YouTube is dedicated to making itself worse; destroys SponsorBlock with ad injection changes (www.youtube.com)
from Powderhorn@beehaw.org to technology@beehaw.org on 18 Jun 18:10
https://beehaw.org/post/14517007

#technology

threaded - newest

[deleted] on 18 Jun 18:33 next collapse

.

Feyter@programming.dev on 18 Jun 18:47 next collapse

Of course they do. They want to keep control over monetization. They don’t care about creators at all.

LodeMike@lemmy.today on 18 Jun 18:51 next collapse

↑ painting :)

onlinepersona@programming.dev on 18 Jun 18:57 next collapse

All his stuff is on youtube. Why doesn’t he upload to peertube? :/ It seems like he doesn’t like youtube a lot but his content only exists there.

Anti Commercial-AI license

DdCno1@beehaw.org on 18 Jun 19:02 next collapse

Because that’s where the audience is. Peertube is deader than the lemmyverse. You are essentially making the silly “but yet you choose to live in society” argument.

unknowing8343@discuss.tchncs.de on 18 Jun 19:06 next collapse

Then publish on both!

renard_roux@beehaw.org on 19 Jun 07:09 next collapse

That seems like a good idea.

mjhelto@lemm.ee on 19 Jun 09:09 next collapse

Yeah right, we all know you have a single copy of digital items and you can either put it here or there, but not both. That’s why NFTs were such a success! /s

saigot@lemmy.ca on 20 Jun 00:00 collapse

Not to be cynical, but how can you monetize peertube as a creator. Even if you are established enough to do in video sponsorships, your sponsors aren’t going to really accept views from peertube when they evaluate how much your worth. So it either does nothing or it sinks your career.

unknowing8343@discuss.tchncs.de on 20 Jun 06:50 collapse

Sponsors will pay if you are big enough, no matter the platform. If PeerTube went big, you’d probably start seeing sponsors.

onlinepersona@programming.dev on 18 Jun 19:10 next collapse

🙄 yeah, great talking with you

Anti Commercial-AI license

Powderhorn@beehaw.org on 18 Jun 19:53 next collapse

Quick reminder that you are on Beehaw. There’s only one rule here, and this sort of dismissive take does not adhere to it. Please find something substantive to dismiss.

onlinepersona@programming.dev on 18 Jun 19:59 collapse

What do you mean. He was rude. Am I supposed to continue engaging with that? I don’t enjoy abuse.

Anti Commercial-AI license

TheMonkeyLord@sopuli.xyz on 18 Jun 22:18 collapse

By making that comment you did engage with it… Not commenting at all would have been disengaging…

onlinepersona@programming.dev on 19 Jun 04:55 collapse

So you just leave discussions with people without a word? No “goodbye”, no " ciao", no “I’m out”. @TheMonkeyLord@sopuli.xyz just disappears when he’s done. It’s the only way a person can disengage.

Good to know

Anti Commercial-AI license

webghost0101@sopuli.xyz on 18 Jun 21:31 collapse

Just FYI the license in your comment doesn’t actually exist and the creative commons license it links to does not mention AI anywhere.

onlinepersona@programming.dev on 18 Jun 21:37 collapse

I’ve tried multiple things to try and help people understand why I paste that there. This is the closest I got with the least amount of comments about it.

Anti Commercial-AI license

webghost0101@sopuli.xyz on 18 Jun 22:32 next collapse

Well i understand its to combat ai from training on your comments right, maybe also to poison the data?

I just don’t see what taking a non relevant licensee and giving it a different name is doing to stop that. Trivial to filter stuff like this out in a dataset.

At best an individual data scraping company decides to honor it out of kindness. At worst people think that its a real license and copy it with a false sense of security.

onlinepersona@programming.dev on 19 Jun 05:10 collapse

I think the fact that you got the point from the license name and the link fulfilled the purpose of informing the reader.

As for AI training who knows how well they clean their data. Copilot spit out the entire GPL verbatim as well as a few other licenses and got sued. Data cleaning processes clearly vary among companies.

But if you have an idea on how to better indicate that content is licensed at a glance, go ahead and do it.

Anti Commercial-AI license

webghost0101@sopuli.xyz on 19 Jun 05:33 collapse

Well you could always just use the proper name. The cc license in question IS anti commercial. A great deal of ai is opens source and non commercial and to those cc is fair game. But if commercial is where you draw the line then envoking this license may do.

This comment is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International)

Calling it “anti-ai” when its not removes power from your argument. Your invoking something that does not exit and linking to something seemingly unrelated.

Now the bigger question i have, have had since i have seen people do this.

Why is there still not an actual anti-ai license? Seems obvious that there is a need for it? I dont know much about how licenses are created but it strikes me as odd.

Kissaki@beehaw.org on 19 Jun 04:07 collapse

Does it apply if you don’t say that you are posting under the license? It may be implied, the intent is reasonably clear, but an argument of ambiguity can be made. You’re merely linking to a license.

Does it apply if the link label mismatches the license? CC by-nc-sa does more than deny commercial AI training. It requires attribution, requires general non-commercial use, and requires share-alike.

Personally, I prefer when it’s at least differently formatted to indicate it as a footer and not comment content. I’ve seen them smaller and IIRC italic on other commenters, which seems more appropriate and less distracting and noisy [for human consumption]. When the comment is no longer than the license footer… well…

onlinepersona@programming.dev on 19 Jun 05:20 collapse

Given how many comments I receive in the vein of “are you seriously licensing your comment?”, I think the intent is quite clear. But since people keep asking why, I might add a blurb (since I don’t have a page I can link to) to explain that.

You are free to improve on the format if you like. Maybe I’ll see a comment of yours with a format I agree with and copy that formatting.

Anti Commercial-AI license

anachronist@midwest.social on 18 Jun 19:09 next collapse

I mean we’re sitting here on the lemmyverse having a conversation…

But yeah creators should upload to peertube but they won’t get any meaningful viewership there. The only way to break the network affect stranglehold google/youtube has over video content on the internet is making sure that if you do produce that content it’s available via other channels.

UltraGiGaGigantic@lemm.ee on 21 Jun 03:01 collapse

A service that uploads to all sites you select. All in one place. Pivot to hosting trackers and have users host their content torrent style

HobbitFoot@thelemmy.club on 18 Jun 21:56 collapse

You are essentially making the silly “but yet you choose to live in society” argument.

I don’t think so. OP wasn’t saying to stop uploading to YouTube, but to upload to alternate sites as well and maybe lead their audiences there by mentioning it in videos.

Chozo@fedia.io on 18 Jun 18:58 next collapse

Harder to monetize on Peertube.

onlinepersona@programming.dev on 18 Jun 19:14 collapse

But his youtube is already monetized. Uploading it to peertube is just an extra action that could help with its popularity.

Anti Commercial-AI license

brie@beehaw.org on 18 Jun 19:25 next collapse

Not PeerTube, but he is on Odysee/LBRY.

onlinepersona@programming.dev on 18 Jun 19:57 collapse

Oh damn, I thought Odysee was dead and didn’t give it a second thought. How is Odysee still alive?

Anti Commercial-AI license

AFC1886VCC@reddthat.com on 19 Jun 08:11 collapse

Why do you add that link to the end of every comment?

[deleted] on 19 Jun 08:14 next collapse

.

threeduck@aussie.zone on 19 Jun 08:27 collapse

Maybe it’s like those Facebook posts where you tell Mark Zuckerberg that he’s not allowed to profit off your photos.

ArmokGoB@lemmy.dbzer0.com on 20 Jun 07:05 collapse

That’s exactly what it is.

Mechanize@feddit.it on 18 Jun 20:14 next collapse

I find it funny that this is the first video where I’m consistently getting the “This helps us protect our community” and “Log in to confirm that you are not a bot” errors while using an alternative Frontend.

I’m sure it’s just a random coincidence, but it is still funny to me.

tuckerm@supermeter.social on 18 Jun 20:55 next collapse

This may not work out the way I want it to, but I'm actually a little excited about these tech companies making a bunch of anti-consumer decisions all at once. So many mainstream users will be looking for alternatives, and it's going to provide a great opportunity for non-profit open source projects. It's already happening with the fediverse suddenly becoming a viable place for discussion in the last 1.5 years. After Windows Recall was announced, I've seen more people talking about switching to Linux than ever before. Part of me can't wait for unskippable Youtube ads.

DeltaTangoLima@reddrefuge.com on 18 Jun 21:30 next collapse

We need Cory to coin a term for what comes after enshittification. Perhaps we can call it the Great Wipening, where we all stop paying to be treated like serfs and start taking back control of our content and data.

renard_roux@beehaw.org on 19 Jun 07:08 next collapse

You missed an S in enShittification.

And I completely agree, Cory seems to be good at coining terms and making them stick 👍

DeltaTangoLima@reddrefuge.com on 19 Jun 07:52 collapse

Cheers. Fixed.

prole@beehaw.org on 20 Jun 13:21 collapse

No we don’t, we have 400+ years of capitalist history to tell us what comes next; Oligarchy, neo-feudalism…

People: Cory Doctorow didn’t invent this concept. Read a book.

DeltaTangoLima@reddrefuge.com on 20 Jun 21:08 collapse

The whole point of this particular comment thread here is that we’re already starting to see what’s happening: people are taking back control. You’re here on Lemmy, proving that exact point.

I never said we needed Cory to tell us what comes next. Just come up with another colourfully descriptive term like he did with enshittification.

You sound like that insufferable ponytail from Good Will Hunting.

t3rmit3@beehaw.org on 18 Jun 21:51 next collapse

People often decry accelerationism, but the reality is that the slow-boiled frog is the one that sits and dies. Chipping away at freedoms, consumer protections, product benefits, etc is all less likely to spark backlash than when they drop sharply in a short time.

That doesn’t mean you should help to make things worse, but it does mean that you may want to reconsider constantly mitigating every bad thing that others are doing, rather than letting them shoot themselves in the foot. When people are being hurt, help them. When people are being inconvenienced, let them get angry.

noobdoomguy8658@feddit.de on 19 Jun 19:55 collapse

This looks like a very classical and well-known case of executives copying each other.

That other company is doing layoffs and seems fine? Reports the line going up? Let’s do it, too!

The guys across the street are already implementing AI? Investors love it? Let do it, too! We may have taken a risk with blockchain, but this one is just sure to work better for us!

The big name is going for the money, predator-style, and they’re still afloat? Finally, we can cash out, too!

toaster@slrpnk.net on 20 Jun 12:50 next collapse

I can’t wait until more YouTube creators move to Peertube + donation platforms like Liberapay!

null@slrpnk.net on 20 Jun 15:07 collapse

After Windows Recall was announced, I’ve seen more people talking about switching to Linux than ever before.

I’ve been the Linux zealot in my friend group for years, and none of them have switched (they’ve dabbled on old laptops but never daily drove).

With Recall, a coworker I never would have expected reached out to me because he knows I’m a “Linux guy” and he was switching to Linux over it.

He’s still daily driving pop_OS a month later.

Powderhorn@beehaw.org on 21 Jun 16:13 collapse

This is an underrepresented viewpoint. We are at the point of “find out,” which so many tech companies thought they could stay just to the other side of the line on. Thing is, you can only move the goalposts so often before they’re in someone’s yard, and they didn’t sign up for this shit.

It was OneDrive upgrade nagging that made me switch to Linux. Microsoft could have, you know, not done that and kept a user. They also could have not gone regressive with how the taskbar functions. Or any number of other things that were dismissive of users.

At a certain point, you’re sitting in ever warmer water in the pot, and it occurs that maybe you’re being turned into food. That’s when the Linux pots start looking appealing. This was a completely avoidable problem brought to you by greed.

Greed! Because we don’t think making a good product is what capitalism is about.

smeg@feddit.uk on 19 Jun 08:30 next collapse

TL;DW: the ads will be in the video stream itself which will mess up timestamps, sponsor block uses timestamps to know when the ads are.

Seems to me that this will also break every other use case of specific times like direct linking to a timestamp of a video, right?

mjhelto@lemm.ee on 19 Jun 09:14 next collapse

I’d imagine YouTube subtracts the ad length from posted timestamps when clicking a link containing one. But we are taking about Google, soooooo…

smeg@feddit.uk on 19 Jun 09:33 collapse

If Google can do that then hopefully sponsor block can too!

mjhelto@lemm.ee on 19 Jun 10:09 next collapse

In the cat and mouse game, the cat can adjust tactics but the mice eventually figure out an alternative route. I’m sure they will find a way with this. Either that or a lot of people will just stop watching YouTube, I’d imagine.

ahornsirup@sopuli.xyz on 19 Jun 11:41 collapse

A truly shocking number of people don’t use any form of adblock. I doubt that driving off the adblock users will have a significant effect on viewership (and even if it does, why would Google care, it’s not like we’re making them money).

Anarki_@lemmy.blahaj.zone on 19 Jun 20:39 next collapse

Yup. Much the same suit as the Reddit migration, sadly.

null@slrpnk.net on 20 Jun 15:04 collapse

There’s also plenty of people that do use adblock today, and would just put up with ads if it stopped working.

So the actual number of people that would simply stop using YouTube altogether is lower than the number of people that use adblock today.

And from YouTube’s perspective, those people aren’t contributing revenue anyways, and all they get is a little bit of usage data. Easy trade.

Kolanaki@yiffit.net on 20 Jun 00:14 collapse

Unless a random number of ads are injected into the video that changes every time it’s viewed… Which is how they already work aside from being directly part of the video stream.

Alice@beehaw.org on 19 Jun 10:49 next collapse

This sucks for so many. People use timestamps for content warnings or to help viewers avoid spoilers. Commenters use timestamps when talking about the content of the video. It’s insane to change this once it’s so ingrained in how people use the website.

smeg@feddit.uk on 19 Jun 11:12 next collapse

Hopefully they’ll realise it’s a bigger breaking change than they wanted as part of this testing phase

jherazob@beehaw.org on 19 Jun 19:48 collapse

You assume they give a fuck

smeg@feddit.uk on 19 Jun 20:31 collapse

Yeah I do. They still want to be able to sell their premium subscriptions and not every engineer working on the product is some soulless corpo. If they can break all adblockers without damaging their product they will, but if it fucks things up too much then they’ll go back to the drawing board and try something else.

gamermanh@lemmy.dbzer0.com on 20 Jun 01:38 collapse

It’s also how content creators literally create chapters: put the time codes into the video description

That’s a native feature of the platform

Alice@beehaw.org on 20 Jun 23:58 collapse

Oh shit, I didn’t even think about that. What the hell.

prole@beehaw.org on 20 Jun 13:15 collapse

It will end up being like FreeVee on Prime for anyone who’s ever watched a movie or anything on there. They straight up randomly just inject ads in at random times, often not even during scene breaks. Characters are sometimes mid-sentence… Oh, and we’re back to the volume of the ads being 2x louder than the movie itself because I guess that law Congress passed way back in the day only applied to cable and broadcast TV.

It makes it nearly unwatchable. So get ready for that experience.

JimSamtanko@lemm.ee on 20 Jun 04:54 next collapse

And yet, despite everyone complaining, YouTube knows damn well no one is going to stop using their shit so they’ll continue to do whatever they want.

Maybe people should just…. Stop using YouTube. That or don’t complain when they fuck over the content creators and users of their platform.

BruceTwarzen@lemm.ee on 20 Jun 07:14 next collapse

I’m honestly not gonna use youtube without ad and sponsor block.

JimSamtanko@lemm.ee on 20 Jun 07:52 collapse

You could just not use YouTube at all.

Chadus_Maximus@lemm.ee on 20 Jun 10:44 next collapse

False.

JimSamtanko@lemm.ee on 20 Jun 16:05 collapse

So… you’ll complain about, but use it anyway thereby supporting what they’re doing.

Gotcha.

derpgon@programming.dev on 20 Jun 13:28 next collapse

Why? Fuck the corpo, not the people who make the content.

JimSamtanko@lemm.ee on 20 Jun 16:04 collapse

Exactly… fuck the corpo, don’t use YouTube.

scbasteve7@lemm.ee on 20 Jun 20:18 next collapse

If you don’t use YouTube, you’re also screwing over the content creators you enjoy. You can cause harm to a company in many ways. Stop using a site prevents them from making money off of you. Preventing them from actively making money off of you while you’re still using the site actively takes money away from them. It is double sided sword because you’re also not actively supporting that content creator. However, if they don’t have another platform to post on, you can instead buy merch, donate, or simply help the algorithm boost their content by watching their content.

I don’t disagree with you. YouTube should no longer be a viable business. Something else should step in and rival them. But since that doesn’t look like it’s going to happen, I’ll be happy running adblocks, and letting them not recoup their server and operation costs from me.

derpgon@programming.dev on 21 Jun 06:52 collapse

How can you write “exactly” and then disagree?

JimSamtanko@lemm.ee on 21 Jun 07:54 collapse

Imagine if- now bear with me… seriously, Imagine if…. everyone stopped using YouTube.

BruceTwarzen@lemm.ee on 20 Jun 17:16 collapse

I’d rather fuck with them and make them waste resources.

JimSamtanko@lemm.ee on 20 Jun 17:46 collapse

I would all but guarantee they’re wasting little to no resources on you.

Sina@beehaw.org on 20 Jun 18:52 collapse

I’ll just use invidious, it’s a bit of a chore to use, but it’s increasingly worth it.

cupcakezealot@lemmy.blahaj.zone on 20 Jun 10:20 next collapse

people really overestimate how many people use ad blockers and sponsorblock…

filcuk@lemmy.zip on 20 Jun 10:59 collapse

30% desktop, 15% mobile estimated in the US use ad blockers.
That is not insignificant by any means, even if it’s overestimated.

JackbyDev@programming.dev on 20 Jun 14:07 next collapse

I imagine the amount of people using sponsorblock specifically are much smaller.

filcuk@lemmy.zip on 20 Jun 14:35 collapse

sponsor.ajay.app/stats/
You’re right, but I think it’s fairly safe to assume that if one knows about sponsorblock, they’re using an ad blocker too.

JackbyDev@programming.dev on 20 Jun 17:49 collapse

Of course, I was only saying few people used sponsor block compared to (any) general ad blocker.

UltraGiGaGigantic@lemm.ee on 21 Jun 02:41 collapse

So few… I’m going to just start offering to install ad blockers in everyone’s phone

jaschen@lemm.ee on 21 Jun 11:23 collapse

My brother in law says he likes commercials when I offered to remove it. They are over indexing this.