YouTube is currently experimenting with server-side ad injection. This means that the ad is being added directly into the video stream.
This breaks sponsorblock since now all timestamps are offset by the ad times.
For now, I set up the server to detect when someone is submitting from a browser with this happening and rejecting the submission to prevent the database from getting filled with incorrect submissions.
does this mean stuff like yt-dlp will download videos with ads in thrm as well?
Looks like I’ll finally get a reason to cut off another website I hate using, but never found the willpower to get rid off.
Good
I’ll buy premium when they finally manage to either prevent adblocking entirely or make it sufficiently inconvenient. Stopping using YouTube is not an option for me and neither is watching ads. YouTube (along with porn) is the internet for me. If I’m not viewing either content, I’m probably not on my computer.
Hell, I don’t even blame them. I can’t morally justify blocking ads and viewing their content for free. I do it because it’s easy and I get away with it. I don’t believe in ads-based business model and that basically leaves subscribtion as the only viable alternative. Not paying and still using the service isn’t exactly practicing what I preach.
I can’t morally justify blocking ads and viewing their content for free.
I can’t morally justify anything they are doing, and have been doing for many many years already. Yet I use their public services because they are unavoidable. But I would never give money to such a company.
The fact that you use their services despite claiming to oppose them probably tells more about how you really feel than your words do. You’re benefiting from their abusive business model the same whey they themselves are. Justifying the continued use of their services by not paying is just a cope to deal with the cognitive dissonance.
It’s pretty hard to not use their services when among else even fucking university courses only upload their content there.
Fixed a word, it was supposed to be unavoidable, not unavailable.
I’d get premium if they weren’t so insistent on bundling in bullshit I don’t want or care about to justify the high price. I put up with enough of that from cable TV. I’ll pay when there’s an ad-free tier that doesn’t do anything else and is a reasonable price for “the service that’s free with ads, but without ads”. If there was a per-device premium tier that I could throw on my Roku, and all my family members could have premium when they stream from there, I’d pay for that. I’d pay for family tier if it didn’t have the dumb single-household rule which screws over truckers and those who travel for a living.
Google has options they could take to convince consumers to pay to not see ads, but there’s no creativity left there, no effort to court the market or adapt the service and prices to what potential customers need and are willing to pay. And it’s because they believe they are the market, and want to keep it that way.
I’m pretty lucky not liking most YouTube style content these days, so don’t consume too much of it like I used to. Lot of the creators feel like AI with the same phrase of if you are new to the channel like and subscribe and ring the notification bell…blah blah blah. And then drag out info that can be said in a minute into a 10 minute long ramble for the algorithm.
YouTube these days is more for music or checking out a part of a game I’m stuck on these days from a creator with like 1 sub putting up a 10 second long clip that gets straight to the point. Those guys are the heroes over the 5+ minute long uploads of the same content in comparison that has you have to dig into the comments to find where to skip to.
Tbh, I don’t think there is a definite “youtube style” that describes all content on youtube. There are some similarities and within categories of videos you can find styles that are more popular within that category, but site wide I would say it provides quite a bit of variety.
What could be called youtube style is that it’s not TV. In that sense YT style and TV style maybe make some sense.
I see YouTube style as the ones that are formulic with the plea to like and subscribe segue to sponsor and the obviously algorithm driven increased lengthen followed by the same tired robotic plea for interaction which is pretty much every big YouTube channel or wannabe big channel.
Doesn’t help that search pushes up those type of channels and shoves smaller channels just uploading content just to share something.
I get what you mean, but don’t hate the player, hate the game. Even tho channels [have to] do that, there’s still a wide variety of content and the call to action doesn’t define the style of each individual creator.
I’m not giving google a dime, they take enough from me that I should be paid to use their shit. I’ll just download what I want to watch, it’s not really much of inconvenience.
I wonder how that will interoperate with timestamps provided by users in comments or by the video creator themselves. Maybe those can be used to detect inserted ads.
The server must have to send some metadata to the client telling when it’s running an ad because there are other things that need to happen client side during that like adjusting of the time or making the ad clickable
I have actually been seeing some timestamps that are completely wrong lately, maybe this is why.
I’m kinda surprised they haven’t done this already. Twitch has been doing this for a while now, and the only reliable way around it is to use a proxy in a country that Twitch doesn’t run ads in.
Video length is incredibly important to The Algorithm and a LOT of content creators time their videos to the second. Taking away control of that (even if the end result ins the exact same length) is going to ruffle a lot of feathers and lead to a lot of people who want to “be a champion for the viewers who should like, comment, and subscribe and use my referral code for war thunder” as a result.
Yeah it sucks, ublock can’t block twitch ads.
I think Twitch has gone to shit lately, because of their decisions, but I don’t know the numbers. Do you have any info about this?
Oh, it’s been pretty crap for a while now. I constantly see viewers complain about
AIDSads and even content creators feel poorly about them.Looking at https://twitchtracker.com/statistics shows a relatively flat viewership base. Since January, they’ve seen a decrease of close to 15% viewers and concurrent channels. It appears that they had a large increase in viewers and channels in 2020, probably due to Covid, and since then they have been in decline.
Thanks Limewire, even though you used to put virus on my computer.
I wonder if this is where AI might be useful where it’s used to filter out all of the megacorp ads, popups, and other random garbage?
- train LLMs on megacorp content and use it to filter out results
- sponsorblock adds this as a toggleable option just like the “skip segment” UI video overlay button
Using AI to fuck the megacorps would be amazing. Using their own tools against them.
Sounds wasteful, detection of ads could be detected with regular software, no?
How?
By the way, yes, it is.
imagine using Gemini for this, would be peak irony.
That would be cool.
I guess my AMD Bulldozer TV PC is gonna have to go in the ewaste bin though. Its already stretched to its limit running Linux Mint, Firefox, uBlock Origin and Sponsorblock as it is
They should still have to indicate that it’s an ad, the problem is that they’ll probably block you from seeking past an ad
- train LLMs on megacorp content and use it to filter out results
I miss the times when ads were just annoying gifs on the left or right side of a web page. Then they evolved, abusing javascript, to become pop ups that hid the URL bar and opened 3 dozen different pop ups while you didn’t close the mother popup. Then they started clickjacking: that close ad button? Just opens another ad. Ad infinitum.
Now, effectively editing the video to add an ad somewhere instead of serving it as a side file. The advertising industry as a whole feels like the absolute worst villains at a personal level, because they want to target you individually.
It was inevitable (and is arguably the “logical” extension of sponsor segments).
As for what it will do to timestamps: The same thing it does to timestamps in podcasts. Some podcast players have a special way to tag the timestamp to adjust with the inserted ads but NOBODY hosts with those. So they are rendered useless.
On the youtube side? They could potentially be auto-adjusted because youtube will know how many ads were inserted . But considering the goal of this is to serve ads…
Wow that’s very annoying. What does this mean for the future of adblocking?
It’ll be difficult for a while until someone figures it out and then it’ll be easy again. It’s just an arms race.
The last time Google pulled out all the stops to fight ad blockers, I had to update uBlock Origin every now and then until the whole thing passed. That’s all.
So I’m not worried. But I am amused that they keep making ads more obnoxious, which pushes more people to use ad blockers. I didn’t even use sponsorblock until a particularly egregious bit of native advertising. They could probably gain ground by just making ads less irritating, but they absolutely will not.
Capitalism is in the end, fighting for monopoly. They rather lose money in foreseeable future, and probably ever, than allow adblockers do their thing for small user-base. Because they want max. control. I can only assume companies that do not go to arms race with their consumers are thee ones that aren’t public traded companies.
It might even be simpler than that. Capitalism just doesn’t care past the next quarter. And when ownership is disconnected from labor or even from customer, than it’s just a really rudimentary collective intelligence. The shareholders just want the line to go up, and everyone in the corporate structure is accountable to the shareholders, so they all do their part, big or little, to make that happen. It completely dispenses with personal responsibility, whether for negative externalities, direct harm, or even the future as close as months from now.
This one might be harder, if YT just sends the ad like it was part of the video file, generating it on the fly, it’s a lot harder to detect, and probably not too hard for them to do, but breaking timestamps is pretty bad for some types of videos, like tutorials.
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Sponsorblock “just” needs to transition from timestamps to timestamps + image hash. Not easy, but not impossible.
Jesus fucking christ YouTube really hates users
Advertising is poison.
We could just ban it.
Also, if the ads where in different parts of the video every time, it would not be possible to use SponsorBlock for them :(
How does a client know when to block the user from fast forwarding to prevent them from skipping over the ad? Could something like sponsorblock detect that to know where the ads are placed?
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Genuinely I’d be fine if someone made a thing that when an ad started a black overlay would go up and the spund would be muted.
Wouldn’t this also completely break ad blockers?
Nah, it would just circumvent them.
Switch to 3rd party clients like pipe-viewer (doesn’t need api key), it’s less likely (though I suppose not impossible) google would roll this out against 3rd party clients as they can’t track you for targeted ads.
To people thinking of joining Nebula because their marketing team/shills are currently spamming this thread, see peertube (federated like lemmy, open source)
To people thinking of joining Nebula because their marketing team/shills are currently spamming this thread, see peertube (federated like lemmy, open source)
Peertube is fine, but like lemmy (but worse), there’s barely anything there. Nebula at least got creators from YouTube to make ad-free versions for Nebula. If the channels that a person are subscribed to don’t exist in Peertube, that’s not an appealing alternative for them.
If they are injecting ads into the actual video stream; it won’t matter what client you use. You request the next video chunk for playback and get served a chunk filled with advertising video instead. The clients won’t be able to tell the difference unless they start analyzing the actual video frames. That’s an entirely server-side decision that clients can’t bypass.
While I think federated services are a good idea in theory, the unfortunate reality is that they’re also privacy and GDPR minefields that nobody has figured out how to make legal yet.
Has any federated service ever been in trouble for GDPR?
I think for that to happen, it would have to be on a server hosted in the EU, owned by a corporation, with a user that just happened to report them for violations.
I think make ad run faster can circumvent this. wdyt? https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/video-speed-controller/nffaoalbilbmmfgbnbgppjihopabppdk?hl=e https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/nffaoalbilbmmfgbnbgppjihopabppdk?hl=en
How would it detect that the currently playing section was an ad then?
