.
This. I don’t exactly know how YouTube’s architecture works, but from running my own mediaserver i woild guess They don’t live transcode because that takes clock cycles on a graphics card or a CPU. They transcode a couple of different bitrate files to serve up and then just serve up direct stream file transfers, thus saving electricity and clock cycles. In order to actively embed an ad in a YouTube video it would have to be done semi-permanently, Decreasing the value of live serve ads.
You’re correct that they’re not doing live transcoding when a video is played. That’s way too expensive in every regard. There are still ways to embed ads dynamically into the video without requiring live transcoding. They likely have 5-10 qualities they encode to, and segment the video into 10s segments, so a 5 minute video would be cut into 30 segments, and then each of those files encoded to multiple qualities upon upload.
That way when playing, if your Internet gets slow, the player can seamlessly downgrade to another quality. These small files concatenated together appear like one long video. Adding some ads served from the same servers as the content could be done dynamically for each request and be difficult to block without impacting the video content delivery, since you can’t have uBlock Origin block the domain hosting the content.
Realistically, they probably don’t do this approach because you don’t know if the ad was loaded because of buffering, but never viewed, so the ad network gets less metrics and therefore the ads are less valuable. Also, I would bet the content upload and distribution team are completely separate from the ad team, so that cross collaboration is more difficult to implement.
I think there’s a simpler reason; if you embed ads as part of the video linking to a specific timestamp becomes a nightmare. One person might have no ad, another might have a 30 second ad, and a third might have 5 minutes of ad. Attempting to link to a time after the ad would give three different timestamps, and loading that timestamp could give you the clip you want or could drop you right in the middle of an ad.
To solve that issue you’d need some way for the client to determine the “true” timestamp, but then you’re also giving ad blockers a way to determine where the ad is so you’re back to square one.
They could, what can go wrong…
How could it be worse than with ads?
240p
How about you suck my balls accordingly, google?
Oh no, so how will I be able to tell a difference?
Can’t make it worse of you don’t use it.
Youtube is past the growth phase, at this point it’s about minimising cost and maximising revenue.
If you regularly use it with adblock but decide to stop using it because of this, then youtube would have succeeded. You weren’t making them money and were costing them bandwidth, so good riddance.
If you really want to stick it to them, turn on adblock, find some long videos and play them on mute in the background at 4K/1080p60 resolution. Cost them even more bandwidth.
Even better, start randomly disliking videos or making nonsensical comments (not hateful or toxic ones, just comments that don’t make sense). Enshittify it further.
It’s not the ads. They want your data and these adblockers prevent them from doing it. Google had and continue to lie to advertisers about their ad views anyways. Simply use Firefox + adblockers or go to alternative sites that are springing up.
It’s official, Youtube now has people employed as product worseners.
YouTube has human employees? I thought they were just all bots.
Google: “Fine, I’ll turn off your adblocker myself!” *rolling out Manifest v3*
I can also just back out and just not watch said videos…
Yeah be like me and just use Peertube, I don’t even notice this stuff untill people complain about it haha.
