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.
cry about it
Newpipe ftw.
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.
Google went from don’t be evil to fuck you all.
To put it shortly: “Went public”.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Is mom stabbing herself?
That’s something like a cleaver, so it’s got a blunt tip that looks like it’s going through her blouse.
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
Nah the blade edge is straight and the spine curves down. Great for chopping small and medium sized vegetables.
Unless I’m mistaken, none of those will block server-side ads.
That’s the point.
I’d be satisfied with replacing the ad segment with some other video temporarily.
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
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?
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
You can adblock twitch, I assume it wouldn’t be too different from that
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.
Couldn’t I check how far along the video is?
You can click on the ad right? Detect that.
Let’s assume you can use that to determine the beginning of an ad, how do you know how much to skip?
Until the clickable part is gone.
AFAIK currently, they just add black video into the YouTube video, and play an ad separately from the main video stream. That’s what I’ve heard about people with working ad block who got this, there was just black video added to their YouTube video
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.
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.
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.
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.
Not yet
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…
Provoking people and in dispute with FTC don’t relate but if the FTC broke them up then you would really regret not cashing in while you could
Insofar as the FTC is in a legal case with google, American users do not have individual standing. But the court of public opinion is another venue without the need for such logic. As this is a political decision to enforce and proceed eight the case as much as an economic one, I would beg to disagree that provocation is in their best interest.
Perhaps some would like to file a complaint? https://www.ftc.gov/enforcement/submit-merger-antitrust-comment
YouTube isn’t profitable. You want to talk antitrust in a meme about YouTube trying to make money on ads?
Suuure it’s not.
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
It’ll require a new mother fucking video platform. We need to just collectively let YouTube die and move on.
There’s Rumble
I fuckin hate Nazis.
The enemy of my enemy is my friend.
Then drown them out with enough non-Nazis, that’s what youtube does
Haven’t heard anything bad about Nebula
Except the price?
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.
Audio is stupidly easy to fingerprint and identify. It would be glorious if we used the very same dumbass technology to identify ad segments as they use to robo-copyright-claim creators for including a 11 second snippet of a radio ad that’s period authentic to the historical media they’re reviewing. Just take that shit and turn it right against them.
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?
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).
deleted by creator
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)
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.
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)
This is just wrong. None of those will prevent server side ads.
not pictured: the pihole just out of frame, holding a shotgun
??? Pihole never blocked YouTube ads.
How do you use Pihole to block YouTube ads?
Block youtube.com. Quite effective, if you ask me.
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
Invidious is currently out of order. Not sure if they would be able to cut out the ads.
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.
Newpipe works on Android and Freetube works on Linux. I guess a local invidious instance works, too. But then, you’d lose pooling.
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.
Piped wasn’t working earlier.
You can’t. I have no idea what this person is talking about.
Peertube is holding the folded chair ready for action
I have serious doubt’s but it seems to be the best option right now
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
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.
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.
I want the context of the original photo
Until Google demanded from its vassal (Mozilla) the removal of support for extensions. Mozilla doesn’t have enough resources to do without Google
I have no idea why you’re getting down voted. It’s essentially true.
The arrangement is vital for Mozilla. According to the Mozilla Foundation’s 2021–2022 financial statement, which is the most recent one published, $510 million out of its $593 million in revenue came courtesy of Google’s search payments. https://fortune.com/2024/08/05/mozilla-firefox-biggest-potential-loser-google-antitrust-search-ruling/
Unfortunately it happens more frequently than I’d like
When did this happen?
If they put the ads in the stream, you can just fast-forward. I don’t think it’ll work out well for Google.
This is something they are really good at, refining code until it does work well for Google.
