Technology

So if YouTube is now serving up the ads directly to me, does that mean they're finally liable for the content of those ads? Can we have them investigated for all the malware, phishing, illegal hate speech, etc.?

Ads will always be detectable because you cannot speed up or skip an ad like you can the rest of the video.

If they do make it so you can speed up or skip the ad sections of a video, mission accomplished.

If all else fails, I'd enjoy a plugin that just blanks the video and mutes the sound whenever an ad is playing. I'll enjoy the few seconds of quiet, and hopefully I can use that time to break out of the mentally unhealthy doom spiral that is the typical YouTube experience.

I'm getting tired, man. these people are truly just the shittiest individuals ever.

Imagine all the cool stuff we could be doing if we weren’t wasting the time of hundreds of engineers figuring out how to shove ads in people’s faces.

Honestly, I've kind of always wondered why they didn't just do this. It's always seemed like the obvious thing to me.

I mean, I hope it doesn't work, because screw Google, but I'm still surprised it took them this long to try it.

I'm really getting the push I need to finally get rid of the last couple Google services I still use

Imma start subscribing to the RSS feeds of torrents made for specific channels before i watch ads.

If youtube wants to make their website so hostile its easier to get better versions of youtube videos without YouTube then those games will be played.

[Enshittification intensifies]

If YouTube offered premium without music for a discounted price I'd probably be willing to pay for it. But I just want no ads, not a bunch of bundled stuff.

So, instead of iterating the ancient concept of frontal assault ads towards something less intrusive and more engaging, they go the black mirror path of force feeding ads?

Sounds about right regarding the decision makers have as much creativity as a Vogon.

Man I really hate those suit MBA circlejerk idiots in positions of power.

Seeing as these ads will be targeted and of varying length, I wonder if a SponsorBlock-like extension with the ability to accept training data from users to help identify ads.

The Plex server application has a feature which scrubs videos and identifies intros so you can skip them like you can on Netflix. Wouldn’t it be sort of like that?

Seems like a good use of AI/ML.

The fact that they can do expensive, on-the-fly video processing like this, and still make a profit, proves that video hosting costs are not an insurmountable barrier for the open-source internet. We need to make hardware accelerated peertube ubiquitous, and get creators to move over.

The article makes it sound like a new concept, but it's a very old approach for adding ads to video streams. I mean, it's essentially how regular TV works.

Well it sounds more scary than it realistically will be.

YouTube must pass to the player the metadata of where the ads start/end. Why? Because they need to be unskippable/unseekable/etc. If the metadata is there it is possible to force the seek 🤷‍♂️

Just matter of time

Oh well.

YouTube can be past-tense. There's a million places to post a video these days. Spill out some whiskey and read a book. Fuck em.

The arms race continues.

Only if premium did not have ads. They show you ad videos as if they’re part of your “recommendations”. They also allow creators to get sponsorships within videos. So even the premium experience isn’t really ad-free and they tout that shit everywhere.

On my phone I use youtube revanced and adguard dns, kiwi browser with ublock origin. On my PC I use just ublock origin. So far** I havent run into issues

I've been getting around it by setting my frontend to use an embed request, that way YouTube thinks it's a third party embed and the ad injection doesn't work. I've also in the past geospoofed to Russia and that works to block ads too.