this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2024
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[–] Rolando 197 points 5 months ago (6 children)

some people still recommend using a VPN and IP address from a country where YouTube ads are prohibited, such as Myanmar, Albania, or Uzbekistan.

Wait, you can just prohibit YouTube ads at a national level? That's somehow awesome and terrifying at the same time.

[–] TrickDacy 43 points 5 months ago (5 children)

What would be terrifying about it?

[–] [email protected] 60 points 5 months ago (3 children)

Yeah, I don’t see what’s terrifying. Countries can make laws, if YouTube wants to operate in that market it has to follow the laws there.

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[–] NeoNachtwaechter 38 points 5 months ago

That's somehow awesome and terrifying at the same time.

The people of this country would find it just the normal thing.

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[–] Chee_Koala 171 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Humanity accepts your challenge! See y'all on the battlefield ;-)

[–] wreckedcarzz 59 points 5 months ago (6 children)

lights molotov cocktail

...

"are we not going to do that, or....? asking for a friend, of course"

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[–] ours 120 points 5 months ago (4 children)

This must cost YouTube a fortune doing additional processing and reduced flexibility. They are going to hurt themselves and blockers will find a way.

[–] Etterra 45 points 5 months ago (5 children)

There's already extensions that somehow skip sponsorship sections, so it won't even take that long.

[–] daddy32 85 points 5 months ago (2 children)

That's "crowdsourced", i.e. manually done by volunteers on per-video basis.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 5 months ago

I see a good use case for AI, can also be crowd sourced.

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[–] [email protected] 41 points 5 months ago (3 children)

Not really. They can precompute those and inject it in an MP4 file so long as the settings match and it's inserted right before an i-frame so that it doesn't corrupt b-frames. They already reencode everything with their preferred settings, so they only need to encode the ads for those same settings they already do. Just needs to be spliced seamlessly.

But YouTube uses DASH anyway, it's like HLS, the stream is served in individual small chunks so it's even easier because they just need to add chunks of ads where they can add mismatched video formats, for the same reason it's able to seamlessly adjust the quality without any audio glitches.

Ad blockers will find a way.

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[–] [email protected] 117 points 5 months ago

YouTube's next move might make it virtually impossible to watch YouTube

[–] [email protected] 116 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Google uses tax avoidance schemes and I use ad avoidance schemes.

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[–] [email protected] 91 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (2 children)

How it works is that once you start getting these Server Side Ads (SSA), Youtube will create a sort of queue of videos in place of your usual video, with the first few being ads that can't be skipped and have a red bar (not yellow) and in the end you'll get your video. They are not literally part of the original video stream, they are separate streams that get injected as if they were the original video. It's called SSAP, and I've been experiencing it from the last weekend. In the meantime, they've pretty much broken their player to implement this.

Ublock Origin has released a temporary fix yesterday here

Alternatively, you can use this extension to redirect from YouTube videos to piped.video I used it, it works very well, can't guarantee for much more.

edit: fixed wording

[–] Dasnap 40 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Anything that makes it distinct gives a blocking opportunity, I assume?

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[–] [email protected] 84 points 5 months ago (2 children)

People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.

You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.

Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.

You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.

– Banksy

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[–] Emerald 72 points 5 months ago (12 children)

Worse case scenario, we gotta make an extension that detects the ad UI and blanks the screen and mutes the audio until its over

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[–] danc4498 69 points 5 months ago

And once everybody is watching ads and nobody is skipping them, YouTube will start making the commercials shorter and less invasive, right Anakin?

[–] [email protected] 68 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (2 children)

I accidentally watched YouTube the other night without adblock, OMFG what an experience.

If I can't watch with adblock I'll just stop using it, it's only a rabit hole to waste time for me anyway.

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[–] [email protected] 68 points 5 months ago

Doubt. Never underestimate the hate and motivation against ads.

[–] [email protected] 63 points 5 months ago (8 children)

Good. This is how YouTube dies. This is how Google dies. This is how competitors/alternatives are born. Stop fighting to make Google services useable against every effort of theirs. Let them drive people away to make (or discover) alternatives.

[–] A_Random_Idiot 42 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (36 children)

Do you have any idea how many billions with a B it would take to even start a viable, proper competitor to youtube? and how quickly that capital B could end up becoming a Capital T?

I hate people who keep screaming about let youtube die and alternatives will be born.

Youtube has been shit for years. No ones made an alternative that is viable.

Any an all alternatives are subscription based services, and tiny. Like Floatplane, Utreon and whatever the gunfocused one is that I cant remember off the top of my head, if it even still exists.

Anyone that has that kinda money are probably already in bed with googles capitalistic hellscape ideals for hte internet and not interested in going against them.

Creating competitors for things like Reddit and Facebook are relatively easy. Creating a competitor for something that probably accumulates hundreds of terabytes, if not more, per hour? That takes insane amounts of storage, and bandwidth, and overhead, and everything else that costs more than any regular person could ever have a hope of even having a wet dream over.

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[–] PlutoniumAcid 28 points 5 months ago (12 children)

It has been THE viteo platform for literally decades. There is so much content there; it would be a tremendous effort to direct that elsewhere.

And that other site would quickly succumb to storage and bandwidth costs. What options could exist?

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[–] [email protected] 62 points 5 months ago (8 children)

My gut reaction is that this won't work long-term. Users on youtube often point to specific timestamps in a video in comments or link to specific timestamps when sharing videos, meaning there needs to be some way to identify the timestamp excluding ads. And if there's a way to do that there's a way to detect ads.

Of course, there's always the chance they just scrap these features despite how useful they are and how commonly they're used; they've done similar before.

[–] Lemminary 28 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Feedback across the Firefox and YouTube subreddits highlighted that it could break timestamped video links and chapter markers. However, YouTube knows the length of the ads it would inject, and can offset subsequent timestamps suitably.

The move also adds a layer of unnecessary complexity in saving Premium viewers from these ads. If they are added server-side, the YouTube client would have to auto-skip them for Premium members, but that also means ad segment info will be relayed to the client, opening up a window of opportunity for ad blockers to use the same information meant for Premium subscribers and skip injected ads automatically.

It sounds like there's a silver lining after all.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 5 months ago (1 children)

The ads won’t be baked in beforehand, they’ll be injected into the stream in real time. Videos are broken into chunks and sent over HTTP, they’ll just put ad chunks in during playback. There is no need to re-encode anything. If you deep link to a timestamp, the video just starts from that timestamp as normal. If you are a Premium user, the server just never injects the ads.

But you are correct that the client needs to be aware that ads are happening, so they can be indicated on screen, and so click-throughs are activated.

This is why Chrome went to Manifest v3 - so you can’t have any code looking for ad signals running on the page to try to counter it.

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[–] [email protected] 61 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I mean, I'll just continue to not use Youtube...

[–] [email protected] 45 points 5 months ago (4 children)

I will see you on peertube ;)

[–] [email protected] 37 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (2 children)

I really wish this would gain some traction. As it is, there is just not enough content there to compete with YouTube in any reasonable way.

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[–] [email protected] 60 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (14 children)

I don't see any technical specification in the article, but if they inject the ad at the start of the video, making it part of the video itself, would make possible to just skip it using video controls. To avoid user skippin ad thru video controls there should be client-side script blocking it, so an ad-blocker can use this to tell apart an ad from the video itself.

Can anyone correct me on this?

Also, would this affect piped and invidious too?

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[–] [email protected] 55 points 5 months ago (28 children)

I'll be curious to see where this ends up going, as I doubt the community will take this lying down.

The few times I've had to go without an Ad blocker, I've seen just how bad the Ads have gotten - they're almost the same as regular TV Ad breaks now! ... And then YouTube Premium is just not a good deal in my eyes, £12.99 a month is an awful lot to pay just to not see Ads.

[–] pycorax 24 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Ads will probably stop me from watching YouTube completely. The huge surge of ads at some point was what stopped me from using Instagram.

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[–] [email protected] 48 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

i would rather have video go black for the duration of ad than watch that filth

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[–] foggy 48 points 5 months ago (5 children)

I am excited. This will break my YouTube addiction.

It'll only affect me when I need to fix something I'm unfamiliar with, and it'llead creators to using other platforms for that kind of material, and lower the barrier to entry.

I don't know why Google is shooting themselves in the foot like this. I mean, it'll be profitable in the short run, yes, but this will almost certainly be devastating to their bottom line in the long run if it works as planned.

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[–] [email protected] 44 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (3 children)

They just escalated the arms race between ad and ad blocker. All this could have been avoided if they actually did something about the scam ads.

[–] [email protected] 116 points 5 months ago (49 children)

No, it could not have been avoided. I don't watch ads. Ads don't need to be "scam ads" for me to not watch them. I just don't. Full stop.

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[–] [email protected] 36 points 5 months ago (42 children)

I already barely watch YouTube. It's mostly for music videos. Google can fuck itself to death.

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[–] [email protected] 32 points 5 months ago (16 children)

Over the past years I've been reducing my youtube and twitch viewership anyways. Its literally the lowest form of entertainment and its not worth a single moment of ad watching. I'll just do something else. Most youtube content sucks anyways. I don't even remember most of the channels I used to watch.

They're just going to increase their own server costs chasing some tiny fraction of viewers who will do anything to avoid ads. they should be grateful for the adviewers they have.

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[–] [email protected] 31 points 5 months ago (5 children)

People will find a way to get around it, I could see buffering a video for 5 mins or even downloading the entire video ala locally playing podcasts, then using AI or some type of frame analyzation technique t to skip ads. Or just skip them like good old fashion Tivo from your player.

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[–] andrewth09 31 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

If the YouTube interface restricts you skipping during certain parts of the video, an ad blocker can detect that and skip over it anyway. Otherwise, I myself will just skip over the ad.

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[–] [email protected] 31 points 5 months ago (8 children)

Finally a use case where AI/Machine learning would absolutely make sense. If we can have AI that can generate text or images, imitate people's voices or write code, we can also have a lightweight model that can detect ads and skip them during playback. There's a model trained on SponsorBlock data for detecting sponsored segments https://github.com/xenova/sponsorblock-ml
I'm sure that we can have something similar but for embedded ads.

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[–] iquanyin 25 points 5 months ago (2 children)

then i won’t be using it much, if at all.

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