SponsorBlock (and DeArrow): "YouTube is currently experimenting with server-si…" - Fosstodon

Support a federated open source peertube instance instead of proprietary centralized paywalled garbage like Nebula. Just because the shittification isn't there yet doesn't mean it won't be as soon as it gets a bit more popular.

There is quite a variety of services like that, curiosity stream is another one.

I really like the idea of Nebula, but the way they market themselves as "creator owned" without being an actual workers cooperative seems deceitful (still much better than YouTube, though!)

Ads need to be tailored to the user when delivered

1. It does not. If you install a new browser and open YouTube the first time, they'll be able to show ads to you
2. They could be tailored based on other factors too, like country, region, or even household by the IP

I think the backend could just generate the ad ridden video feed for the specific user. Most probably it would be very resource intensive, but I can only hope so.. but then I also don't know much about HLS and other fragmented streams so it might not be a performance problem at all.

like a linked list

I think the full list of chunks is (currently) known beforehand. That's how yt-dlp can download on multiple threads, but also how it can show the number of total fragments relatively quickly on the progress bar

... which is why youtube has recently started blocking non-logged in users

yeah that makes sense. i was thinking maybe youtube had servers to decide what chunks clients would get, maybe by looking at whether or not they are premium users first. but anyway youtube still needs a way to differentiate between ad chunks and video chunks, otherwise we would just be able to skip 10 seconds through all the ads. surely that can be exploited somehow.

I can't morally justify blocking ads and viewing their content for free.

I can't morally justify anything they are doing, and have been doing for many many years already. Yet I use their public services because they are unavoidable. But I would never give money to such a company.

I'd get premium if they weren't so insistent on bundling in bullshit I don't want or care about to justify the high price. I put up with enough of that from cable TV. I'll pay when there's an ad-free tier that doesn't do anything else and is a reasonable price for "the service that's free with ads, but without ads". If there was a per-device premium tier that I could throw on my Roku, and all my family members could have premium when they stream from there, I'd pay for that. I'd pay for family tier if it didn't have the dumb single-household rule which screws over truckers and those who travel for a living.

Google has options they could take to convince consumers to pay to not see ads, but there's no creativity left there, no effort to court the market or adapt the service and prices to what potential customers need and are willing to pay. And it's because they believe they are the market, and want to keep it that way.

I'm pretty lucky not liking most YouTube style content these days, so don't consume too much of it like I used to. Lot of the creators feel like AI with the same phrase of if you are new to the channel like and subscribe and ring the notification bell...blah blah blah. And then drag out info that can be said in a minute into a 10 minute long ramble for the algorithm.

YouTube these days is more for music or checking out a part of a game I'm stuck on these days from a creator with like 1 sub putting up a 10 second long clip that gets straight to the point. Those guys are the heroes over the 5+ minute long uploads of the same content in comparison that has you have to dig into the comments to find where to skip to.

I'm not giving google a dime, they take enough from me that I should be paid to use their shit. I'll just download what I want to watch, it's not really much of inconvenience.

Surely The Algorithm will not know of the ads inserted, so that won't influence the results.

Oh, it's been pretty crap for a while now. I constantly see viewers complain about AIDS ads and even content creators feel poorly about them.

Looking at https://twitchtracker.com/statistics shows a relatively flat viewership base. Since January, they've seen a decrease of close to 15% viewers and concurrent channels. It appears that they had a large increase in viewers and channels in 2020, probably due to Covid, and since then they have been in decline.

Even when you don't know the language, you can judge if something is an ad just by an overly excited tone of voice. I wonder if someone has tried writing an ad detection algorithm already. It would still be a lot heavier on resources than SponsorBlock.

How?

By the way, yes, it is.

The last time Google pulled out all the stops to fight ad blockers, I had to update uBlock Origin every now and then until the whole thing passed. That's all.

So I'm not worried. But I am amused that they keep making ads more obnoxious, which pushes more people to use ad blockers. I didn't even use sponsorblock until a particularly egregious bit of native advertising. They could probably gain ground by just making ads less irritating, but they absolutely will not.

it would require government intervention. Where a regulation must declare that ads must clearly be labelled as ads, so that adjustments can be made by detecting when is the ad segment happening.

This one might be harder, if YT just sends the ad like it was part of the video file, generating it on the fly, it's a lot harder to detect, and probably not too hard for them to do, but breaking timestamps is pretty bad for some types of videos, like tutorials.

See Flash websites ripping each other off for five years on either side of Youtube's introduction.

See Bittorrent moving more video than Netflix until like 2012.

See twenty years of web-based P2P experiments. Weirdos with fat hard drives (hi) will always be happy to seed.

Or - crazy thought - services could cost money. It would not take much. Youtube's not getting ten bucks each time you watch a video. Bandwidth and storage keep getting cheaper. Nor are they paying for content, unlike Netflix and so on, and those fuckers are also considering ads.

But think of all the people that would die because they didn't forward those emails to 10 people they knew...

Has any federated service ever been in trouble for GDPR?

The state of whether it's an ad has to be somewhere clientside as the ads can't be skipped by the user.

Yeah Firefox + Ublock Origin. It buffers for me indefinitely and the only way to fix it is to skip ahead 10 or so seconds. If I then go back 10 seconds it starts buffering again.

A Boring Dystopia, or the Firefox or Technology communities (any)