- 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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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.
Worse than using YouTube without an ad blocker?
deleted by creator
There is absolutely zero possibility that they can find a way to make my experience on YouTube worse than my experience on YouTube without uBlock.
That’s a way to look at, but i’l personally still be using Peertube. instead of 3rd party YouTube apps.
Some of those alternative “YouTube” apps are not limited to YouTube as a backend/source of content. I don’t recall if it’s freetube, new pipe or both that allow using Peertube and YouTube from the same app, which helps bridge the gap in content / ease the transition from an end user perspective.
Newpipe supports Youtube, Peertube, media.ccc.de, Soundcloud and Bandcamp
Interesting. Thanks, I’ll definitely be checking it out.
That’s the funny thing about this threat. It implies that using YouTube the regular way is “optimal” viewing. It’s fucking shit without adblock.
It’s optimal to them. You just don’t understand Youtube’s perspective of it yet. And then it’s unoptimal for them when you watch with the adblocker.
Even without ads it’s shit without sponsorblock for me. Not even for the sponsor spots, but the absolutely annoying copy paste of please like, subscribe, hit the notification icon, blah blah blah blah blah.
Sponsor Block???
That’s shit, but it’s still usable as I can shortcut my way around it. The ads are hot liquid swamp ass that make it unusable. I see ad, I circumvent or close tab.
How to quit YT in a week?
- disable adblocking
- Suffer watching ads
- Get bored, because you no longer feel like watching adTube
- Switch to something else
The fact that my children know the Liberty Mutual jingle from watching YouTube at school says no.
yo what can you even do about this
Kind of shocked it took this long.
It always cost more more but the games that used clever traps were a lot more effective than just drm. Because warez groups can easily check if the game launches. Not if every enemy after mission four has infinite health and pinpoint accuracy.
Just curious if this maps to “shit, Google knows Twitter exists and figured out what we are doing” or “YouTube servers are broken”
So I’m a little lazy and have to watch ads when I watch YouTube on my TV. I don’t care enough to fix this.
Anyways, I don’t mind the short ads. I get it, you gotta pay for your stuff somehow. What I don’t get is these ads that can stretch on for 10, 15, even 150 minutes. I think I had a 3 hour ad at one point. It’s insane. You should have to opt in to these ads that are longer than say 30 seconds.
Opt in?
A Google exec should be shot for any ads longer than 30 seconds.
I was taking a shower once and wanted some music. I started the YouTube app on my phone cause revanced was acting up at the time. It starte off mildly enough, with like 2x15seconds ads, but by the time I was all shampooed one of those huge ads started playing. It didn’t stop until I finished my shower. I was seeing red by the time I got out of the shower and turned it off.
I’d hazard a guess that this old quora post that was estimating the average American loses 4.2 years of their life on ads would now result in even more time lost on ads, but let’s go with 4.2 years per person. This means that for every 20 people, there’s one person’s lifetime of ads. “A life for a life” is a fair concept, Google. Start the culling. One Google employee shot for every 20 people that use YouTube. It’s the only way to atone.
I recently saved a post somewhere with a complete guide on cracked youtube on smart tv’s which wasn’t all too difficult iirc… let me know if you want me to dig it up.
Found it! https://github.com/yuliskov/SmartTube
The whole page loading delay thing is hilarious because it doesn’t tell you why it’s happening, so viewers are likely to just assume the service is becoming even more shitty.
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.
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?
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…
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.
Ad blocking, uh, finds a way.
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.
They could, what can go wrong…
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.
Obviously the “optimal” term vary according to the POV folks.
If for some reason you can’t use a full-on ad blocker, “SponsorBlock for Youtube” is another Firefox extension you can install. It doesn’t block ads per se, but it will auto-skip segments of a video that have been reported as ad content. Kind of a grassroots thing, like reporting cops on Waze.
Until they try to kill that too.
I don’t think Google gets any money from YouTube sponsorships directly. Not watching a sponsored segment and not clicking the affiliate link are one and the same in the eyes of the company.
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.
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?
SmartTube Next for watching YT on TV and LibreTube for Android.
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
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.
About all this is doing is making me update my lists in UBO more often.
Oh no, so how will I be able to tell a difference?
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.
I mean… it definitely will if you turn off your ad blocker.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
YouTube appeared to confirm reports that people with ad-blockers installed were experiencing a multi-second delay before being able to watch a video.
The Android-based news website Android Authority reported that people who weren’t using Chrome noticed the delays, citing Reddit users who said they’ve experienced this delay while using browsers like Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft Edge.
"In the past week, users using ad blockers may have experienced suboptimal viewing, which included delays in loading, regardless of the browser they are using.
Users who have uninstalled their ad blockers may still experience a temporary delay in loading, and should try refreshing their browser," a YouTube spokesperson told Business Insider.
In June 2023, it began preventing users with ad blockers turned on from watching videos and reportedly experimented with pop-up warnings.
More recently, X users began complaining and sharing screenshots of YouTube pop-ups warning them to not use ad blockers.
The original article contains 403 words, the summary contains 146 words. Saved 64%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Get fucked, YouTube.
