• barnaclebutt@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    44
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    7 hours ago

    It’s so weird that YouTube is their second most profitable venture after adsense. It’s like they thought, we have a virtual monopoly on internet ads, Internet video, and web browsers. Let’s combine their power to make people watch non stop ads while tracking them worse than the CIA. Then, let’s be very surprised when people don’t like us and we get hit with antitrust lawsuits. Fuck Google.

  • finitebanjo@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    14
    ·
    edit-2
    7 hours ago

    The fact that I cant go to YT and select play all on a channel anymore makes its primary use, music, pointless to me.

    Another issue is Pandora, they keep forcing mobile site on Desktop User Agent setting and I work too many hours to go in and change the identifiers needed to make it work. Their app is busted as well, it asks for permissions and will semi-frequently crash when I dont give them permissions.

    The whole internets basically becoming shit because of corporate incompetence. Not even willful malice, just idiocy.

      • finitebanjo@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        edit-2
        21 minutes ago

        Fun little piece of trivia: my primary use of YouTube was, in fact, music, you illiterate nimrod.

    • kaotic@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      edit-2
      4 hours ago

      I don’t know this for sure, but I feel like this is something you can do with freetube. Regardless, it’s worth looking into.

      • finitebanjo@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        1
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        4 hours ago

        I don’t like using apps to start with tbh, 100% pass on that. Installing random software to phones should never have become so commonplace.

    • AwkwardLookMonkeyPuppet@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      8
      ·
      edit-2
      7 hours ago

      That’s because they want you to pay a subscription fee for YouTube music.

      For the Pandora app, they don’t want you using it if you don’t give them permission to do whatever it is they want to do.

      It is malicious. It’s often incompetence too, but it’s also malicious.

      • finitebanjo@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        4
        ·
        6 hours ago

        Even if they benefit from me using YT Music, they make no sales pitch at any point leading up to me seeing the button is gone and leaving the platform. They are just missing out on tons of ad revenue from users that otherwise would have stayed and listened for hours.

        And Pandora also assuredly did not design their app to crash.

    • UraniumBlazer@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      39
      arrow-down
      2
      ·
      12 hours ago

      Isn’t there some law that you have to visually indicate whether a given piece of content is sponsored (ad) or not? Can’t that just be detected by ad blockers to skip/hide ads?

      • MonkeMischief@lemmy.today
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        3 hours ago

        I used to have a neat app on my phone that would play “Interdimensional Cable” bits, or just silence, over Spotify ads. It made it a lot more usable.

        Their ad gets played, I don’t have to hear it screaming at me. Win/Win right?

      • XpeeN@sopuli.xyz
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        4 hours ago

        It depends on their implementation. If they decided to somehow serve the ad itself and serve the video only after the ad is done, I think that you won’t be able to skip it, maybe only censor it to see a blank video screen or something.

      • archomrade [he/him]@midwest.social
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        24
        ·
        11 hours ago

        There isn’t a law that I’m aware of, but typically the ad needs to be un-skippable/seek-able, which means there will always be some indication to the video player of what the user can skip or fast forward through.

        That doesn’t mean Google couldn’t just make fast forwarding/seeking a premium feature, but they’d lose a lot of user appeal if they did so they probably wouldn’t do that

        • SomeGuy69@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          12
          ·
          10 hours ago

          Germany has this law, sponsored segments must be clearly labelled. But one could just hash the ad anyways or just try to fast forward and if it doesn’t work and it would be the ad.

          • anonymous111@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            1 hour ago

            I was thinking about this. Can we crowd source add hash markers, in a similar way to how Sponsor Block opperates but with hashes instead of time stamps?

        • hash@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          2
          ·
          10 hours ago

          Even if they do this, I wouldn’t be averse to a less on demand version of youtube. 3rd party apps will let you load a number of videos for later viewing. Would probably help me consume media more responsibly and youtube has to deal with the additional resources needed to serve all the videos I didn’t wind up watching after all.

      • Ignotum@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        3 hours ago

        Your browser just receives a single video file, there’s no way to tell where in that video there’s an ad, if there even is one

        You can’t remove nor replace it if you don’t know what to remove or replace

    • j4k3@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      23
      ·
      13 hours ago

      I’m not sure about the mechanism, but isn’t this the same thing as ancient early DVR’s like TiVo that would record from the cable stream and omit the ads segments?

      • MimicJar@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        12
        ·
        12 hours ago

        That’s the thing, I don’t think the mechanism exists (or works) yet. I’m confident it will someday, but I didn’t think it worked yet.

          • Squiddlioni@kbin.melroy.org
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            19
            ·
            12 hours ago

            Twitch (and YouTube currently) switches to a new content stream to play an ad, which is easy to detect and block in an extension. If I understand the tech correctly, server side ads would be stitched into the playing content stream. The extension would have to know the content of the video to know that an ad is playing. There are some clever ways that might be caught (looking for spikes in bitrate, volume differences, etc), but none of that currently exists in the software in the OP.

    • rtxn@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      17
      ·
      12 hours ago

      IIRC, Twitch uses similar ad injection. Ad blockers get around it by opening new video streams until they find one that isn’t running an ad. Could be wrong though, I’m parroting an uncited comment.

      • Wolfram@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        4 hours ago

        Even then, the only fool proof way of getting around server side ads is using an adblocking proxy that pipes the video stream into a different country. And public proxies available are not foolproof because of excessive traffic or whatnot.

        • Wolfram@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          2
          ·
          4 hours ago

          And specifically this is for TTV.LOL revolving around Twitch.

          I think the same applies to YouTube in the same countries Twitch can’t play ads in. But I haven’t seen anything about YouTube adblocking proxies like TTV.LOL.

    • marcos@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      5
      ·
      12 hours ago

      They can block some kinds of server-side ads. And if google has those already, they have been quite successful against youtube.

      But yeah, they won’t block all server-side ads.

  • tomatolung@sopuli.xyz
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    48
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    11 hours ago

    What’s funny to me is how they are in a fight for their company with the FTC, and they want to continue provoking people by increasing their revenue on the back of their users on a service they might have a technical monopoly on? Hmmmm…

    • Lev_Astov@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      8
      ·
      7 hours ago

      That’s something like a cleaver, so it’s got a blunt tip that looks like it’s going through her blouse.

      • Baguette@lemm.ee
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        5 hours ago

        Cleaver is a bit more wide to be better at cutting through bone and stuff. I’d say its closer to a santoku knife though usually the tip is more tapered downwards

    • finitebanjo@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      7 hours ago

      Nah the blade edge is straight and the spine curves down. Great for chopping small and medium sized vegetables.

  • neonred@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    13
    arrow-down
    14
    ·
    4 hours ago

    I really hate that picture. Imagine swapping the man and tho woman. He and their two kids waiting, knifes ready, for the spouse to come back from work, ready for stabbing an unsuspect. Wow, what an outcry this would have.

  • Scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    25
    ·
    13 hours ago

    The problem is when they start doing in stream ads, that will require something new. That said, people have been doing that with cable for a while, it’ll be real interesting to see what clever stuff comes out to detect them in stream

    • lohky@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      9
      ·
      11 hours ago

      It’ll require a new mother fucking video platform. We need to just collectively let YouTube die and move on.

    • AlexWIWA@lemmy.ml
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      9
      ·
      11 hours ago

      This is something that would be a surprisingly good use case for machine learning. Fingerprint the ads by watching ahead in the stream, then skip that section.

      Actually, I think older algorithmic methods will work. I think that’s how TiVo worked. The annoying part is you’ll have to wait a bit at the start of the video.

    • PSoul•Memes@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      14
      ·
      13 hours ago

      I assume something similar to sponsor block, some algorithm to identify ad segments and some user feedback to confirm. Unless I’m mistaken as to how sponsor block works?

      • Gormadt@lemmy.blahaj.zone
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        21
        ·
        13 hours ago

        Sponser block works via user input

        People will watch the videos, report the segments that are sponser slots, and then when people watch the video they can upvote or downvote the accuracy of the report.

        In stream ads would be a hard one to tackle because YouTube would likely inject them randomly into the stream to boost engagement (readas, prevent people skipping them easily).

        • CarbonIceDragon@pawb.social
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          6
          ·
          12 hours ago

          if they were randomly placed, then couldnt you have a sponsor-block type system where instead of the ad segments being marked and skipped, information about the video is externally stored somewhere (like perhaps a really low res screenshot of the video every couple seconds, or some number generated algorithmically by a frame of video), and the results should be the same for all users for the actual video part, but if the ads are placed randomly, the ad section will suddenly not match the data other users had, prompting the video to skip until it matches again (with a buffer included if they remove the ability to move forward)

          • Kushan@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            3 hours ago

            You don’t need anything so complicated.

            Take two copies of the same video, diff them and only keep the parts that match.

            We can also build up a database of as signatures to automatically identify them without requiring a watermark - we already have the technology to do this for detecting intro sequences for skipping.

        • 42Firehawk@lemmynsfw.com
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          3
          ·
          12 hours ago

          In that case the ads are video only, no clicking on them, including to skip or anything else. So it would be detecting that trying to change where you are in the video doesn’t change anything (and exclusively playing via your 3 second buffer)

  • archonet@lemy.lol
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    31
    arrow-down
    10
    ·
    13 hours ago

    not pictured: the pihole just out of frame, holding a shotgun

      • SKBo@lu.skbo.net
        cake
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        1 hour ago

        It blocked YouTube ads when ads where served from other domains or subdomains. Now that they’re served from the same subdomains as videos, it’s not blocking anymore.

        • archonet@lemy.lol
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          8
          arrow-down
          1
          ·
          edit-2
          10 hours ago

          all these people missing the part where I said “holding a shotgun” – I guarantee you’ll never see a YouTube ad on your network again if no data from their servers ever gets past your router. It’s not a subtle or precise option, but it is highly effective. Much like a shotgun.

          Then you can just use peertube, piped, or invidious when that gets fixed

            • archonet@lemy.lol
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              3
              ·
              edit-2
              10 hours ago

              never underestimate the tenacity and ingenuity of spiteful pirates. It’s been a while since I last used invidious, but I can’t imagine it being permanently broken. in the meantime – Piped, then?

              If things get real stupid, we might have to employ AI to identify and strip ads from videos before mirroring. edit: Someone has, in fact, already trained an AI to identify ads in a video, with apparently 97.4% accuracy. So, the hard part’s already been done.

              • Prunebutt@slrpnk.net
                link
                fedilink
                arrow-up
                1
                ·
                4 hours ago

                Newpipe works on Android and Freetube works on Linux. I guess a local invidious instance works, too. But then, you’d lose pooling.

              • LunchMoneyThief@links.hackliberty.org
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                2
                ·
                6 hours ago

                There has been some back and forth between Goolag’s countermeasures and Invidious’ countermeasures before arriving at the current situation, Invidious seemingly having lost the battle.

                From their git issue tracker:

                Hello,

                Sad news for everyone. YouTube/Google has patched the latest workaround that we had in order to restore the video playback functionality.

                Right now we have no other solutions/fixes. You may be able to get Invidious working on residential IP addresses (like at home) but on datacenter IP addresses Invidious won’t work anymore. (Some datacenter IPs may still work, but that’s a matter of time until they don’t anymore.) … This is not the death of this project. We will still try to find new solutions, but this might take time, months probably.

      • USSMojave@startrek.website
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        11 hours ago

        I love how people will complain about ads on YouTube and then go on to complain that PeerTube sucks because “who’s going to pay the hosting fees?” 🙄 For the record I like PeerTube but Android clients are ass right now

        • Possibly linux@lemmy.zip
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          2
          ·
          edit-2
          11 hours ago

          That’s not my biggest complaint. The problem is it isn’t being pushed forward. It needs some serious work to even be remotely compared to YouTube.

          It is getting better but I don’t think the current leadership is agrees I’ve enough. I’d like to see it move to its own legal entity with dedicated budgeting. They need to raise some serious money to get competitive. Developers are expensive but they do much better work than a few French guys.

  • Praise Idleness@sh.itjust.works
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    3
    ·
    10 hours ago

    tbh if they do server side ads I’d be glad knowing that it costs them too much that they should be glad they’re not losing money by ads, which I think they will.