YouTube is experimenting with server-side ads
(lemmy.world)
from doodle967@lemdro.id to degoogle@lemmy.ml on 14 Jun 2024 11:23
https://lemdro.id/post/9769248
from doodle967@lemdro.id to degoogle@lemmy.ml on 14 Jun 2024 11:23
https://lemdro.id/post/9769248
cross-posted from: lemmy.world/post/16462338
#degoogle
threaded - newest
Oh no, please no.
Will uBlock still work or will that also break when/if this gets added?
As I understood the ad will be a part of the actual video file you receive but, unlike fixed sponsor integrations, the time it’s shown at will change every time. That is going to be impossible to get rid of without AI unless there are some exploits
I guess thats what we will have to do. The cats catching up but the mouse will continue to inovate.
Please no not AI
Whata ur problem with ai? I dont get the hatred. We need good foss models otherwise proprietary crap wins.
Energy efficiency, enforcement and hallucinations
Energy usage isnt bad its literally what makes shit happen. Hallucinations yeah but its getting better, what does enforcement mean?
Energy usage of AI models is at least 100x higher than other ways of doing most of the tasks (such as calculations and searches), hallucinations will never disappear and enforcement means inability to disable the AI or use most of the features with it being disabled
I’d argue its a tradeoff for efficiency. Hallucinations are getting better its already better than the average human especially with tool use, self checking and chain of thought. And the whole enforcement thing I’ve never had that issue sounds like something is only run into on proprietary software and well thats a cluster fuck anyways.
Well if the AI is optional and isn’t the only preinstalled way of doing a certain task, I don’t mind it. Efficiency is still much worse though
I doubt it’ll be impossible as Google will be required by many laws around the world to make it clear if something is an advert, especially in the EU. So there will be a mechanism to know if something in the stream is an advert or not.
Adblockers should be able to adapt but I do think SponsorBlock might be stuffed if users are seeing adverts at different times in the stream.
My guess is that this new mechanism is disadvantageous for analytics
They will also want to block people from skipping the ad. So they’ll have to provide timestamps, when skipping should be blocked. Maybe those can be somehow extracted.
That’s a pretty good idea. As soon as skipping is disabled, start skipping. And stop skipping when you’re allowed to skip again.
That sounds so weird out of context 😄
Legally, YouTube has to tell you you’re watching an ad. This means that at least visually somewhere (it could be baked into the video stream, for example), there should be a distinctive pattern that extensions should be able to grab and make the video fast-forward.
If youtube manages to stop fast forwarding, maybe at the very least we could auto-mute, and maybe overlay photos of puppies or something
Bad idea. People would get a negative Pavlovian reaction to puppies after a while.
Imagine walking down the street, seeing a puppy and immediately getting annoyed! That’s no way to live, man! 😄
Based in my experience it does not work. Ads still play
I guess no more ad-free experience in privacy-respecting clients. Well that sucks but let’s hope it at least won’t kill them completely
for now https://github.com/mendel5/alternative-front-ends?tab=readme-ov-file#youtube
I use LibreTube btw
Libretube’s DeArrow and Sponsorblock support is very nice and I like its interface very much.
Idk what’s DeArrow and I don’t use SponsorBlock because it’s not reliable for me lol. What is really good about LibreTube though is the privacy stuff and that it works fine on 8 years old phones. DEATH TO PLANNED OBSOLESCENCE!
@GolfNovemberUniform @doodle967 for a moment there my eyes saw "Arch" 🤣🤣
Oh yea I use Arch btw
Shit guess I have to quit yt and move to peer tube full time.
You can still benefit from the YouTube content pool without this nonsense
If i have to watch ads or sponsors im done watching shit.
Suits me. I have a ton of movies and TV shows to catch up to.
Maybe this is healthier 🤔
It’s more complicated, but you can still use crowd-sourcing to recognize the ads. Then use an algo to analyze the ad, frame by frame, and reject that when it shows up.
It’ll take a bit of time, but their strategy isn’t going to last. It’s ‘arms-race’ style escalation on a digital front. Eventually, the crowd sourcing will be replaced by AI/ML tools. Ad companies, like google, will always try to fight back, but open-source will always respond.
You can’t beat nerds that are skilled and passionate about not getting fucked.
Next stop: AI generated Ads.
The game be the game, yo.
Already happening, sort of. Google allows companies to upload sets of headlines, images, and descriptions, then Google’s system mashes them together and tests them to find the best combos. It’s not full AI, but considering some companies doing this are probably AI-generating the input, it’s getting close. I wouldn’t imagine it’ll be too long until Google does it for you.
AI ad block. The AI watches (or just parses the to the audio transcription) the video before you and can mark when and where to skip from and to. With these 40TOPs machines that could be possible.
When programmers with ADHD/Autism get interrupted from a fixation (like a video), suppressing that interruption, even if unproductive or unimportant, becomes their new fixation.
I’ve been guilty of this many times, for better or worse.
I feel personally attacked by this comment.
I spent like 8 hours yesterday figuring out how to install viewtube on my NAS because I got the YouTube Adblock warning on my iPad.
Adblockers can still mute and stop the user from seeing the ads with black screen (or fast forward). Advertisers will still be mad.
Yes ik they disable the video controls but the video is still served just like before, just that they inject ads into it.
Reminds me of this post: https://lemmy.world/post/16500440
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/41671446-f46a-4287-aa97-81c59bff0fd4.jpeg?format=webp">
Ah, Black Mirror 😔
This is why Chrome browsers wanted Manifest v3 or whatever- they took away the APIs for extensions to do stuff like that.
It doesn’t affect WebKit or gecko browsers though, or customised Chromium browsers.
Correct. 65% of all human internet traffic is unmodified Chrome.
When Firefox was slow, Internet Explorer was clunky and didn’t render anything correctly, and scrappy upstart with a “Don’t be evil” slogan and great search engine Google came out with a new fast, memory efficient web browser, all us nerds ran out and told everyone “look! The internet doesn’t suck anymore! Use Chrome!” We were all amazed that we could have like 5 tabs open on our PCs with a whole gigabyte of RAM.
The normies echoed this through time, never unchanging - “my kid says ‘Chrome’ is the good one”. Even when sites started breaking when viewed in other browsers…didn’t we just finish fighting this “standards” war? Isn’t this what we destroyed Internet Explorer for?
It was only a matter of time before Google put their foot down and insisted that you can’t have a good experience on YouTube. Its time is coming.
Facebook, Instagram, Threads, Twitter, Telegram, Discord, Reddit. YouTube is literally the last remaining social media app that doesn’t require an account. My real fear is that it will start asking for an account like other social media.
I watch a ton of YT, my experience is fine. Only media subscription that’s worth it, imho.
Friends, for now, my suggestion to you is to use privacy-friendly alternative frontends instead of the official Youtube client.
https://github.com/mendel5/alternative-front-ends?tab=readme-ov-file#youtube
If it’s part of the video now, doesn’t that mean we can just fast forward through it?
Because if it’s something explicit in the stream, then ad blockers will just look for that and we’re back to where we are currently.
I guess they could prevent you from doing that by:
Have some browser extension play the video in the background with ads and notify me once it’s done. In the meantime show some message like “bringing out the trash”. Can do better things with my time than watching ads Or something to that effect… 🤷
Please drink verification can.
Those controls are disabled during the ad
But then ad blockers would know when controls are disabled
All I can tell you is what I experienced
Wait, you already have embedded ads??
Yep, I guess I’m in the expirement
Dang, where are you located?
If you’re degoogling, then just do that instead of freeloading on google services and complaining that they either have to monetize your data or shove ads down your throat.
Find a paid service free of any of that. There are multiple out there.
But the users aren’t there. I’d love all my favourite YouTubers to switch to PeerTube, but they haven’t.
Nah I’d rather do both; I pay for dropout.tv but I want to keep freeloading on YouTube, and it’s been working great so far, no ads 😉
Can’t. Google shanked them all with anticompetitive behavior. So instead, I think I will do all I can to punish them for that.
Go to your favorite YT creator’s channels and download important content! Educational content, lectures, nostalgic content. Anything and everything you have the storage for.
One day, it will be locked away behind paywalls, poisoned with ads, or just deleted entirely.
Part of preparing for war is stockpiling supplies. Buy bulk storage. An extra 2-4 TB hard drive can be bought for 100-200 dollars. It doesn’t have to be fancy, get a friend or two to go in with you on it.
Download and save everything you value. Rip your physical media and save it, pirate the shows and movies you love. One day it will be locked away or stolen from you because the terms of service changed.
Please don’t delay, I wish I had started years ago myself.
Just keep in mind that hard drives do not last forever. They’ll last a few years of regular use, maybe up to a decade if you’re lucky. Storing media on a hard drive is not like having a box of books in your basement, your kids aren’t going to be able to use them in 40 years.
Eh, now days unless you’re really beating them up, most HDDs will last at least 5-7 years.
You are right that people need to have multiple backups on different media, especially really important stuff.
3:2:1 The Golden Rule.
3 backups minimum, two on site, one off.
Totally!
Thanks for this advice, I will take your advice as soon as possible.
Bit outdated info on hard drive pricing, I recently bought 12TB drives for $85 each (albeit used)
You’re right though, actually even cheaper than I thought.
5TB portable HDDs new on Newegg for $100 - $150
All the more reason to start hoarding data!
We desperately need a radarr/sonarr type setup to auto download youtube channels
That dosent get your ip banned :(
Hm good point that would be a challenge, then again if it’s downloading the ads too, so google thinks you’re watching them and then strips them with ai after saving them could be ok
That would be really cool.
I have said this in another post here, as a joke, that YT can just inject the ads in the main video stream, and it would be just like cable tv where you can’t skip the ad.
I swear it was a joke.
edit: spelling
I remember someone wrote this and said how could they not have thought of this? So it was you, huh? 😈
It was /c/amotio? Pitchforks out; GET ‘EM!
Then I’ll just start downloading videos and playing them back skipping ads.
All of the ai bullshit out there, there might actually be a good use for ai, is cutting out ads out of video.
Fuck YouTube and fuck Google.
Reminds me of my home’s first TV recorder. It actually came with a trimming function and we could cut the ads out.
I WILL BURN THE GOOGLEPLEX TO THE FUCKING GROUND!
yt-dlp installs now: 📈📈📈
The concerning thing is, wouldn’t this affect yt dlp too?
My thoughts exactly, if ads are injected directly into the video stream itself now we’ll be downloading videos with ads in them…
maybe it’s just where i am (norway) but ads never bothered me. i generally get two five second ones not long enough to skip.
I’ve got a couple questions about this.
If the timestamp is off, how does the share link with timestamp work?
If I quit watching the video when an ad starts and then start watching it again, does it continue with the ad? I watch yt on my Samsung tv and it’s an ad minefield, but it’s kinda fun and easy to report the ads or quit the vid and start it again to avoid the ads. Id rather spend 30 seconds bouncing around menus than watching ads for stuff I don’t use.
If it’s injected video, can I just skip ahead like I do for sponsored content?
If you stop the video mid-ad it just restarts the ad or shows a new one
Are the ads injected in real-time or at the start of the video?
I assume it uses extra processing power to add them randomly for each user individually so if it was the latter would rapidly refreshing the page over and over again force them to completely rerun the process over again and slow their servers down? I guess I’m not entirely sure how this would work.
One of the main methods of video delivery is actually by sending a series of 2 second video clips over http. So it would not really take much processing power to insert ads in the middle, it’s not like they are having to encode video or anything.
Is this why the YouTube app on Roku is totally fucked right now?