YouTube Says New 5-Second Video Load Delay Is Supposed to Punish Ad Blockers, Not Firefox Users
(www.404media.co)
from stopthatgirl7@kbin.social to technology@lemmy.world on 21 Nov 2023 00:23
https://kbin.social/m/technology@lemmy.world/t/643275
from stopthatgirl7@kbin.social to technology@lemmy.world on 21 Nov 2023 00:23
https://kbin.social/m/technology@lemmy.world/t/643275
Firefox users are reporting an 'artificial' load time on YouTube videos. YouTube says it's part of a plan to make people who use adblockers "experience suboptimal viewing, regardless of the browser they are using."
threaded - newest
“They’re the same picture.”
Also, that does not explain why:
Now, if only we knew who made Chrome and YouTube… The mind boggles.
Given that Google's been talking about switching Chrome to a new plugin format that would limit the ability of adblockers to function on Chrome, and given that Google owns Youtube and profits from the ads Youtube displays...
Nope, I'm not connecting the dots. Not sure why Google would be wanting people switch from Firefox to Chrome at this time.
.
(They’re being sarcastic)
It's more obvious than that even; their SEC paperwork states that adblockers are a risk to their profits. That's more than enough info to assume they're going to go to war in the near future (now) with them.
They’ve always been at war with ad blockers. It’s just most major multinationals have matured or diversified to a point where they are functional monopolies, and no longer gain any value in competition or service improvement.
At this stage of the merger and consolidation phase of global capitalism, with captured governments that won’t dare break them up or fine them more than a meek virtue signal, the most cost effective way to satiate the infinite growth of capitalism is to increase the exploitation and value extraction of their existing user base as much as possible (aka enshittification).
Sounds like the single best reason to use one.
Concluding implicitly: “… and therefore a threat to all your computers’ security” :-)
Dear God, won’t anyone think of the shareholders?
Just for clarity, they already switched protocols (Manifest v3), they just have continued to support the old format (v2) that allows unlock origin to work. They are discontinuing support for v2 next year.
What really pisses me off is that mv3 is becoming a standard that Vivaldi, Firefox, Opera, Edge, etc. will use.
Mind you that Firefox will adjust it to be able to fully support ad blocker.
What do you mean by change user agent to chrome? Asking 4 a friend
When you browse to a website, your browser passes info about itself to the server hosting that site. This info is intended to help the server provide the best rendering code for your browser. This is called your User Agent.
However, Google is using it here to identify Firefox users, and is apparently choosing to lump them all in a box called "adblock users" instead of trying to identify an ad blocker more accurately.
To add on
You can spoof this user agent to see if a website does something shady depending on which browser you’re using.
So if you keep all other variables the same, and just toggle the user agent value, YouTube behaves differently
How can we do that?
I haven’t tried it in a while, but I think there are browser extensions for it. Might need to ask someone else for how to do it these days
That's because they may use code to detect as blockers that is not legal in the EU, so they might have thought that they're super crafty and used markers such as user agent for their cool coercion delay code thingy
If you do change your user agent, I would use an extension that does it only on YouTube domains.
We want independent metrics to show rising Firefox use, not falling.
Yeah cool I’ll have a look. Any extensions spring to mind?
For a specific how to, there's a bunch of firefox addons that do it, but the mozilla recommended one is this
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/user-agent-string-switcher/
It's super easy to use, just open it and it gives a bunch of options.
This is my current (fake) user agent;
With two or three clicks, this is my new (fake) user agent;
A few more clicks;
And finally;
Now, that last one is making it look like I'm using internet explorer... Youtube videos will not load with that last one active. Claims my browser is too old and not supported.
I don't know why they all start with Mozilla/5.0 but the apparently a lot of websites will block your requests if you don't have it (or a valid browser strings like it?)
Almost all user agent strings start with that Mozilla prefix because Mozilla made the first browser with “fancy” features, so in the early internet many websites checked for that string to determine if they should serve the nice website or the stripped down version. Later when other browsers added the features, that also had to add that to their user string so users would get the right site. Which just cemented the practice.
This is a good summary of this mess: webaim.org/blog/user-agent-string-history/
I personally like seeing Mozilla loud and proud in all the user agents.
It’s a mess, but also an echo of history.
Just a reminder to not use user agent switcher unless it’s absolutely necessary, and if you do, limit it only for certain sites that need it. If enough people change their user agent, website operators will be like “See, no one use Firefox anymore. We shouldn’t bother to support it anymore”.
I am a Firefox user who uses adblock and I don't get the issue.
Same here. Firefox, ublock origin, privacy badger. Videos start playing in under 2 seconds. I’ve also never got the adblock warning.
Lucky I guess.
They just haven’t rolled it out to you yet.
I think uBlock might already be blocking that code.
Just turned it off. No difference.
YouTube rolls features out in waves
I was getting the delay early yesterday and then it went away. I guess they must have done something in uBO.
The last scenario is clearly a breach of anti-trust laws. It is time for alphabet to be broken up. Their monopoly is way worse than AT&T every was.
Alphabet's monopoly is bad, make no mistake.
But they aren't controlling all electronic means of communication for 90% of the continental United States, as AT&T did in the ma' bell and pa' bell days.
Google controls over 90% of the search business in the US and that’s the way the vast majority of people begin their browsing. It’s why US v Google is currently in the courts
MS vs US back in the 90’s did not result in anything significant. This pretty much will happen again with Google. Some lobbyists will just do their thing, some minor slaps in the wrist and concessments between DoJ and Alohabet etc and Google will continue to Googling around.
I’m not trying to argue there’s appetite to break up Google among the people with the power to do it. I’m just arguing Google has a monopoly similar to Ma Bell.
Yeah I agree
Adsense is literally 90% of the market. Let alone android…
Uh… Gmail, Ad sense, search?
They’ve got like a dozen duopolies going on, they have far more control and ability to leverage it than Bell ever did
Chrome sends every single website you visit to Google. You already pay with your privacy.
Supposedly Firefox users spoofing the Chrome user agent don’t get the issue because the script tries to execute the 5s delay in a way that works on Chrome but not on FF. Because the Chrome method doesn’t work on FF, it just gets skipped entirely. But I’m not sure if that’s entirely accurate, just read about it.
But then shouldn’t there be a delay when using actual Chrome?
I did see Chrome users mention a delay (on lemmy) but I haven’t personally checked it out
There’s people reporting exactly that if they’re using certain ad-blocking tools.
My understanding is the method they can use on chrome is near instant, but the alternative they use on Firefox is slower, hence the delay. Is this BS? Yeah probably, but it does at least logically follow.
It could be as simple as for Chrome assuming there is a certain API, while for Firefox, give it a try and assume no if no response in 5sec
I know several websites consider firefox's built-in privacy settings an adblocker in certain configurations. I get notices on many sites and use no adblocker. Not sure if it's the case here.
I’m not experiencing that issue on Grayjay 👍
As opposed to the perfectly optimal experience you get when allowing ads
Yes, but ads make them money.
A 5 second break, while suboptimal, is significantly less suboptimal than having to watch 20+ second ads.
Wouldn’t it be neat if YouTube had reasonable competition? You know, so when YouTube adds a five-second delay as a strange style of punishment, a different platform would look more attractive?
It’s funny too because ads literally are a 5 second delay (at least) that you get when you dont use an adblocker!
I honestly think I prefer the delay over the ad.
Same. Give me the delay. At least I know that’s only five seconds, as opposed to a ten-second unskippable ad followed by another ad that I can skip after five seconds.
They’re still letting you skip ads??
If I see an unskippable ad, I like to play the game “Roll the dice until Youtube gives up”. Hit the refresh key until it gives me the correct video length. Devalues Youtube’s ad product and costs YouTube more.
am close video on mobile
That is the way to do it. Then open it on NewPipe or another 3rd party app without ads if you want to see it.
You’re absolutely right, but we haven’t even touched on the worst part of ads, which is how they utterly poison your brain with annoying jingles, annoying colors, and stupid catch-phrases, all psychologically engineered to get stuck in your head.
And let’s not even go into how they prey on your fears and insecurities, or deceive you into thinking you need things that you actually don’t. How they prey on vulnerable children, or the elderly, or brainwash small children into manipulating their parents against their best interests. Or how privacy has been shredded since the advent of behavioral tracking.
I’m not exaggerating at all when I say that advertising is one of the world’s biggest psychological hazards. I would rather sit in an empty room with no stimulation whatsoever than let that poison into my brain.
At some point Hulu did that - just like three, thirty-second blocks of silent 'shame on you for ad blocking!' I totally preferred that to ads...
Now I just don't use Hulu?
Ah, the good old days. Put on your show, get up and grab your snack/drink, come back just in time for the show to start, no ads the rest of the way
And even before that when adblockers just straight up worked on Hulu no shame screens to be found
There will never be a real competitor to YouTube, because nobody else is willing to run at a net loss for a decade before seeing their first profitable quarter, like Google did with YouTube.
Turns out, free video hosting is expensive as fuck.
Maybe. But give decentralised federated hosting a few years. It might never be a rival but it's possible it will become a viable alternative.
If PeerTube can fix their major discoverability issues, it can potentially pose a real threat to YouTube. But that's the biggest thing keeping it back right now, is that it's impossible to just find anything you want to watch.
Unless you want to watch hour-long seminars on Linux. In which case, PeerTube's got you covered.
I think discoverability is in its infancy for the fediverse in general.
But I'm old enough to remember when vast tracts of the internet were hard to find and everyone used directories. When that changed, everyone jumped online.
Im surprised Amazon hasn’t stepped into the space to advertise their own products. They already own a huge storage cloud backend.
.
Its so strange they let their users store 2 hour+ VODS but dont let users upload edited videos? Would make so much sense and even save them storage since user’s would replace VODs with edited videos since no one watches VODs
I’m guessing that it is probably them being comfortable with their niche, and they don’t think they can break into the YouTube model the same way YouTube couldn’t break into the Twitch model with YouTube Gaming (#killedbygoogle)
In the relatively rare cases that I watch stuff on twitch, I usually watch the VODs. Don’t have the time or energy to sit though hours of a stream in one sitting, nor am I usually able to catch one live, nor do I like feeling like I’ll miss something if I have to leave early, so I prefer to just watch the recordings of them at my own pace over multiple sessions.
I often watch vods. My favorite streamer’s time zone and streaming schedule mean that I can only catch a couple of hours of the beginning of their stream before going to bed, and I couldn’t regularly watch 8-10 hours of stream in one go anyway, so I watch the vods of the streams I want to see the rest of.
…i’m surprised pornhub hasn’t rolled out an all-ages video site…
They already make a killing with their cloud with much less business risk in the form of AWS.
That sounds reasonable but you’re thinking way too small. Lets not forget that Tiktok is already more popular than YouTube with a very, very large chunk of younger people, for example.
But besides that, let’s not forget that absolute giants in the business have been toppled. Look at Yahoo! as one example. Hell, even entire countries can fall within a few decades, whole empires.
So, assuming that there will never be a decent YouTube competitor is a very limited way of looking at it. Who’s to say Google will still exist in any meaningful market leading way in 20 years?
Sure they’re big now, but what if the entire face of the internet and how we use it and what we want fundamentally changes (say with the addition of highly advanced AI that brings changes we can’t even predict right now).
There will absolutely one day be a service that can rival YouTube and eventually replace them, it’s the same with every product from every business, it’s the circle of life I suppose. But whether that will happen within the next 5 years, or 15, or 30, only time can tell :-D
Never say never, though!
TikTok isn’t YouTube. It’s two different method to consume videos. TikTok doesn’t replace YouTube per se. Some people split the available attention time between them and in favor of TikTok.
It will be hard to compete on the YouTube field. But, there is multiple places for a different way to consume video with a different user experience.
On the YouTube field, it will be hard. I don’t see creator moving with their community. The same issue has with let say Reddit, Twitter, etc.
That’s the commenter’s point: YouTube might not be replaced, but that doesn’t mean it cannot disappear.
Yet there is a gazillion of porn sites out there. The thing is, once YouTube become shitty enough its users are itching to find an alternative, porn operators like MindGeek might launch a competitor site because they’re already have a scalable video delivery service. I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re already working on it.
It’s not really a technical problem anymore. Which isn’t to say it’s easy to run such a site, but rather to stress that YouTube is like a social media site. The value is in the users (and the content that they create and consume). You could make a perfect YouTube clone, but good luck getting people to use it when their favourite creators don’t. And good luck getting creators to care when the users aren’t there.
And Lemmy is misleading. Most people don’t use Firefox. Heck, most people don’t seem to even use ad blockers.
Turns out people don't want to compete with something that runs at a loss. and as soon as someone figures out how Google will just copy them with a massive infrastructure lead.
Peertube is almost there. Just needs a good server really, most of the servers are too small for the market share. Or at least fit the general public, I’m loving it ATM.
I’ve been using Nebula. It’s a subscription-based alternative with no advertising, but I get it for free because I’m subscribed to Curiosity Stream (which is basically Netflix, but for documentaries).
The only downside to Nebula is that there aren’t a lot of content creators on it, so you don’t have the variety of videos that YouTube offers.
The captions suck too. I subscribed to the same deal as you. I did it mostly to support the creators. But I basically never use it. The creator whose affiliate link I used to sign up? Their own captions are amazing on YouTube (human written with colour and positioning) and auto generated garbage on Nebula.
I’m still waiting for MindGeek to launch an SFW version of pornhub to compete with YouTube. If YouTube keeps getting shittier, they might eventually do it.
Lol, I’d rather wait 5 seconds than see an ad lol.
ads can be 30 seconds
Ads can be 15 minutes. Like they’re adding goddamn infomercials now.
At least 2-3 times I would get an entire K-pop music video as an ad.
Sure I can be skipped, but it will play when I’m in the shower listening to a podcast.
I don’t speak Korean or listen to kpop, so it’s weird it’s being advertised to me as I’m not the target audience.
I’ve seen more than one hour long ad. It let you skip after 5 seconds, but imagine if someone were leaving it on as background.
When they first launched YouTube Red I remember they were throwing whole episodes of their shows up as pre-roll ads.
sacre bleuuu
Wait 5 seconds and it plays or bombarded with ads that, at best, takes 5 second and an manual action before watching a video?
Yeah, if I wasn't using Freetube on desktop I'm still not watching ads.
Frog, meet boiling water. This is standard play, like adding ads in the first place. First it’s one short, then slightly longer, then two in a row, then interspersed… eventually it’s commercial TV, just one big ad. Give em inch, they take a mile. Advertising shits in your head, don’t let it.
Haven’t experienced that so far (but that’s probably because I don’t log into my YouTube account anymore and mostly use private browsing), but I imagine that’s something that adblockers will eventually be able to block?
Huh, I just thought youtube was running slow. Still better than ads.
Extensions like “agent spoofer” allow you to customize the details of what your browser reports to the web page.
Personally on my home pc, I’m using a galaxy s21 with the netscape browser
I find the use of having Firefox pretending to be Netscape like using your parent's ID to buy liquor underage. Too funny!
I love netscape the best browser to ever exist(ed)
except firefox
<img alt="" src="https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fi1.wp.com%2Fskyinbrown.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2018%2F08%2Fnetscape-navigator-loading-screen-2.png%3Fresize%3D850%252C550&f=1&nofb=1&ipt=056ce9dd35d86ec336d8e91fa2f063c4cb1c38bc7de843f0f8fd4a76c138efa7&ipo=images">
I like the cut of your jib!
I feel like all the people running Firefox (most of my friends/family and many colleagues) are just going to say “damn, YouTube sucks. I should look elsewhere” and not “oh, it must be slow because I’m not on chrome.” Heck my parents don’t even know what chrome is.
Like look where?
Nebula is great and really cheap for the content. Ofc maybe it depends on what you watch; but it’s great for me o7
What’s that federated video service that carries a bunch of YouTube videos?
Peertube, but it’s not great yet. I’ve not tried to use it for a few years, so maybe it’s gotten better.
Video is hard because it requires a lot of space and bandwidth. We really need a storage and/or compression breakthrough.
We also need the internet providers to stop being so stingy with network speeds and bandwidth limits.
Imagine, 100 people trying to load a video from your single hard drive, it’s not fast enough for that. It’s not like a picture where the entire thing can be sent at once. So, it will require a decent tech upgrade across the board before that can be federated successfully.
A large creator could do something like that and invest money into it, but it will still really be controlled by a small group of people.
We have had constant advancement in compression. People just keep using it to make higher quality, higher resolution videos rather than actually reducing file sizes.
I agree that compression has advanced steadily. I’m really referring to a break though. Something that gets 1080 videos down to 100mb.
But more realistically, I think storage is where we need to look. If I can get a 100tb ssd for not too much, then I can more realistically host a video library.
Bandwidth can be paid for, it’s fast enough. It’s just that the companies charge a ton for faster speeds.
This is one reason I’m excited for AV1. Being able to store high quality video in a fraction of the disk space is something that will bring being a competitor to YouTube much more viable.
I was going to play around with it, but it wasn’t part of the standard ffmpeg and I would need special build flags to use it.
That’s above my understanding, so I didn’t move forward.
I’ll have to check to see if it can be done at this time.
YouTube 1080p is 8-10 Mbit/s according to what I could find. That’d be 100-125 MByte/s for 100 people. I think my SSD is more than fast enough for that.
Even better, a 1 Gbps connection is also (just) enough to actually upload the video to those 100 people.
And with 100+ people watching, P2P distribution should work really well too.
The solution is real-time P2P bandwidth sharing. I guess peer tube does that. More watchers=more bandwidth.
Piped or FreeTube on desktop.
LibreTube on mobile. SmartTube on Android TV.
I haven’t had to deal with Google’s crap in a while. All of these have no ads and have Sponsorblock built-in. I do miss the algorithm’s suggestions but I do discover new content creators through Nebula (and FreeTube has decent related video suggestions in my experience).
Funny, because my ad-blocked vids load just fine in Safari
Nope, still too easy to get around.
Active enshitification.
It was happening for several days with me but it seems to be fixed now
Okay. Yeah. Sure.
5sec vs 3x20sec.
Easy choice
3x20, a bunch of wasted CPU cycles and probably a rare form of malware
Not too mention .01 points off your san permanently
Oh sanity, yeah per ad
But wait, wouldn’t a 5 second pause on loading still be way better than sitting through minutes of adverts? :-D
Punishment my arse
I’ll take a 5 sec delay over ads any fucking day of the week.
Just now
Next up will be resetting the volume control every video, or limiting the resolutions you can view at.
They already kinda do the resolution thing. Premium gets higher bitrate versions of the videos.
GrayJay is still working pretty good. I cannot use the YouTube app, or mobile browsers because most of the content I’m interested in isn’t highly visual so I like to turn my screen off and listen. I am ok with a reasonable amount of ads but the anti-feature of background play disabled without premium is just stupid.
You need YouTube ReVanced.
So 5 seconds of silence… Yeah punish me daddy google.
Does this apply to Freetube, Invidious and other yt mirrors?
they’re so shockingly inept, i can’t believe it anymore
I don’t believe this instance of anticompetitive behavior was an accident either. They just thought while doing it for ad blockers, might as through in the competition in the net too. They just got caught. Now they can plausible claim it was an accident.
Like much of big tech, they are too big. This makes also being anticompetitive just too easy to resist.
“People say breaking up Alphabet into heavily regulated entities is supposed to benefit the public, not investors”
The degree in which corporations engage in psychological warfare against customers is astounding. Not surprising, just outrageous. Don’t want notifications on? We’re going to ask you to turn on notifications in the the program every single day until you do it. Don’t want to watch ads because our infinite greed has destroyed what used to be a good platform with a reasonable number of ads before we bought it? Then we’ll make the experience less pleasant until you comply. They already make multiple parts of YouTube disagree with ad blockers on purpose to break the sites features. Not that I use anything other than NewPipe and Piped anymore anyway. I’m just sick of shitty corporations acting like we’re children who can be punished.
YouTube didn’t have ads before it got bought IIRC, not that it would have lasted that way even if it was not bought
It’s been many years, but I remember a small banner ad below the video and maybe one to the side. It was so reasonable though it’s hard to remember for sure.
That was after it got bought IIRC, but it’s possible I’m misremembering.
At least we know for sure neither of us is confident about our memories.
It’s literally like that shit from Ready Player One where the guy suggests that you can fill up the VR screen with like 80% ads before the user gets sick from it. That’s what they are doing now, they will push ads until people either stop watching or not enough people subscribe to Premium. The fact that you can’t even skip ahead in a video without getting more ads, even if you just got the pre-roll ads. It’s completely unacceptable and I think that there should be laws that would prevent that type of consumer abuse.
Don’t you just love being fed plausible deniability BS over and over and over again. I’ve lost friends over this bs. People who always argue in bad faith, always invoke plausible deniability, always min/max each interaction with hidden motives - should be given no attention and credibility. Unfortunately, those people strives in corporate environments, and as you would expect, they’re often responsible for marketing, PR, sales, and corporate strategies. Corporations are the annoying lying friends you don’t want around.
We are in a war indeed.
I think it’s a new trend with CEOs and investors. They want infinite growth so the strategy is aquire / create, grow, squeeze, throw away, while creating new products to migrate fed up customers. Rinse and repeat.
Investors goal: maximize ROI this year.
CEO goal: infinite growth and/or increase share price to keep funds flowing.
I believe the current economic behavior isn’t sustainable. Some day things will go south.
I actually think they are currently all going south. This increase in ads is just one part of the fall I think.
Id say the last stage of squeeze might be more accurate.
Because it’s possible to recover now.
Once the majority of big corps reach the no return stage, we’re all screwed.
Infinite growth in a finite world is impossible.
Do we need to start requiring all C-suite managers to learn thermodynamics?
They know, they just wanna accumulate as much fat bonuses as possible before the crash.
The idea that the only real duty of corporate leadership is to drive shareholder profit is apocalyptically naive and ultimately nihilistic, and it has been since the words dribbled from Milton Friedman into the NYT magazine back in 1970.
short term. The problem is driving short term profit. In the short term, you profit by abusing your customers. If you considered long term profit, you need to also consider customer satisfaction
No, I stand by what I said.
If you build something well, it will sell itself. You won’t need financial gymnastics to make your company or the product look good.
Stupid financial tactics like stock buybacks (which, as a result of how the stock market works, have a direct positive impact on stock price) should be illegal.
The problem is the focus on profit over and above the focus on literally anything else. That’s what modern corporate leadership has come to understand as the true meaning behind Friedman’s words. And it’s killing our society, our environment, and in many cases, the companies themselves (because the tactics are obviously unsustainable).
Welcome to the basic problem of capitalism. It’s unfortunately by design
This is it and there’s another wrinkle driving it IMO which is the end of QE. When rates were at sub-inflation (so basically negative) and investor capital was everywhere, none of these companies really cared about milking the customers because they were already fat and happy milking the government indirectly. Now the government cheese machine has dried up and so now we’ve gotta get the stock price up a quarter of a point by any means necessary instead.
Everyone here is bitching and whining about how much YouTube sucks, and yet we all know that no one will stop using the service.
So why do you they’re able to get away with this type of shit time and time again?
Youtube is great not because of itself, but because of the content, none of which they are the creator of.
I say this a lot but I’d happily pay for YouTube if the company didn’t run it so arbitrarily
And I sure as fuck don’t want to pay now, if this is how they treat their viewers
There isn’t any alternative for either content creators or consumers so of course people can’t just stop using it. But that doesn’t mean everyone should just accept anything from them. These kinds of things definitely hurt both the YouTube and Google brands and there definitely are Google products that you can stop using and avoiding to give money to YouTube.
Well, then you can count on them continuing to fuck over everyone that uses their service.
So they will allow ad blockers now? I’ll take a five second delay instead of shitty ads.
I’ll spoof the user agent because that shit is disgusting.
If it actually targets ad blockers and not FF in particular, that won’t do much other than telling all the websites you visit that yet another user is using chrome and not FF.
I didn’t do it so take it with a grain of salt but people were saying they saw improvement in loading when changing the used agent to chrome.
I saw others reporting a similar issue in Brave. 🤷♂️
Oh well, we’ll see how it plays out, right now there is a lot of speculation going on
There are other ways to detect FF, but they can almost always be worked around with enough effort.
I'd still prefer to wait 5 seconds than have to watch a fucking sanitized corporate advertisement trying to sell me bullshit I don't want and won't buy with annoying fucking music, voiceover, and footage of people pretending to be happy.
Fuck off, Google. Good thing this will be easily bypassed anyway.
If it were one ad I might be fine with it, but it’s usually 2-3 ads every 5-10 minutes, at a volume twice as loud as the video, and each up to 2 minutes long.
And inserted randomly within the content
A made the mistake of watching YouTube on my TV a few weeks back, without an ad blocker. I was getting 1-3 15 second ads every 2-3 minutes!
I hate ads too. Would you consider paying for a service so it’s user supported instead of ad supported? I do, pay for YouTube, Spotify, Hulu no ad tier. It gets old because it starts adding up. I’d rather pay for a user owned platform like a coop of some kind, but still, these things do cost money to run.
.
I won’t pay for Youtube because they keep making their product worse and treating creators horribly.
I won’t pay for YouTube because the executives are literally thousands of times wealthier than I am.
Why the fuck would I give money to people who are already obscenely rich?
People don’t have issues paying. As you said, if it was a user-run co-op, people would be fine with it. But as it stands right now the services keep raising their prices just because they can while all the money goes to the bosses and shareholders while the actual people who do most of the work get whatever is left over
I do pay for some services, where there is reasonable value.
However I rarely use YouTube so was fine with dealing with the devil of ads. Was. The inexorable march of enshittification will likely make me either never use that service or try technical workarounds for some of the enshittification (excessive ads)
I won’t be shocked when they eventually get rid of this altogether. They shouldn’t be shocked when I switch to 100% piracy when they do.
Fuck ads.
Oof, get’em.
www.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/…/k9i62zu/ for a working fix
For those that don’t want to click on a reddit link:
Credit to u/paintboth1234
www.youtube.com##+js(nano-stb, resolve(1), *, 0.001)For those that had no clue where to put this:
Click on uBO icon > ⚙ Dashboard button > Add the filter(s) in “My filters” pane > ✓ Apply changes > Open new tab and test again.
This is hillarious! I didn’t even notice that. YT always delayed video loading a little. Is this really a change?
I haven’t noticed any delay in Firefox. I have noticed that the ui fails to load sometimes. Video works just fine, but there’s nothing else on the page. So hey, Google, if you could keep that up that’d be great.
from what i’ve understood, they are selectively pushing it out, like they did with the adblock blocking shit.
So not everyone is getting hit by it.
Yep. And using the page feedback button gets you off the list from what I can tell. No response from Google but removes the ad block shenanigans instantly.
Which, to me, screams that they want to make life miserable for the general masses who dont know any better, who will blame it on their browser or something else besides google.
While quickly removing it from the people who know how to complain about it, so they wont be invested/pissed off enough to go around explaining the technical aspects of what they are doing and bringing the blame back on google.
And it might work, cause remember…folks around placesl ike this tend to me more technical than the average person. So cant use the discussions around here pointing it out and dissecting its cause and shit as the norm.
Totally agree. My kids don’t understand why services like youtube suck so much at other people’s homes. My house is only FF with uBlock Origin and I’m looking at putting in a PiHole soon. It’s insane how bad the internet experience has become in the last decade.
I miss the mid 90s internet. When there wasnt even search engines. Just digital yellowpages and webrings, with no advertising or corporate exploitation.
Yeah it really just looked like the normal shitty youtube connection you get when their servers get a wee bit overloaded.
All of the people saying “I’d rather wait five seconds than watch an ad” seem to be optimistic that it will continue to be 5 seconds and YouTube won’t keep upping it.
But they can’t extend it longer than the shortest ads, since then it’ll affect users after they watch ads too, which kinda defeats the point
Exactly, so this still guarantees a better experience than ad viewers because you will always have the minimum ad length
That’s not a problem. Just put in longer ads. Or multiple ads in a row.
They aleady do that
I’ll take 20 minutes of silence over 1 second of ads. I will never willingly watch an ad I didn’t explicitly request. Ever.
Life is short and I won’t devote any of it to advertisements.
That being said, I do pay for YouTube premium because I do use it a lot and understand that the platform has every right to make money. But that makes what they’re doing with Firefox and ad blockers worse.
Honestly, worst case scenario, if YouTube manages to completely eliminate adblockers, maybe by making some kind of cryptographic system where the browser has to provide a token embedded inside the ad video stream in order to access the video, I would still use an extension to mute sound and draw a black bar over the ads while technically playing them in the background, it’s not the wait time that bothers me, it’s how repetitive and obnoxious the ads are, I just don’t want to perceive them.
“Which color hat did the extra in the background of your latest ad wear?” Wrong answer = 10 ads.
If they could, YouTube would hire someone to sit on your couch and make sure you consume the ads with your utmost attention.
Which is why you have to void warranties and go through a lot of hassle to r Unlock the bootloader, or root your own phone and have actual control over it.
And that’s the reason Google is trying to push shitty web standards to remove your control.
And why Apple and Microsoft keep restricting your access to your OS, with rumors of Windows 12 being cloud-only.
Many governments around the world don’t want you to have any control or privacy. Many tech giants don’t want you to have any control or privacy. It’s the same old thing religions have done forever. Enforce a lack of control and privacy through violence, social pressure, or resources. Only now, the enforcement style is indirect, trying to say you don’t own your device, can’t use ad blockers or privacy tools, have to agree to terms and conditions that waive your rights, your usage has to be monitored, or that backdoors have to be built into everything.
Don’t expect this behavior to stop unless regulation is created to prevent it, or the company caves to financial or social pressure to change…for now.
Don’t expect regulation to be created unless you put people who care about privacy and such in power.
Even then, people in power need to be held accountable if they misbehave, or nothing else matters.
It all comes back to class struggle and politics.
Ads are psychological abuse. I will not watch them. If YouTube make it too hard to use their service without watching ads, I don’t need to use YouTube.
I’ve never seen this fake load thing and I always use Firefox
They don’t roll it out to all users at once. Similar to the video blocking
More than happy to wait
I haven’t noticed this in the browser, but I’ve definitely noticed it using the YouTube app on Roku. No Firefox or ad blocker there.
If you’re on desktop and open several videos at once (such as getting home from work/school and opening all the new videos on your subscriptions tab) you really don’t notice.
What I do notice are the ads at the beginning, quarters, middle, and end of a video
I’ll just blame it on my ISP being shit
I’d rather a 5 second pause then see something trying to hijack my freewill.
No ads or delays > No ads with delays >>>>>> ads
Honestly, as long as the video itself doesn’t have interruptions, I’m okay with the ad-free experience having a small delay or even lower video resolution. I don’t have to have 4k 120 FPS video on everything.
What I don’t want is constant interruptions, wild changes in emotional tone or volume, obnoxious and manipulative ads, politically sponsored bullshit, or constant pestering to disable my ad blocker and tracking protection. In short, once the video starts, leave me alone.
I can appreciate that Google has spent its entire existence trying to find another revenue stream beyond advertising, and largely failed, but I don’t care. If my choices are to continue being manipulated and lied to by companies and politicians paying for the privilege, and not using YouTube, I’ll just stop using YouTube. I’ve done it before with other services I used much more frequently.
Either they shut up about using ad blockers, or they give me an alternative.
And yes, I realize this is a very selfish and entitled response. If I get value out of something that costs other people time and money to provide me, it is fair that I give back in some way. Traditionally, that was done via companies serving ads and spying on its users.
But enough is enough. Modern advertising and tracking keep getting worse, and trying to enforce them is not the way to move forward.
YouTube sucks now. Just constant ads.
cough piped cough
All jokes aside, I strongly recommend a service like Invidious or Piped.
piped does not support live streams at this time unfortunately
On Invidious, not all instances support live streams, so you have to click around until you find one that does. Maybe it’s the same for Piped.
laughs in “phoronix” without “adblocking”…
YouTube can go screw themselves, use Invidious or Piped to access YouTube. You can also combine this with LibRedirect to automatically redirect all YouTube links to Invidious or Piped. There are amazing mobile clients like LibreTube or NewPipe for Android and Yattee with this guide for iOS. All of these don’t have ads or trackers.
Can vouch for Yattee on iOS, but every once in awhile I’ve had to grab new invidious instances as things happen
AFAIK if you use
https://r.yattee.stream/manifest-invidious-piped.json, it automatically fetches the list of instances. Can’t try it out right now since I switched away from iOS. On GrapheneOS I don’t have any of these issues, I can simply sideload any app I want meaning I can actually use a proper YouTube client like LibreTube.“We know you didn’t do anything wrong. We meant to hurt someone else.”
Normally this is when I’d go all yar har fiddle dee dee, and don’t get me wrong Imma do a lot of that too, but a lot of my favorite video essay nerds are also on a platform called Nebula that’s dirt cheap, ad free and owned outright by the people who make the content. It’s a good way to balance the whole “people need to get paid for the content they make” thing with the whole “these platforms are predatory and abusive” thing.
Nebula will also sell lifetime subscriptions for $300 occasionally. When you compare it to netflix’s standard price of $15.49/month, it pays for itself in less than 2 years.
I admire their mission. Giving the power to the video creators is great. I’m all for coops. But, as a user I find it lacking. If you want to watch anything outside of educational videos and video essays you have to go elsewhere. It doesn’t have very good content discovery. I know creators don’t like chasing an algorithm, but as a viewer I like having recommendations based on what I watch.
I bought a one year membership, because I support what they are trying to do, but I rarely watch anything on it.
lol, I take back the snark I gave in another thread the other day about Google doing this to fuck with people now. Egg on my face for giving them the benefit of the doubt.
They can’t honestly think this will have the desired effect. I also bet the poor sod that had to implement it “strongly advised not to do it”. But was over ruled by some know it all shit head MBA.
Can you say “anti-trust”
Deliberately and actively try to make user experience worst is shit evil. Now im gonna actively share ubo to all people i talk IRL
.
Why was it a mistake? I’ve used Google workspaces for business email for about 5 years and find it to be a really good and inexpensive service.
.
How many of you use YouTube on the actual website, and not just an embedded video on another site?
I use YouTube for me subscription feed and for the video recommendations. I redirect every watch page to Invidious tho.
I do, on desktop anyway
This is why I refuse to pay for YouTube. They are literally actively making the experience worse, rather than trying to make the paid experience better. This is laughable.
Anything to justify your stance. The experience is better without ads, but people just don’t want to pay.
Guess they’ll have to do a better job at convincing me that I should pay for what’s historically been free. I’ve never tolerated ads and I’m not about to start. At this point they’re encouraging me to carry on out of spite, underhanded tactics are just giving me more reasons not to do what they want.
Make you pay for “what has historically been provided in exchange for a fee or advertisement for the past 17 years, one year after the service launched”.
You’ll do what you want of course, but that fake outrage and righteousness is just pitiful. Just stop pretending and own that you just don’t want to pay for it as long as you’ll be able to.
Dude you are the product. Or do you think that they didn’t build your profile based on your experiences and tastes and then sold it to other companies…
Wow someone hasn’t understood how the internet works
Copium copium.
You realize that they are only able to pay for “what’s historically been free” because of advertisements right? Google might be able to sustain Youtube even without ads because they have other revenue sources, but the vast majority of their revenue are from advertisements, and it would be a massive loss of money to keep Youtube up without it generating ad revenue. Hosting videos is one of the most expensive things a website can do. If we are to ever hope for other companies to compete with Youtube, we should expect for it to not be free. All that said, Google can still go fuck themselves though - I cannot possibly endorse their methods.
Yes, I do realize how terribly expensive hosting videos is. It doesn’t change my stance as a customer/end user, however.
.
Salty from the sound of it.
Damn I was gonna say that.
No, I think it’s a reasonable stance. I pay for Crunchyroll and Hidive because I like the paid service they provide, it’s a good experience that they are providing and I find value in it. Why would I pay for something that I don’t find value in, something where a company tries to actively downgrade the experience of its users rather than try to upgrade the experience of its paid service? I like services where they don’t try to actively screw over their users. I pay for Lastfm and Trakt too, because again I like the paid service that they provide.
It’s hard to provide something extra when all their content comes from users. They tried with
redtubeYouTube Red originals but those were pretty lame.You pay for those because you can’t watch them for free without ads by using an extension or something like that. They’re not “convenient enough to bypass” for you.
animepahe
Same holds for YouTube. They just got rid of the only no ads subscription here. Which was half the price of premium. So they kick people out of that, and afterwards going to war with ad blockers… If they really wanted as much people as possible to pay, they would have kept that abbo. But probably it’s better for them financially to have a bit more with ad blockers and ads and convert some to the premium tier
Look, I think YouTube is one of the few major “social media” sites that net positive for social good. And it loses Google money every year with saving everyone’s videos forever and hosting 4k and even 8k content…
But you can’t withhold the carrot and use the stick. They’re eroding trust with the people that have liked and supported YouTube throughout the years. There are plenty of people like me, that would gladly pay some amount of money. Just not THAT amount of money. Create some payment tiers and decent benefits for climbing up it.
Cruelty, is Thy name.
I will never again use Chrome again (well maybe except YouTube if stops working in non-chromium-based browsers), we need to get Web back into our hands! It is sad that it took me too many years to realize that, I hope others will follow.
It was only a month or two ago when I didn’t believe I could make firefox my primary browser, but I was so wrong. I don’t notice any performance implications after weeks of using FF compared to chrome, despite having read comments to the contrary.
I feel like the explanation follows a thread of believability, but even then, this feature was terribly coded if it was circumvented via User Agent string manipulation.
I don’t believe that ad blockers modify the user agent, so if you can modify the user agent of FF to emulate Chrome and solve the issue, then that means Chrome users that use ad blockers don’t have to deal with the delay and therefore their claim that they aren’t punishing FF users his utter horse shit.
I was under the impression Chrome doesn’t let you use ad blockers anymore? idk I use
archfirefox btwI thought Chrome was planning to oust ad blockers in 2024. Idk if that’s true though, maybe I’m mis-remembering.
I’ve kinda stuck with Firefox for many years now because I never saw any reason not too. I honestly hardly ever used extensions though (except ad blockers), so maybe there’s something I don’t understand about any downfalls of Firefox. I just don’t see any, especially nowadays. It just works for me, so I never fully switched.
I’ve tried other browsers, but I just come back to Firefox ever time. It’s a comfort at this point
Google lived long enough to become the villain.
Old news, they’ve been the villain for much longer than you think
Don’t be evilDon’tbe evilWhen they were allowed to buy YouTube because their Google Video couldn’t compete was the turning point.
Remember when they forced everyone with a Google service account (Youtube, gmail, etc.) to automatically have an account on their attempted social media site? What was it called, circles or something? I think they saw it was failing and tied everyone with a Google account to the social site in an attempt to make it look like the social site actually had members. The problem was that, still, nobody used it and what use it it to have millions on inactive users on a social media platform.?
Google plus. I think it’s groups were called circles
Yes! Thanks.
The sad thing is, I consider this an upgrade. I’ll take a moment to breathe and maybe break out of the negative spiral that is modern internet use.
Five seconds of loading is an upgrade over five consecutive ads
That’s a fact!
(In Scooby-Doo theme song style)
There is no acceptable answer to “why do you make your own services suck?”
Because we need go punish those who have the GALL to not want to have consumerism shoved down their throat 8 times in a 5 minute video.
I know I have not be a very good echo in this echo chamber, but you don’t think it’s a tad ridiculous to say YouTube is forcing it down anyones throat? Nobody is forcing anyone to watch YouTube, yet you say it as if they are.
Not to mention they literally have a legitimate option to remove the ads, so they REALLY aren’t forcing it down your throat. Which means if the service isn’t worth it enough to you to pay for it or watch ads, don’t use it?
No you’re right, it’s no one is forced to use YouTube, however if you like any of the content creators it’s the only place you can find them. And the issue with ads, is that it’s not a few, it’s unskippable ads every few minutes so that there is so much being shoved at you. YouTube of 10 years ago was a much more enjoyable experience.
Do you think using adblockers to watch YouTube for free is stealing? It is, after all, getting a paid service for free against the services permission. If that is enough of a definition to be considered stealing (I think it is), then it’s quite easy to understand why they might make their own services suck.
Walmart has implemented plenty of inconveniences to combat shoplifting. Things locked behind glass. I’ve had to wait 15+ minutes for a Walmart employee to unlock a door for me to grab a $20 power tool. If that isn’t make services worse, idk what is. I am not saying it is right, but rather pointing how the double standards in the way we think. If you are going to be up in arms for ad blockers, I think you should also be up in arms about commercial retailers inconvenient anti-shoplifting measures. Both are means to stop users from obtaining the good/service without proper payment, even if it means legitimate customers get a worse experience.
And even if you agreed with the Walmart analogy, and also think the measures Walmart takes are on the same level as AdBlocker blockers, I think we can agree most people would not.
And if you do not think using adblockers to watch YouTube is stealing, I’m curious what your definition of theft is.
It clearly isn’t theft to use an adblock. It is simply electing what contents are played on your own machine. If it was theft to not download ads, it would be theft to grab something from the fridge during TV ads. Ad-absurdum we would end up in that black mirror episode where they force you to watch ads and lock the room.
That being said. I believe it is within googles rights to make the life of not paying customers hard. Whether it is a smart decision, is another question.
The difference is the content is being delivered to the TV. YouTube cannot advertise if you simply block adverts. It’s still advertising even if you walk away from your computer or close your eyes. It’s the same thing for junk mail. If you never get the junk mail, then it’s never actually delivered. But if you immediately shred it without ever looking, it was still delivered even if you didn’t bother to look. That delivery of advertisements is how Google funds YouTube. To prevent that delivery is to stop the transaction you agreed to. You are not holding up your end of the agreement for a non-free service.
To “simply elect what contents are played on your own machine” would mean not using YouTube. It wouldn’t mean using YouTube on YOUR terms
So do u believe its theft to turn your TV off everytime an ad comes on and turn it back on a few minutes later? I mean its a bit strange but I wouldnt go as far to call that theft
That’s the equivalent of just turning off your monitor when you get an ad. There isn’t any great comparison to cable TV and streaming services. Because you can consume streaming services while stopping the delivery of all ads. even using sponsorblock for in video ads. You cannot for cable TV. The best you can do is turn it off while they play, but they will play nonetheless.
The closest you get to it with cable TV is DVR and skipping the ads (some going so far as to auto skip) but you’re literally paying for cable TV. The fact cable TV as so many ads with how much it costs is absurd anyway. So of course you aren’t stealing because you’re already paying an inordinate amount of money for the service.
So I guess if one day YouTube has a paid service with ads, and you block the ads, the debate of whether its stealing or not could get pretty murky. The scebario is closer to tag switching at Walmart, which is still stealing, but I guess arguably less? But right now, while you aren’t paying anything at all for a paid service, it’s pretty cut and dry.
Your argument hinges on technical limitation: Since it cannot be confirmed whether snail mail advertisement was looked at, the delivery person gets paid for putting in the letterbox. Since the TV station does not know exactly how many people watch their commercial breaks, they get paid for broadcasting. Since streaming services can relatively accurately check how many times an ad was played, they only get paid for the exact number and it is stealing to not download it.
TV stations nowadays have much more advanced capabilities and they do know rather accurately how many devices are watching their signal. So if an advertiser wants access to this data and sees that people turn off their devices during commercials as @Dontfearthereaper123 described - should the advertiser be allowed to pay less? If the advertiser pays less, does turning off your TV become stealing?
If YouTube started to (legally) access your webcam. Would closing your eyes and plugging your ears during ads become stealing?
This is precisely what I am saying. It is the delivery of advertisements that matters, not how many people actually see it (which is impossible to know in any advertising situation). Your TV analogy is not very good. During a broadcast, there is a live stream of data being sent to the TV. You cannot control what data is being streamed to that TV, you can only control if it’s being displayed on your TV or not. Therefore, you cannot stop the delivery of the ads. If you are watching a show live, you cannot skip past the ads. If there are 5 minutes of ads, the best you can do is turn off the TV or walk away for 5 minutes. If the ad wasn’t put in the broadcast to begin with, so never delivered, there’s no way in hell the advertiser is paying for it.
So to answer your last question, it has nothing to do with seeing it or not. Purely delivery. The moment the mail is in your mailbox, the content is delivered. But if you put a lock on your mailbox, it cannot be delivered. If someone puts up a billboard, it doesn’t matter how many people see it, the billboard is up. If you put your commercial in a television broadcast, it will indeed be broadcast. Though with the internet, people now have the ability to stop the delivery of ads altogether. Therefore, if you say you will pay for this service by receiving advertisements, and then the advertisements don’t get delivered, that would be stealing.
You didn’t answer my question though. If someone turns off their TV during commercials, the content is not delivered. If someone puts up a “please no ads” sticker, it becomes illegal to put advertisement in the mailbox (at least where i life). In both cases the materials are not delivered. Is that theft?
I did answer your question. I said the delivery for television is when it is broadcast through the air or cables. Which it is, regardless of if your television is on. Just like how radio waves are in the air whether your radio is on or not. Even if the radio never plays the sound, the data is still being broadcast (aka delivered).
The mail comparison quickly falls apart, since you do not benefit from spam mail. You do not get a service in exchange for getting the spam mail, so what could you steal by not getting spam mail? If you put up a sticker that prevents the delivery (kinda like an ad blocker), then you did not get that ad delivered. But again, you are not using advertising mail as a means to pay for a service you are using, so it cannot be stealing.
YouTube is not free. Period. It costs money. Google has to get money from users to run it. It can either do that from ads, subscriptions, or donations (which we know isn’t going to happen). If every user blocks ads, no ads are being delivered, and they would not be able to run the service. In our world, ads are tracked by delivery and not by eyes seen. End users can choose to look away, ignore, walk away, turn off their monitor, or whatever else. The ad was still delivered. Ads delivered means a small percentage will learn about their business through those ads, which makes it profitable for businesses to keep paying for them. Therefore, to block ads, you are not paying for the service. To not pay for a service that you are expected to pay for is stealing.
I agree, that the snail mail comparison limps. I just included it, since you brought it up initially. Lets drop it for now.
You are arguing that simply broadcasting an analog signal fulfils delivery, even if no device is receiving it. This deviates from your initial technical limitations argument, but lets assume this is true. If broadcasting a signal without caring whether it is received or if it is, by how many devices, fulfils delivery. Then a streaming service simply needs to make their advertisement available (eg. ads.mestream.com or as clickable content on mestream.com). The ads are available for everyone and no one cares whether or how many devices access them. Most streaming services go further than that and programmatically force people to watch those ads by playing them before the main-content or by similar means.
But we know that TV stations operate differently from how you described. If no one would care if and by how many devices the signal is received, there would not be any pricing difference. But since the tech allows to know rather accurate how many devices receive a signal, a spot at 8pm is much more expensive than 3am. So we know TV stations and advertisers using TV do care about how many devices receive that signal. I would go even further and say they actually care about how many people see the advertisement. But since the technical limitation does not allow this insight, number of devices is the closest value to monitor.
I am repeating myself, but YouTube not wanting to provide services to people who neither pay a subscription or watch ads is within their rights. Whether it is a viable business strategy will show. But for you to call using an ad-block theft, that just doesn’t make sense. Unless you also call it theft, to turn off your TV during commercials. If it becomes a technically and legally viable to analyse how many people are watching those ads, it would become theft to close your eyes.
Edit: changed the URLs, so they do not point to an existing service.
I back channels and projects I like on Patreon because yeah, I’d rather not steal if I don’t have to. But YouTube needs to know they are BETWEEN the content I want and me. I bought into Google Music and stuck with it through its change to YouTube Music, and it’s always come with YouTube Red/Premium. The kicker is I’m paying for a lot of my video content twice but I’m happy with it because it’s on my terms and not a PENNY of it goes to Jake Paul.
You’re right, a lot of companies suck and I wish most of them behaved differently.
I don’t know if it makes a difference, but I’m in Canada and I’ve noticed none of this. No video load delays, no anti ad-blocker pop ups, none of it. I’m not going to stop using Firefox or Ublock Origin though.
I’d be interested if there’s a difference if you use sponsorblock addon. I’ve noticed that it triggers the sleep thingy
It could be that Google is releasing this incrementally. It seems a bit random who gets it and who doesn’t
Aussie here. Using Firefox and UBO, but with default settings. I downloaded the extension, popped it on about 4 years ago and haven’t done anything since. I’ve had the same experience as you - no video delays or pop ups.
Could we just be “lucky”?
Some might argue that we already are lucky, considering where we live 😀
Google’s modus operandi - business as usual. Deploying their dirty tricks on their mass of servers to edge out and destroy competition. When caught out they apologize all surprised Pikachu style, then do it again differently. This is likely in response to news about Firefox mobile finally allowing extensions to work. People are probably trying it out, but their Youtube experience will be crap, so they’ll go back to chrome.
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/e6505c34-33fb-4bea-9f80-fc19a44967d4.jpeg">
Maybe changing your user agent just let’s you reroll whether you are in the group of users that are used for testing the increased loading time
Ads are sub suboptimal viewing.
Punish?
👉👈🥺
You know you like it.
Are you popping a zit ?
Spacedocking
when are they gonna learn that any client-side restriction or hindrance can and will be defeated? sleep(5000) is kinda like them throwing a fit, not actually trying to punish anyone. obviously we’ll find a way to avoid waiting the 5s, do they think we’ll just give up?
It’s mostly true but i can imagine them trying to render the ads directly into video or something to make it unakippable. Just like plain old TV ads.
Re-rendering 4k videos (or of any other quality fwiw) with ads included would probably incur more electricity costs than they could ever make through the ads. TV could afford to do this since they transmit the same program and the same ads to everyone. Youtube targets them per user, so they’d need to render the same video, in high quality, every time any user clicks on it.
It’s big corpo stuff. Once company grows over certain size left hand stops loosing sight of the right hand.
In other words one team gets task to make sure ads aren’t skipped ever, they don’t get rewarded for saying its dump idea but for implementation .
Later comes other team that gets task to fifure out why the hell electricity bill went up.
Then after that they figure out best way to save money is to reduce employee count.
Then after the adblocking sensation gets old, some one else responsible for perfomance comes with idea that rendering ads is inefficient and they will go back to popup ads.
It often doesn’t make sense and costumer service gets worse as companies grow so i wouldn’t be surpriced by something like this at all.
I don’t understand why companies still place ads on youtube. I’ve never ever bought a product or visited a company’s website which was advertised on youtube.
Are there really people who listen to youtube ads?
Yes, it’s the same people that don’t install ad blockers.
Absolutely. I’ve participated in several campaigns that resulted in ~20% increases in sales for targeted ads. It makes a difference.
Sadly.
Companies wouldn’t spend the money if it wasn’t worth their time.
To my surprise it actually works.
It’s kind of tactic of mass promotion and is expected that hundreds of folks will not give a damn but one in many will click on the ad.
Also companies (at least i did when i had to use it) often only pay for clicks or even for successful install of their apps so it’s much cheaper than e.g. classic tv spots where they have to pay for a time regardless ofeffectiveness.
I do not think Google deserves the benefit of the doubt anymore, people need to stop using their services.
No one’s going to unless someone recreates YouTube, which isn’t happening anytime soon.
It’s already been recreated (vevo, peertube, etc.) it’s just that those services don’t have anywhere near the content Youtube has.
Thanks fot saving my time answering for all of us
Sadly, the problem is that the small platforms tend to attract all the scum that was blocked on YT. You know… all the racist anitisemitic nazi conspiracy theory ridden brains.
The ad funded model is dying AKA endless free money is dying, it doesn’t work because there’s no real business there it works based on the empty promise of making money elsewhere on the products they are selling without any guarantee that the advertisement is what’s making them the money. The analytics are starting to tell them that it’s not as good of an investment as they once thought. Advertisement has become overvalued, that’s why people are saying that there is a bubble and that it’s going to burst, just like it happened before with the dotcom crash.
In other words a platform like YouTube is already very flawed. Sure you can make alternative video sharing platforms and you can get them by on donations (or maybe even nationalize it in some places) but that money making component for creators isn’t something that can be as easily replicated. They can do sponsorships, they can ask for donations, but donations are hardly anything to live by unless you’re famous, and sponsorships can have the same problem as the aforementioned over-inflated ad revenue.
Do No EvilBe A Lil Bitch
Idk, this one is pretty easily explained by Hanlon’s razor. I’m sure others will disagree, which is fine, but it seems not only plausible, but likely that they intended for this to target all ad block users and not just FireFox. Google has waged a war with adblockers, and they are making quick retaliatory changes as the adblockers block the adblocker blockers. It’s literally Google making changes and people changing the adblockers back. It genuinely seems more realistic for them to have tried to target all adblockers than just FireFox…
Yeah except changing your user agent to chrome bypasses the load slowdown lol
Thanks to HTTP being a complete mish mash and meme of protocols and standards, there’s no way for google to easily target ad blockers without either significantly changing the entire youtube API, or trying to enforce stupid DRM bullcrappary by updating or pushing for a new web standard.
Even crunchyroll doesn’t crackdown on ad block even with DRM playback enabled.
Did you test this yourself? Rather than just ask your source, I was going to test it myself. However, I cannot get a slow down at all. Everything is loading instantly and ad-free. Perhaps the servers providing my instance of YouTube don’t have the change, I’m not sure, but I have not been able to personally create this. So without a reliable source or evidence, I cannot just take your word for it that changing the user-agent alone fixed the issue.
Rossmann tested it in latest video. No difference between browsers. And that dude is strong ad block and none Google browser supporter.
Pretty much. Doesn’t help that Firefox is the best browser for customizing your browsing experience. So all adblockers are very good on it.
Probably some summer trainee tasked with solving the Firefox + ublock Origin combo made an oopsie.
With all that said: fuck Google for even beginning their crusade against adblockers.
Everything fine with private DNS and brave 👍👍
“Everything is working fine on my chromium-based browser”
No shit, Sherlock.
When the point it’s seeing a webpage I don’t give a flying fuck if it’s chromium or Firefox both are open source, I mean while I’m not using chrome what have the propietary shit I’m fine. ✌️👍.
You’re no genius, eh?
Strange then how my Vivaldi browser doesn’t have the load time, then. Almost like it’s a punishment for non-chromium users.
It totally is. Accidents, Beta features, etc. all used as cover to be a cunt.
Trying to monetise the fraction of a percent of users who actively avoid your advertising and wouldn’t engage with it or purchase products from the advertisers even if forced to watch them is the epitome of corporate greed. Pathetic, money grubbing billionaire corporations deserve to burn to the ground rather than be supported by the societies they leech off like the cancer they are.
There ! I have nothing to add
That’s like saying Walmart trying to stop the small percentage of people who shoplift is the epitome of corporate greed. YouTube is a paid service. It costs money to run, regardless of how much you hate them. You pay either with money, or with ads. I could get the anger towards them blocking ad blockers if they did not have a way to remove them. But they literally have an option to legitimately remove them, and it also directly supports the creates you watch a lot more than ad revenue.
Am I defending Google? No. I am doing everything in my power to get away from Big Brother being ever present and seeing everything. But I am also not blind to reality. I also use ad blockers on any website I go on. But if any service denies me entry for using one, that’s their right. I shouldn’t get to consume whatever content I want for free while they take the financial hit.
They make a profit, operating costs are covered. You do know that right? Profit is surplus? You’re not so poorly educated to not understand the most basic principal of capitalism?
Yes.
Regardless of what you may say, nobody is up in arms about Walmart’s, or any other commercial retailer’s, anti-theft changes. Adding ink tags to merchandise, locking things up in whatever method they chose, camera’s out the wazoo. Nobody is up in arms because nobody thinks it’s bad that they are trying to stop people from stealing.
You can try and dismiss me by saying I am defending Google, but it doesn’t make what you’re saying correct. YouTube is a paid service. To block the ads means to get that paid service for free. The content you are freely consuming is actively costing YouTube money. For them to stop you from freely consuming their product is very much so similar to Walmart making measures to stop shoplifters. You can view physical stealing and digital stealing as different, but they are the same thing. One is just less likely to get caught.
And just to be clear, I steal online content all the time. From digital movies/shows, to using AdBlockers on sites. Stealing is wrong, therefore what I am doing is wrong. Though it certainly is difficult to feel bad that the billion dollar corporations are missing out on my couple of bucks, or a random site didn’t get $0.001 from my ad view. Regardless, just how a shoplifter can understand why Walmart would make it harder to shoplift, I can understand why YouTube would make it harder to AdBlock. Do I like it? Obviously not. But it’s silly to sit here and suggest them fighting adblockers is what makes them evil, and not all the hidden tracking and absurd data collection.
Are you a stand-up comedian?
You know the internet isn’t actually magic, right? You know that storing and distributing data costs real money, and doesn’t just magically appear on your computer screen. Video hosting is quite literally, insanely fucking expensive. That’s the reality of it. The absolute absurd amount of storage it takes to host YouTube is truly mind boggling. Then they have to have who knows how much money in data transfer to both upload the videos, and then stream them out to however many users. That’s not even including the fact that they do actually give money to their creators. Some of them make quite a substantial amount of it, no less. I haven’t even mentioned the team with YouTube developing, maintaining, servicing, their technical equipment. All the customer support, the relations managers, the YouTube partner managers, and all the other hundreds of behind the scenes staff.
YouTube costs money. I think you don’t disagree with that. Perhaps the part you have a problem with is thinking you, a single person, aren’t costing them money. And sure, if you were literally the only person doing it, it really wouldn’t be noticeable. But given all the uproar, it’s very clear it’s not just you. By how many people are upset, it’s clear it’s actually quite a substantial amount of people. So if you think all of those people aren’t costing YouTube money, then I really cannot help teach you basic money any further.
If you’re argument is instead that all these people mad about AdBlocker blocking are costing YouTube money, but not enough for them to lose money or even substantial profits, then I really don’t know what to tell you. If that is your argument, then you are trying to argue that YouTube should eat the profits so users can steal more. Which really just doesn’t make any fucking sense. Again, that’s very similar to getting pissed that Walmart is making it harder to shoplift because Walmart make so much money. And yet nobody is suggesting Walmart make it easier to shoplift, because people as a whole see shoplifting as stealing, but don’t see AdBlock as stealing. Quite frankly, that’s just a result of an ignorance as to how technology works and what things actually cost.
And if you’re suggesting something else, then I don’t know what it is and you’ll need to further clarify if you want me to better understand.
Huh. They really drill the capitalist shill into you with that American “education” system, don’t they?
As long as a company is making a profit all costs have been covered, all employees, suppliers, and producers have been paid. Those in society who have the means and the will have ensured this product exists and has been paid for and I thank them for their contribution. That allows the rest of humanity to enjoy the socialisation of their contribution to the masses, who have not the means or the will, but who ensure the rest of the system is available and working to support everyone’s ability to contribute.
If you want to argue that employees, suppliers, or producers aren’t adequately paid, then why is there a profit margin?
Capitalism as an idea is not bad. America’s current state of capitalism is very bad. This idea you just suggested also is not bad. But I think would be even worse than our current state of capitalism if it were attempted to be implemented. Greed would be present in any system, including this idealistic one where people pay for the costs of a service if able, to allow those who cannot to enjoy it also.
The argument I am making is in regards to stealing. I assume your argument also applied to other corporations in regards to the distribution and payment of goods/services, though regardless most people agree stealing is wrong. Most people see the prevention of theft as acceptable. I am merely pointing out the double standard most people up in arms are placing on this change. Most people do not see AdBlocking as stealing, though by definition they are using a paid service for free without the services consent. That seems to me like stealing. I am not here to discuss alternatives to our state capitalism, that is for a different thread. And stealing as a way to accomplish this new system also seems to be extremely, shall we say, ineffective?
Why? This is weird. Why not enforce a full 30 second delay or some length corresponding to the length of the ad? That would be a sure way to make people who can’t circumvent the block turn off the ad blocker. That or they’d just do something other than watch youtube, which is also possible I suppose.
Doubtful. I’d rather see a black, silent screen for 30 seconds then an ad for some clone of a game.
They can’t. If they make the wait period too long, people will just think YT is down. And experiencing constant downtime on a content delivery platform is really bad PR.
Hmmm, watch an ad or wait five seconds… Not sure they thought this one out.
At this point i would rather watch an empty wall for a minute than a 10s ad
I mean that’s why Hulu got rid of the free tier.
But… It may alert you to the existence of a game that has a completely different mechanic than the one presented in the ad!
It’s punishing me and I’m using their app. Their video loading has been spotty as shit lately. And I know it’s not my bandwidth, I’ve got 5Gbps available and 12ms latency to YouTube’s closest data center.
I’m not even blocking the ads when I use it.
I knew something was fucky when I tried to use my phone at work today.
Bro my position is very clear. I’d rather forget about YouTube entirely than let ads back into my life
Freetube? It’s an app, look it up
None of these alternate options allow me to watch on my TV without ads. I almost never watch anything on my phone, and when I do I have YouTube revanced for that
Brave on android lets you watch youtube with no ads. As long as the adblocking and fingerprint blocking is set to aggressive
While I think Google is a monster that needs to be destroyed, it’s silly to me that your two options are either block ads or leave. The third option would be pay for the service. If your only problem is the ads and not the tracking (which probably isn’t true, but it’s the only complaint you made in the comment), then paying for it is a valid solution. It shouldn’t be controversial to say video hosting costs money to run, which obviously includes YouTube. So giving it out for free is simply not a realistic option. You’re free to leave, but you won’t have anywhere else to go that meets the “free and no ads” requirement. If you realistically don’t want ads, you will have to pay. And if you’re fine with paying, YouTube is currently the platform with the most content to offer.
Honestly, I’m thankful paying is an option. I wish Google would offer a paid package overall to stop the tracking/data collection. I would literally just give them my money for actual privacy with their services.
do you know what makes them even more money? Making you pay, and then selling your data anyway!
You CANNOT opt out of data collection from youtube. Just pay them or they’ll put an absurd amount of ads to the point it’s not usable anymore.
Right, and that’s exactly what I said. Though Google specifically doesn’t really need to sell your data. They just use it themselves to advertise to you.
I would pay for the service if it weren’t an absolutely ridiculous price.
$14 a month is bonkers.
I value YouTube, at most, at about $5 a month. I can easily do without it.
There you have it. If the cost of the service is not worth it, then users won’t buy it. Either enough users will pay for it that the service will stay as it is for the price it is, they will decrease the cost of the service, or improve the service they are offering. Or, given Google’s track record, just kill of the service entirely.
I will also point out that many users pay for Spotify for $11 USD a month. YouTube premium includes YT Music, which is a direct competitor to Spotify. So for users who pay for Spotify, it would be virtually $3 for ad-free YouTube. Of course this doesn’t work if you don’t pay for a music streaming service, but as far as services go it certainly isn’t unreasonably priced. Sure, it may be unfair that they don’t offer just a YT ad-free package, perhaps with all this backlash they will. Or perhaps not. It’s Google, they’ll do whatever they fuck they want.
The problem is that the paid option eventually gets ads anyway. See cable TV and soon Netflix.
The problem is that YouTube hasn’t done something, but you think they will? Cable television has basically always had commercials. When it started, it was mostly just government broadcasts, but when it got popularly commercialized, adverts were introduced. Netflix has a paid option with ads, but they also still have an ad-free option, so that still doesn’t really substantiate your argument either.
There is no real evidence to think they will add ads to their paid service. Of course it’s possible, but we don’t need to make up things Google might do in the future to call them evil. There’s plenty of things they’re currently doing.
The pressure of ever-increasing profits demands it.
Your comment assumes two things.
The fist point is a fact of life.
The second one is simply not fact. It could be profitably, but it is far from guaranteed. They could just as easily make far more money by keeping the paid tier ad-free to avoid the loss of subscribers.
Furthermore, the price of YouTube Premium is increasing.
Gotta ensure the greedy corporation makes record profits quarter over quarter.
9to5google.com/…/youtube-premium-price-increase/
And this right here ladies and gentlemen (and other) is why we need to host our own. Hopefully somebody comes up with a peer2peer based youtube competitor.
I don’t know about peer2peer but decentralized alternative exists. e.g. peertube
IPFS?
Still illegal
Honestly, I never bothered to install an ad blocker before today. I just figured ads were tolerable. This move by YouTube got me to switch to firefox and install ublock origin and oh my is it glorious. I can wait 5 seconds for my video to start since I am used to ads anyway.
You can spoof it as Chrome because it’s a bias towards other browsers that aren’t chrome, regardless of whatever bullshit statements they put out to avoid getting sued or otherwise in trouble.
I hate ads so much that I typically would start a video on YouTube with my phone/PC muted and then put the phone face down or turn off the monitor for ten seconds before going back to the video and rewinding to the start.
They honestly never bothered me too much but I have to say if they ever succeed in defeating the ad blockers it will be hard to go back now that I’ve seen this side.
People have been conditioned into viewing ads as a normal every day part of life. It’s actually kind of scary, since it’s basically mind games to convince people to hand their money over.
“supposed to”
Oopsie whoopsy, we accidentally made competing browsers disadvantaged.
Deliberate, disguised as accidental. Disgusting.
Hanlon’s razor - “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”
This is not only adequately explained by stupidity, but it makes the most logical sense to be explained by stupidity. They are actively fighting a war with AdBlockers. They are trying to block AdBlockers, and AdBlockers are working as quickly as possible to fight those changes. Then Google has to fire back as quickly as possible. This is resulting in rapid published changes to counteract AdBlockers and their retaliation. It makes all too much sense that their fight against AdBlockers did not work as intended. The people making these changes are Google software developers, and I really do not think any of them have an issue with Mozilla.
I don’t know how stupid YouTube devs would have to be to:
Tie the delay that was supposed to fight AdBlock to user-agent (changing it to chrome fixes the issue)
Ignore Youtube Premium users that pay for ad-free experience
For those reasons I think it’s pretty safe to say that this goes beyond stupidity and into malice territory.
What evidence is there of this being user-agent based? I’ve heard people make this claim, but I have not seen evidence of it and when testing on my own machine there was no delay at all.
I’d wager Googles only releasing it to some users at first like they do with most things.
Except Google has done the exact same thing to numerous other products and have multiple anti competition cases against them specifically related to Chrome. Hanlon’s Razor doesn’t apply IMO if there is a track record of the behaviour, as that clearly shows intent and premeditation.
Unless you consider fighting adblockers a futile stupidity, you should first apply Occam’s razor - explanation requiring least amount of assumptions is probably the correct one.
In this case spoofing user-agent string of Chrome is enough to fix all the performance issues on Firefox, meaning there is no fancy anti-adblock code or anything like that.
Right, they got caught doing some hot button issue shit with the FCC talking about renewing the NN rules and they didn’t want to reignite the debate themselves. Google owns YT. Google makes money on ads, yeah, but they are also dominating the browser game with more people switching to firefox. Both explanations make sense, but only one of them calls for covering up/lying. Also, when any company gets caught doing something that they have some other excuse for, I’m liable to believe the appearance rather than the PR response.
And basing it on user agent doesn’t even make any sense for fighting adblock, that only makes sense for targeting browsers, which their devs know because (I’m assuming) they’re not stupid enough to not understand a core part of their technology stack
This is under the assumption that the user agent change is real. I have seen this spread time and time again, and every time I ask if there is any evidence. So I will ask you as well: do you have evidence for it, or have you experienced it first hand? I have yet to have someone prove that this is true, and I have not been able to create it myself (I tried, but never got a delay to begin with). So until there is evidence that this is true, and not just a rumor being spread, than Occam’s razor cannot apply.
I saw this myself when this was news. Created empty firefox profile, installed only userscript changer plugin.
Default user agent - rotating loading circle before video starts playing. Windows/Chrome user agent - video starts immediately.
Tried with multiple videos, changing first user agent that opened the video to make sure it’s not cached somewhere.
Didn’t bother to install Chrome for reverse test though.
Now it’s back to loading at the same speed regardless of user agent though.
That’s already been confirmed to be bullshit…And what I mean by that is that youtube’s claim is bullshit.
This is bullshit even being truth lol “is supposed to punish adblockers” such entitlement and normalization.
Ah yes, because ad viewers get to enjoy the video immediately with zero delay whatsoever. You sure showed those adblock using scum by… Still having a better experience with adblock enabled by virtue of only subjecting them to silence instead of an ad while still not making any money.
Even assuming what they’re claiming is truely their intention, it’s still dumb as hell.
Not to mention the ad would almost certainly be longer than 5 seconds anyway
Freetube, Newpipe, Indivious. All great.
peertube
I like it, but the stuff I want to see is not on there.
I’m nervous about how long it’ll be until those stop working
That might be hard unless they start requiring logins.
Twitter has already moved in that direction.
And twitter is doing pretty good, right?
i never experienced that delay in the first place…
I don’t mind ads, I understand that websites need to finance themselves to cover their costs (and maybe build up some capital to expand). But I do mind tracking, user profiling, personalization / user targeting, trading this data with dubious companies worldwide, and obnoxious ads, for example pop-ups or auto-play videos with a 1 micron sized close button, or a forced timed ad which is hiding the content.
It’s like having a bunch of people following you around, taking note of everything you do, evaluating that data, making statistics, dicsussing it with other people you don’t know, etc… Then, when you want to make yourself a sandwich, step in between you and your sandwich, taking up a megaphone and scream into your face : “OH, WE NOTICED THAT YOU ARE MAKING A SANDWICH. CAN WE INTERST YOU IN NEW FANCY BUTTER KNIVES FOR ONLY 59,99 €?” [Then going on about it for 3 minutes before they are stepping out of your way].
There are laws against that in real life, and in the digital realm this is missing. Considering how much time a lot of people spend online this is something which needs to be taken seriously.
It’s really scary sometimes. There was a time when I was stupid enough to use facebook, just to stay in touch with friends. Once I talked with a friend about allergies and asthma, and I told them I have a pollen allergy. A short time later an ad showed up on my facebook feed, advertising some nasal spray for allergies. Wtf?! And that’s just the surface. “Harmless” ads. Who knows what else happens with that data?
And then we get stuff like Cambridge Analytica.
Personally, I do mind ads. They exist purely to convince people to buy stuff. In most cases, they are dishonest, or at the very least present the products in a favorable manner that hides flaws people might deserve to know. And even good ads are a distraction from what I actually want to see or do.
I completely agree, ad companies have taken user tracking too far. It is absolutely scary how much ad companies know about my private life, and there’s no realistic way to stop them. We really need better legislation.
The ad company does not actually know anything about you or your life. That’s an illusion.
I find this so weird. Like, I want the exact literal opposite of what you want - I want personalized ads about shit I might conceivably click on.
I want usable personalized internet that knows where I am and offers me local deals and hotspots.
The hell are you so afraid of? Honestly?
The ads are not necessarily for things that are helpful to you, they are for things that other people want you to spend money on. There’s a big difference.
The entire point of ads is that they target the middle part of that venn diagram.
I cannot imagine being dumb enough to buy something you’re not interested in just because an ad popped up. An entire industry exists because that so rarely happens
Unfortunately, you’re misinterpreting the purpose of advertising. What you and I expect, logically, is what I used to teach the kids I trained back when I worked at a fish market. I told them, “Your job isn’t to convince the customer that they want something. They already know what they want. Your job is to use your knowledge to inform them so they buy what they need instead of getting what they think they need.”
However, this isn’t traditionally what advertising is for. Traditional advertising is about taking a shotgun to that Venn Diagram and blowing a hole through the entire circle because it’s cheaper and easier, and will grab people from outside the middle too. Take Coca-Cola, for example. Everybody knows what Coke is, they have no need to advertise to make people aware of their product. They could save billions by not advertising and people would still know who they are and what they sell. The reason that they put so much money into advertising every year, plastering their logo on billboards and TV commercials and the like, is because they want to plant their product into your subconscious. They don’t expect you to see an ad for Coke and go out and buy some, though they’d love it if you would; what they want is the next time you go to buy groceries or order food at a restaurant, you’re going to get a Coke since their product is in the back of your mind. Car ads are about making you remember that clever ad you saw the next time you’re planning on getting a car so you’ll buy their brand. Not on the merits of the cars themselves but on the ad sticking in your mind. It’s easier to get somebody to buy something based on them remembering a catchy jingle on the radio than to convince them that your product is better than the competitors. Shops like Temu are based entirely on getting you to buy stuff you’re not interested in, simply because “it’s such a good deal!” and if you don’t buy it now, you’ll miss out on the savings!
Targeted ads are just about increasing the likelihood that you’ll view an ad by making that process more efficient, often by violating your privacy as an individual. Advertisers don’t pay per clickthrough, they pay per view. As far as platforms like YouTube and Facebook are concerned, you’re the product that they’re selling to the companies, and tracking everything you do is just about finding the right companies to sell you to. You being happy with a purchase is just a side effect of that transaction. It’s why if you look up technology patents, you’ll find stuff like televisions designed to track your eyes to make sure you’re actually watching the ads or prevent you from muting the TV during ads. This is why Google is cracking down on adblockers so hard right now. People who use adblockers are statistically less likely to click on an ad than people who don’t. But YouTube doesn’t care about that. They care that those people aren’t viewing ads and therefore they can’t charge advertisers for those views, even though forcing people with adblockers to see ads would actually reduce companies clickthrough rates so they’d be paying YouTube more for less. Ironically, it’s in both advertisers and people who use adblockers best interest to prevent Google from ruining adblockers.
So you want to constantly be a slave to your consumerist impulses as you uncritically consume everything thrown at you, despite all the evidence that these companies can literally manipulate your perception of reality through targeted political advertising and echo chambers? Enjoy your terrifying dystopia, but at least you think you’re getting a ‘local deal’ so who cares, right?
Holy shit dude what happens to you when you see an ad??
You need to inform yourself about advertising. Go and look up Edward Bernays. You literally can’t stop ads affecting you, except by eliminating them. You think you’re being a critical consumer, but you’re right where they want you.
I know more about advertising than you do man, sorry
That’s pretty presumptive. And pretty unlikely as you’ve shown yourself to be very naive about how advertising works. If you have any qualifications in it, your initial confusion shouldn’t have been there.
Filter bubbles are one thing, which I find is a huge disadvantage to personalization. You’ll never learn about new stuff, because it will never be presented to you, since someone assumes that you blong to a specific box.
Another is that I value my privacy. It’s no one’s business what I do, when, where, with whom and how. Apart from that, there is no guarantee that this information is not being misused.
For example, I’m thinking about political campaigns, which target specific user groups on the one hand, or spread misinformation and distrust to others. I see such forms of information steering as detrimental to democratic societies. Free and unbiased information is crucial for critical thinking.
Look up resources on helping someone with an addiction of any sort and watch the avalanche of ads for alcohol and such :( that’s one of the darker “harmless” ads I’ve heard of. It’s disgusting.
How did we function before youtube. besides music videos I rarely like video anything. howto skip skip skip. Used up all my skips on amazon too.
There used to be a whole tv channel for music videos
They forced our hands in creating and using adblockers. Remember how awful the web was getting before we could adblock? Pop ups, force play videos with full sound, entire webpages full of ads with a tiny bit of content in the middle.
Embedded .midi files
The funniest part is that the abject uselessness of web ads is well known to the advertisers. They do it anyway, and for so little gain that it’s effectively a statistical rounding error. They have no idea what else to do soon they shrug and burn the money anyway because thems the rules of capitalism.
Youtube be like: “Theyre the same people”
Oh, no! Better disable my ad blocker quick!
Yeah, not sure what they are expecting to happen…
I’m using Firefox but is it not possible to block ads in chrome too?
If they haven’t already, Google is in the process of disabling ad block extensions on all chrome based browsers. There have been a ton of posts about this on Lemmy.
Random article that came up on search
androidauthority.com/google-chrome-manifest-v3-ch…
Not when they roll out manifest v3
It won’t be possible in the future. It should be happening soonish if I’m remembering correctly. There’s a change to how add-ons will be allowed to work in chrome.
Freetube on PCs, LibreTube on Android. Block that, fuck-o.
.
NewPipe, yt-dlp
I wish I could make YouTube “experience suboptimal revenue” in retaliation, but sadly I can’t block more than 100% of ads.
You can use Adnauseum, silently/invisibly clicks on every ad as well as hiding them so that the ads get worthless data, your info is drowned out with false stuff (there’s a term but I blanked on it), hurts ads
Edit: Will disclose I don’t use it as though it’s based on uBO it’s worse and on the libgen.li book piracy websites uBO lets me actually download a book while Adnauseum doesn’t let me
This delay has happened on Brave browser too, it’s not FF specific. But it’s pathetic either way.
I mean, if they really wanted to show you ads, they could just switch the returned stream when the video player calls for certain chunk, then when that ad is done playing, switch back to the original stream. The user experience would be basically like watching TV.
don’t give them ideas!!
Or just literally do not serve the video.
Nvm that would imply heavy tracking and integrity drm bullshit Rather not let android WebView integrity grow…
Whatever you say Google. Hey EU, Google wants to chat with you.
Isn’t it weird that EU, famous for being so fragmented that they can’t decide on common interior or foreign policy, all while being ridiculed for their large and inefficient bureaucracy, still is the sole entity that manages to stand up to mega corporations?
And those are sometimes fights that have zero benefit to a different wealthy elite, but actually protect citizen liberties.
I shudder to think how the world would look like if EU had not established and enforced the GDPR as well as it does. Consumer protection is probably one of the only fields where the EU had a global positive impact.
So what? I have to wait about 5 seconds anyway because I have a slow internet connection. No big deal. 5 seconds of not watching a youtube video is probably good for you.
Tee hee. I don’t use UserTuber.
Oh wow, I just opened lemmy because a YouTube video was taking extra time to open in Firefox lol.
It’s like when a teacher can’t target the bad kid so they punish the whole class instead.
5 seconds of silence vs 30+ seconds of ads. Tough choice Google, tough choice.
Little do these companies know that poor people know how to be patient and older people remember the days of free ad supported internet dialup via cds, so this is not new and people will continue where business models fail.
.