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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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There will always be a way
Can you skip ads on live TV? No.
With a DVR? Yes.
When ads are a distinct bit of content recognized by the client, then the casual user with the stock client/no add-ons can't overcome the UI choice to block you from seeking unless youtube lets you. But this allows ad blockers to skip even downloading the ad, because it's clear what is content and what is ad.
If the ad is completely "just part of the stream" with zero indication where ads begin and end, then you can at least seek back and forth, with not even the official client able to block you from seeking, because it doesn't know where the ads are either. The client downloads the stream.
If the stream is accompanied by some metadata letting the client know when to block seeking, then ad blockers can use that to auto-seek.
I suspect the last one is going to be the case, because they both want to limit seeking during ad, and they also want to change things to an ad experience so that you 'click through' to what the ad is trying to get you to do.
You can fast forward on yt though :p, so unless they remove that for the duration of the ad (in which case an addon could possibly use that to determine if an ad is being played) you could at least skip it manually. And maybe there'd be a crowd sourced solution to somehow determine the actual videos beginning (like detecting the first frame of the actual video or something, idk).
What’s to stop them from timestamping the time they sent you the ad and wait until like 90% of that time has gone by until they send you the video? It’s all server-side, nothing a plugin can do.
Plugins could have lengthy buffers and a start-up delay, not ideal obviously, but some people and for some videos, people might be willing to wait. Alternatively as many others have mentioned in this post, a plugin could mute the audio and/or black out the video if it detects an ad playing. There are trade offs, but it's a workable approach as well.
Honestly that’s not much better than muting and doing something else like we used to do with cable. If it gets to this point, I’ll be long gone, probably to curiositystream or nebula.