This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Worse than using YouTube without an ad blocker?
That's the funny thing about this threat. It implies that using YouTube the regular way is "optimal" viewing. It's fucking shit without adblock.
Even without ads it's shit without sponsorblock for me. Not even for the sponsor spots, but the absolutely annoying copy paste of please like, subscribe, hit the notification icon, blah blah blah blah blah.
That's shit, but it's still usable as I can shortcut my way around it. The ads are hot liquid swamp ass that make it unusable. I see ad, I circumvent or close tab.
How to quit YT in a week?
There is absolutely zero possibility that they can find a way to make my experience on YouTube worse than my experience on YouTube without uBlock.
The fact that my children know the Liberty Mutual jingle from watching YouTube at school says no.
which is a hilarious threat because the #1 way to make my viewing experience worse would be turning off my ad blocker, lmao
"if you don't voluntarily make your experience 10x worse, we will make it 2x worse"
Ive had my ad blocker turned off for a week on Youtube. Theres a preroll ad on every video and a shitload of ad break mid video and at the last 3 seconds of a video.
Its the worst viewing experience I can imagine. I cut out Twitch and even stopped all my subs when they went mandatory ad viewing. Im full on ready for third party options in the same spirit as Lemmy.
I also think they are fucking with the sound levels in the same way TV did prior to the FTC ruling. The commercials are awfully loud compared to the content.
I think my viewing experience will be even worse if I turn off my ad blocker.
Youtube advertising is absolute trash. It's already bad enough to sit through ads when you don't even know if you want to watch the video. Their ads consist of fake Joe Rogans with tts voices advertising scams.
Get fucked, YouTube.
Loving Freetube, Newpipe, and Grayjay more and more every day!
Tried to dive into Piped recently, but nothing would load.
I'm only surface-level competent with computers though, so I probably fucked something up... since you've poked around multiple options, which one(s) do you recommend as the most idiot proof?
YouTube is just messing around. They could encode ads randomly on videos if they wanted to, like podcasts.
There's already a sponsor blocker extension that skips when a sponsor is even mentioned, it would be trivial to add other embedded ads to it.
cheaper to just have the interns code buggy Javascript then to reencode millions of videos.
This. I don't exactly know how YouTube's architecture works, but from running my own mediaserver i woild guess They don't live transcode because that takes clock cycles on a graphics card or a CPU. They transcode a couple of different bitrate files to serve up and then just serve up direct stream file transfers, thus saving electricity and clock cycles. In order to actively embed an ad in a YouTube video it would have to be done semi-permanently, Decreasing the value of live serve ads.
You're correct that they're not doing live transcoding when a video is played. That's way too expensive in every regard. There are still ways to embed ads dynamically into the video without requiring live transcoding. They likely have 5-10 qualities they encode to, and segment the video into 10s segments, so a 5 minute video would be cut into 30 segments, and then each of those files encoded to multiple qualities upon upload.
That way when playing, if your Internet gets slow, the player can seamlessly downgrade to another quality. These small files concatenated together appear like one long video. Adding some ads served from the same servers as the content could be done dynamically for each request and be difficult to block without impacting the video content delivery, since you can't have uBlock Origin block the domain hosting the content.
Realistically, they probably don't do this approach because you don't know if the ad was loaded because of buffering, but never viewed, so the ad network gets less metrics and therefore the ads are less valuable. Also, I would bet the content upload and distribution team are completely separate from the ad team, so that cross collaboration is more difficult to implement.
How about you suck my balls accordingly, google?
Oh no, so how will I be able to tell a difference?
Can’t make it worse of you don’t use it.
Youtube is past the growth phase, at this point it's about minimising cost and maximising revenue.
If you regularly use it with adblock but decide to stop using it because of this, then youtube would have succeeded. You weren't making them money and were costing them bandwidth, so good riddance.
If you really want to stick it to them, turn on adblock, find some long videos and play them on mute in the background at 4K/1080p60 resolution. Cost them even more bandwidth.
Even better, start randomly disliking videos or making nonsensical comments (not hateful or toxic ones, just comments that don't make sense). Enshittify it further.
I can also just back out and just not watch said videos...
Google: “Fine, I’ll turn off your adblocker myself!” *rolling out Manifest v3*
Turning off your ad-blocker is like running in jail, naked. So no thanks, YT.
Both Firefox + uBlock Origin saved me countless times from malicious ads since years. You should do it too.
If for some reason you can't use a full-on ad blocker, "SponsorBlock for Youtube" is another Firefox extension you can install. It doesn't block ads per se, but it will auto-skip segments of a video that have been reported as ad content. Kind of a grassroots thing, like reporting cops on Waze.
Keep it up, dumbasses.
Catch the hint...the harder you try the harder we do. There's no trying from our end.
So I'm a little lazy and have to watch ads when I watch YouTube on my TV. I don't care enough to fix this.
Anyways, I don't mind the short ads. I get it, you gotta pay for your stuff somehow. What I don't get is these ads that can stretch on for 10, 15, even 150 minutes. I think I had a 3 hour ad at one point. It's insane. You should have to opt in to these ads that are longer than say 30 seconds.
YouTube losing the war on AdBlockers, lol.
PeerTube & Odysee when?
When the video creators you watch move to them.
Kind of shocked it took this long.
It always cost more more but the games that used clever traps were a lot more effective than just drm. Because warez groups can easily check if the game launches. Not if every enemy after mission four has infinite health and pinpoint accuracy.
Just curious if this maps to "shit, Google knows Twitter exists and figured out what we are doing" or "YouTube servers are broken"
