This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
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"
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
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.
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.
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?
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 👌
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.
How about you suck my balls accordingly, google?
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.
Oh no, so how will I be able to tell a difference?
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.
Turning off your ad-blocker is like running in jail, naked. So no thanks, YT.
Both Firefox + uBlock Origin saved me countless times from malicious ads since years. You should do it too.
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.
Keep it up, dumbasses.
Catch the hint...the harder you try the harder we do. There's no trying from our end.
PeerTube & Odysee when?
When the video creators you watch move to them.
YouTube losing the war on AdBlockers, lol.
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"
I mean... it definitely will if you turn off your ad blocker.
How can they make the experience worse for people using adblock if they cant even detect it
If they can detect adblockers, why not just block everyone using one like they were doing previously?
