Looks like I'm testing not using YouTube.
this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2024
255 points (97.8% liked)
Privacy
31471 readers
682 users here now
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
Chat rooms
-
[Matrix/Element]Dead
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
It’s past due that we need a new platform.
We don't need a new platform. We need 20 new platforms, and authors can post on whichever ones are best for them. Have real competition and real incentive to be better.
load more comments
(1 replies)
That'll make youtube disappear for me.
Over the years I watched less and less. I only seldomly have to look into youtube for things that are easier in video than in text.
Teens and many people don't know that there is a world without ads. They have to be educated that there are alternatives - not watching youtube is a real option. You do not depend on it.
I's a horrible world many people live in. Recently I saw someone browsing on instagram, each third post is an ad and oftentimes there are ads after ads. And people follow other people and watch their ads. Incredible!
Recently, I was browsing linkedin and there were 12 ads instead of real jobs in a row. in a row. Unrelated to my profession.
But the point is there’s always been a way to avoid ads, even while browsing sites with ads and browsing YT. Personally, if that ability entirely disappears, i hate ads, ad-voice, and the concept of advertising so much that I will stop and close a whole tab if an ad plays. I’m in the minority though. Because, I think you’re right, a lot of people just don’t even think about it and mindlessly consume. I can’t. When Reddit fucked us and showed us our opinions and feelings didn’t matter, I left. I will do the same to YT.
I think I hate ads just as much. But I might cave in and start subscribing to premium again. I just stopped because they don't allow a family plan here in Korea.
I think many people see it as normal/expected.
A coworker showed me a video yesterday on their phone, I said 'holy hell what is this shit? This is what it looks like for you?' And opened it in Tubular. They had no idea such a thing existed.
I rarely watch videos because I prefer to read. The people I work with spend a vast amount of their free time watching YouTube and TikTok. They just seem to zone out, or be really interested when an ad comes on.
I think many people see it as normal/expected.
Yes, that's it. People born in the early part of last century (my grandparent's era) only knew over-the-air TV which in the US included commercials. It was just part of reality, like billboards by the highway.
The county I live in banned billboards and most outdoor advertising long ago, and it’s NICE
I know this is an unpopular opinion but I love YouTube and it really bums me out to have to drop it. My home account has been heavily curated over the past two decades and it's pretty rare to see a video on my homepage from the shitty part of YouTube...now I'm getting ads and just closing the tab. I have a separate account just for listening to music on my work laptop and I've found a ton of new artists through it, too....not sure what I'm gonna do once it starts getting ads, too.
I have a Nebula subscription but only like 1/3 of the channels I watch are on there. And obviously none of the music
I feel the same way. Or felt. It is a wonderful platform that will let anyone upload and share videos at absolutely no cost. Video hosting isn't as expensive as we are often lead to believe, but it isn't cheap. Especially if you want to provide a great experience like different resolutions and qualities.
I used to subscribe to YouTube Premium and was quite happy about it. However they slowly made the platform worse and worse. At some point it hurt to give them money, even if the subscription was "worth it". I just didn't like giving money to people destroying a great platform.
Luckily YouTube still supports RSS. This means that I can easily mix in other video platforms with no bother. I now subscribe to Nebula and have 35 subscriptions there. I also have a handful of PeerTube, video podcasts and other self-hosted creators. It isn't the "majority" of my subscriptions (Apparently I have ~200 YouTube channels that I subscribe to, but a huge number of them are dead, second channels or incredibly infrequent.) but it doesn't matter. All of my subscriptions come to the same "inbox" and it doesn't really matter what platform they are on.
load more comments
(1 replies)
load more comments
(2 replies)
This is where we could use a browser plug in that uses AI to learn what an ad is and skip it for us. Now we just need someone to start working on it.
Plugins can add controls and it can download videos, but plugins can't interact with videos directly I think.
Maybe use the Youtube API closed captions and figure out the patterns for ads that way?
load more comments
(3 replies)
Thats fine. This just fuels developers to make more efficient ad blockers. Youtube wont win the long game and the more they try stuff like this, the more people find out about ublock and other adblockers.
load more comments
(1 replies)
Youtube is testing my fucking patience.
Stay away from Odysee unless you are a neonazi
Certainly there are also neonazis, like in all other streaming platforms too, including YT, where I already blocked some channels because of this. Worst is removedute respect nazies.
load more comments
(2 replies)
Crap I just opened youtube today and it looks like I was chosen. The ads load like normal videos and it sucks. My brain actually glitched for a couple of seconds when I opened a video because I wasn't used to seeing an ad. I dunno if there's any chance uBO can even counter this.
Try to watch the video embedded, simply edit it's URL, using instead of
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxxxxxxx
this URL
https://www.youtube.com/embed/xxxxxxxx
Welp, restarted my laptop and I'm off the testing list so can't replicate (unless I turn off uBO of course). But thanks, this will be handy if it happens again.
I'm surprised it took them this long.
Oh dear lord no.
YT has 2 posibilities
- Hosting all videos doble, one with ads and the same vids without for premium user
- Insert also markers which at the end also are exploited by adblockers and userscripts
I think they'll hit their teeth against a rock with this.
Meanwhile a lot of content creators a changing to Odysee
That's not true. The way their streaming works is basically a Playlist of shorter fragments. They can easily insert their own fragments without obvious visual tells if they don't alter other elements of the page to indicate that an ad is playing.
But they will have to alter othet elements on the page. For example, scrubbing. It will either have to be paused at one specific timestamp while the ad is playing or the ad would have to be incorporated into the length of the video.
In either case, it is detectable.
The video chunks hash can be calculated and then blocked, in a crowdsourced way like with sponsorblock (but way more effective, because it will cover all videos)
The obvious solution to me is sponsorblock switching to sampling pixels out of each frame, like that project that encoded data into video streams (yet resilient to compression), there are algorithms that could fingerprint any ad with an extremely high degree of accuracy. It'd be more complex than the current implementation, but it'd also be more resilient. I'd settle for it hiding the video and suppressing the audio for the ads duration, possibly displaying a countdown timer, vs actually watching the ad. Then Youtube would get paid, but have no way of knowing you haven't seen the ad, and the metrics around their ad effectiveness would ultimately suffer, so users still win.
You could even go so far as to have the client cache the video, several minutes in advance, dropping all the ad frames, so it's a seamless experience for the user. I got money, but will spend 10x as much ensuring Google gets less from me. It ain't about money. It's about sending a message!
load more comments
(1 replies)
- Hosting all videos doble, one with ads and the same vids without for premium user
Not quite sure why, they simply could in the fly stitch those files together.
Twitch is doing that for a while now i think.
Exactly this. It isn't even really "stitching" as YouTube videos are served as a series of short chunks anyways. So you simply tell the player that there are a few extra chunks which happen to be ads. There is no video processing required it is basically free to do it this way on the sever side.
load more comments
(2 replies)
I think they'll hit their teeth against a rock with this.
Press X to doubt
Most people do not have an adblocker. Most people watch YouTube to varying degrees of frequency and duration. Most people will continue to watch the ads. I’d be surprised if YT noticed any amount of users leaving the site because of this. The privacy minded folk are few and far between.
Actually the videos get stitched together dynamically.
load more comments
(3 replies)
Honestly, I just pull videos from Youtube to watch later. I don't actually watch anything on Youtube. I do wonder if there's an upcoming replacement for Youtube like there was for Twitter.
Peertube
What are the YT alternatives? I use it by default and I'm to exhausted to look for another landing place
Odysee ! I use a extention even so if I click a video on YouTube and it is also on odysee it opened odysee instead.
That is a good question
Honestly no idea why they didn't just do that to begin with.
Because it’s actually really hard to achieve technically. When ads are served outside the stream you can easily serve different ads to different viewers based on their profiles. When the ads are baked into the stream you can either
A) Create a whole bunch of different copies of the video asset with different ads baked in and then rotate these on a regular basis. Which would be expensive to update and store and limit the range of adverts that could be served to a particular user.
B) Dynamically create a stream on the users request, which while possible means standard CDN caching isn’t going to work so there’s a distribution challenge.
Or some other alternative they’ve come up with. I’d be really interest to know what their approach is here.
They’re probably inserting the ads “on the fly”. It can be finicky depending on codec, but doable.
load more comments
(1 replies)
It's easier and less resource hungry to deliver targeted ads like that.
It depends on what the publishers publish for. If it’s money then Peertube is probably not attractive.
As said, some creators already had changed to Odysee, because there they also can monetize their work, but without all the YT crap and nags, apart Odysee is freemium OpenSource https://github.com/OdyseeTeam
Anyone know if and how this might affect Grayjay or revanced?
If it ain't Foss it is a toss
I noticed some lagging lately on ReVanced, but nothing more, ATM. If the server side ads are the cause it's nothing major for now.
That move would finally rid me of my addiction to YouTube. So much time, so many possibilities...
view more: next ›