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.
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.
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.
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 will just start downloading videos and watching them at my leisure. Anything to not give this corp my money.
Funny thing is I use to have no problem watching ads on youtube until they increased the amount and started spamming ads for gambling. There is an option to select on your google account that limits the amount of gambling ads you see. I had that enabled and it felt like it increased the amount of gambling ads it was serving me.
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!
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.
That is true. But then you could probably use the chunk length to determine where the ads starts and ends since there is with a very high probability an unusually long chunk at those times.
I don't know about YouTube but the chunks are often a fixed length. For example 1 or 2 seconds. So as long as the ad itself is an even number of seconds (which YouTube can require, or just pad the add to the nearest second) so there is no concrete difference between the 1s "content" chunks vs the 1s "ad" chunks.
If you are trying to predict the ad chunks you are probably better off doing things like detecting sudden loudness changes, different colour tones or similar. But this will always be imperfect as these could just be scene changes that happened to be chunk aligned in the content.
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.
one with ads and the same vids without for premium user
If it worked that way, which others have already explained it doesn't, that would break their business model of showing each person individually targeted ads.
Better than any other- Well, there are some selfhosted video sites like PeerTube and others, but respect content are not a real alternative, nor other proprietary streaming sites, like removedute, Vimeo, Dailymotion, etc. Front-ends or desktop clients (FreeTube) with the new YT policy will die. What other alternatives then?
From what I read, this also breaks sponsorblock - as the ads are part of the video, it moves the time stamps of the video so it makes it not correct. The ads will also change I imagine so idk if sponsorblock will be a solution.
So that the timestamp adjustment can be propagated via uploader or user comments across YouTube clients on all platforms... i.e. to avoid having to hardcode each adjustment for each ad on each video on every client
Why couldn't they just serve the comments to each client with the ad-adjusted timestamps already? The only thing the client has to request then is the comment page it wants to load, and some unique ID for which the backend remembers which ad version it's associated with.
No, not in it's actual form, nor the front-ends can't not longer cutting the ads with their current form. Or they change their script, or you have the alternative to use YT or using another streaming service. But I think that there will be other solution in the future to show the middle finger to YT.
Yeah, that'll be hard. I'm trying to use Peertube but network effect is big on YT (not sure if that's the right expression here, noone is using Peertube, everyone is on YT).
Odysee takes a lot of curation to even be usable. You can block whole channels easily and they won't show up for you anywhere, but once you've blocked all the RWB you're left with mostly tech, gaming, and reactions. And this is despite Odysee/LBRY having been around for years.
Yeah, that’ll be hard. I’m trying to use Peertube but network effect is big on YT (not sure if that’s the right expression here, noone is using Peertube, everyone is on YT).
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.
No. This is not great. This is older than all of my kids. Fuck.. this is older than my partner. This is not a good thing, this is far beyond the point where it should be open source. Where the fuck is DOS 6.22? Eh? Or Windows 3.11? This is stupid and dumb. Not to be celebrated.
As someone who has done some OS dev, it’s not likely to be of much help. DOS didn’t have much of any of the defining features of most modern OS’s — it barely had a kernel, there was no multitasking, no memory management, no memory protection, no networking, and everything ran at the same privilege level. What little bit of an API was there was purely through a handful of software interrupts — otherwise, it was up to your code to communicate with nearly all the hardware directly (or to communicate with whatever bespoke device driver your hardware required).
This is great for anyone that wants to provide old-school DOS compatibility, and could be useful in the far future to aid in “digital archaeology” (i.e.: being able to run old 80’s and early 90’s software for research and archival purposes on “real DOS”) — but that’s about it. DOS wasn’t even all that modern for its time — we have much better tools to use and learn from for designing OS’s today.
As a sort of historical perspective this is useful, but not likely for anything else.
To put things into context, IBM didn’t get ripped off in any way (at least not from DOS - the whole IBM/Microsoft OS/2 debacle is a different story). The earliest PCs (IBM PC, IBM PC XT, IBM PC Jr., and associated clones) didn’t really have the hardware capabilities needed to permit a more advanced operating system. There was no flat memory model, no protection rings, and no Translation Look-aside Buffer (TLB). The low maximum unpaged memory addressing limit (1MB) made it difficult to run more than one process at a time, and really limits how much OS you can have active on the machine (modern Windows by way of example reserves 1GB of virtual RAM per process just for kernel memory mapping).
These things did exist on mainframe and mini computers of the day — so the ideas and techniques weren’t unknown — but the cheaper IBM PCs had so many limitations that those techniques were mostly detrimental (there were some pre-emptive OSs for 8086/8088 based PCs, but they had a lot of limitations, particularly around memory management and protection), if not outright impossible. Hence the popularity of DOS in its day — it was simple, cheap, didn’t require a lot of resources, and mostly stayed out of the way of application development. It worked reasonably well given the limitations of the platforms it ran on, and the expectations of users.
So IBM did just fine from that deal — it was when they went in with Microsoft to replace DOS with a new OS that did feature pre-emptive multitasking, memory protection, and other modern techniques that they got royally screwed over by Microsoft (vis: the history of OS/2 development).
I’m not sure what’s keeping Microsoft and ibm from Open Sourcing all the rest of the DOS versions as well — the 3.x series was very influential, 5 added disk compression, and 6 was the most modern of them all. I can’t remember if Stac’s lawsuit against Microsoft would require them to take out the disk compression parts (although AFAIK the relevant patents are probably long expired now), but even if that’s the case having these available as OSS would also be useful — even if only for a historical context.
Good thing Firefox for Android allows plug-ins now. That's been my go-to mobile YouTube viewer ever since. It's almost as good as my desktop experience.
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