I haven’t seen an anti adblocker popup on youtube for a couple months now, I though they gave up. It looks like the uBlock developers and block list maintainers are just doing an excellent job staying ahead of whatever youtube is doing.
Revanced update fixed it on their end about two weeks ago also.
Bless the Revanced guys. They made my mobile youtube binge watches as smooth as my desktop firefox + ublock setup.
Now? They’ve always been playing whack-a-mole against third party apps.
it would be amazing if they could just add a mobile ui to Smarttube (best android tv app imho) - it supports login, adblock, sponsorblock & dearrow, you can cast to it, etc. - and it’s updated constantly, via a prompt in the app, no external download or play store necessary
This Hour Has 22 Minutes
They need to distract the MBAs with a box of crayons to eat so the adults can make good decisions.
New pipe and inner tune still work fine.
For now
exactly, it would be trivial to have a whitelist server side and now only ad friendly apps can access the videos. they only still work because it’s worth keeping those viewers in the system for the time being.
Trivial? What information does this whitelist hold that can’t be spoofed? It’s not like apps have to tell the truth about what they are.
People do that? Just have their code go on the internet and tell lies?! This is a Christian internet!
(yes it’s /s)
This is what current implementations like Revanced do. The endgame will be fullblown DRM. Until then, it will be a cat and mouse game.
Technically NewPipe simply parses the website and is seen as a web browser from YouTube’s point of view.
That how they bypass the API’s TOS, they don’t use it.
exactly, it would be trivial to have a whitelist server side and now only ad friendly apps can access the videos. they only still work because it’s worth keeping those viewers in the system for the time being.
It’s not trivial to make sure over the network on a device you don’t control that you’re talking with an app you think you are talking with. Just look how multiplayer games fail to combat cheaters and resort to kernel anticheats, and then still fail to assure the players are actually using the legit application. It’s actually pretty much impossible in any open ecosystem, maybe possible on something like chromecast where you get to control almost anything (as long as someone doesn’t hack it to run custom firmware, like they do with every console ever).
Not only is this impossible, it always makes the experience for your legit users worse (but hey, if they are fine with the level of ads on yt today they probably don’t care if google were to mine bitcoins on their phones).
Same with revanced right now.
If they ever manage to kill it I’ll simply quit YouTube and be better for it.
I’ll be very sad to quit it but I will too.
I can’t live without sponsorblock
In Germany, there is a law that regulates the amount and intervals of advertising for private television broadcasters: 20% or 1/5 per broadcast day may be used for advertising. Programs that are shorter than 30 minutes may have a break, otherwise there must be 20 minutes between commercial breaks - 30 minutes in the evening. Unfortunately, there are still some loopholes.
Children’s programs are not allowed to have commercial breaks.
It’s a shame that this law still doesn’t apply to YouTube.
I literally just use the Dislike Re-Adder, also used uBlock Origin and never got an Anti-AdBlock message
What they don’t realize is people are also using those third party apps because they are offering much more customization than the stock YouTube app ever offers. I had free premium and still used Revanced because it’s such a godsend. There’s so much useless crap in the youtube layout.
I have premium now and use revanced. I can’t stand the create button in the middle of the screen. I have no desire to make shitty videos for their platform. I would use the default app if I could just customize what buttons are on screen so I don’t accidentally press one. That seems like a great accessibility feature, but I guess they don’t care about some people.
I have premium and use revanced, I agree.
“because that prevents the creator from being rewarded for viewership”
not like Youtube rewards creators for viewership either (and then lying to the advertisers as well)
They could probably retain users simply by running ads every 10 minutes, rather than every 3 minutes.
Money/s is the more used metric. Retention is secondary or even tertiary to money/s. Behold the algorithm, great and terrible, sheathed in robes of black and grasping sickle white.
Ah, but you’re one layer off. Projected/potential money/s (in the next 1-2 quarters mainly) is what is truly king.
It doesn’t have to be a good idea, it can be a terrible one - but good sounding words in the board room are what matter
“Hey, so we’ve decided to see if we can run 10 unskippable ads back to back. Simultaneously, we’ve launched a war on ad blockers. This time it will surely work because we found out you can ignore your customers - Elon Musk has shown us the way, he only lost bots with all his innovation. We expect people to get over it in 3 months and estimate we’ll lose 4 users. Between 10x more ads and half our users off ad blockers, we project 20x ad revenue next quarter!”
-Words of a future CEO, probably
Oh but they don’t care about anything but short form content. If they could ditch supporting long form content today they would.
Nah they want lots of short form and also like 10 hour long videos that can play 200 ads in it that you forget is on in the background. They want tiktok and broadcast TV.
They really just want to show you ads.
The cold, hard steel of the sword of truth.
Such a fantastic series :) (the books, not any of the garbage adaptations)
This reply makes me so happy. The books are always better.
I think YouTubers make fractional pennies from Ads, and mostly only if its fully watched and sometimes clicked to go to the website. So if you get a 15 second ad, and skip to the content, you didn’t give the creators any money.
Also, shout out to those ads being horrible. My first time ever installing an adblocker was during a rapid anti-smoking campaign, that had body horror. 15 year old me didn’t want to smoke, nor wanted to after, but it was so disturbing that I learned how to avoid them.
Not even going into the disturbing or weird ads. One time I got an ad for a “Ching Chong Fing Fong shirt company” as a way of mocking Chinese people because their government sucks. Another time, I got a full 12 hour video by a Vietnamese couple just grilling in their backyard. No subtitles, not even sure if they were aware they enabled their videos to do that, or didn’t fully understand the process of uploading videos.
Anytime I see actual ads on the internet, not just YouTube, it just makes me go “I am perfectly justified in not seeing these weird ads.” I don’t give them any money no matter what I do, so why not have my eyes saved from bright flashing colors and scam artists?
If it hadn’t been for ublock origin, I’d not be on YT this long
My first time ever installing an adblocker was during a rapid anti-smoking campaign
Those ads made me want to take up smoking out of spite.
Ouch. Cutting off the nose to spite the face.
That was the purpose. You see, Big Tobacco actually sponsors the anti-smoking campaigns, which does give them some creative input. They tell the writers to make them as annoying as possible.
If I recall correctly, ever since videos could be called up as ads you can just pay for any video to be an ad, as long as it’s on YouTube, and it doesn’t have to be yours. I don’t know if this has changed, but an essays channel figured out that that’s the fastests way someone could target a competitor’s channel. Paying to have someone else’s videobat an ad tanks that video ad revenue and discoverability instantly. Ad views count as views to the video and skipping an ad counts as a skip on the video which signals the algorithm to think that nobody wants or likes to see that video. Do it to enough new videos and you can entirely kill a previously profitable channel in a couple of months.
TheSpiffingBrit did video on that.
everything still fine here on firefox + ublock origin
Sometimes I have to reload the page when using these 2. the page will load but just have a youtube icon in the centre of the player or the spinny circle until i hit f5
Wish I could say the same.
I’m also using firefox + ublock, but Ive noticed when I’m watching shorts, I’ll occasionally get an ad that’s disguised as a short. There’s no like/dislike buttons or anything.
Just block shorts alltogether, it’s a win win.
How do you block shorts entirely? I used to be able to x them away in YouTube Desktop for 30 days but I can’t find that option anymore. And can they be blocked in ReVanced as well?
I found some website that had a line of code that could be added to my adblocker to completely remove them.
Haven’t seen them since.
I think it was this: https://letsblock.it/filters/youtube-shorts
But… my doomscroll :<
Just read climate news.
BitchPeas.
That’s intended. Even to premium subs youtube pushes adds which try and promote engagement. Its fucking awful.
Does get me out of the loop sometimes though, so I guess Im thankful for that.
Since the initial push, I have not even had to reset my ublock… stop using Chrome
Makes me miss a time where they couldn’t tell if ads were actually watched or not.
Sooner or later, ad blockers should just simulate the ad being played (in the background) with the real content going in the foreground to act as if the ad was watched.
Kind of like going to the bathroom during commercials.
Then again I wish we had a real alternative to YouTube. (Don’t point me to the fediverse video stuff … that’s not what I mean.) There is no real competition for a place to freely upload videos … or on the other side find all that content. No one wants to scale enough to compete. (Very few probably could considering the amount of new content per minute).
If only there was real competition, then YouTube would have to fight over our attention/usage by lowering ad count.
No competition means worse for all.
Sooner or later, ad blockers should just simulate the ad being played (in the background) with the real content going in the foreground to act as if the ad was watched.
I wish adblockers did this, open the ad in a little silenced sandbox window. I don’t see the ad, creator gets their pay
I wonder about this. Youtube is made so that videos has to be long (10 minutes at least, or you won’t get exposure, right?) so we get all those dragged out videos with long summaries.
Also you are supposed to earn money with it, which combined makes videos, IMO, often not very interesting.
Sure, I get it, everyone can’t make videos all day long for free, but isn’t that something that we shouldn’t maybe want?
I prefer a genuine hobbyist making one video a year, than a sponsored person pushing one a day.
Which brings me to hosting and bandwidth needs, youtube needs a lot of that because of its business model, but say Lemmy communities could probably host quality videos without large hassle (especially if small servers wasn’t defederated all the time).
Thoughts?
No one wants to scale enough to compete.
I don’t consider scale important from the perspective of making and watching good videos. People get hung up on it when citing barriers to competition with Youtube, and while it’s certainly there, it only matters to Google itself (so it can continue to plausibly lie to its customers about ad impression numbers). In fact YT’s offering was at its creative peak when scale was lacking.
It makes no difference to me whether a knowledgeable hobbyist has 20,000 subs or 250,000. I don’t care about their “content” suitability for advertisers (that creepy term can get nuked). I certainly couldn’t care less whether the algorithm promotes their work, deserving as it may be. This sort of creator operates on the assumption their viewers are intelligent, and is typically savvy enough to route around YT with alternate donation/support mechanisms. These people will continue on any platform. For them, quality is an end in itself rather than a feed-in to a metric. I would rather watch a badly filmed insightful critical appraisal of a new piece of hardware than Canadian/Black Technology Man’s 8K press release rehash full of slick cuts and pointless b-roll.
Scale is the concern of middlemen.
Well, YT is literally getting petabytes uploaded to it. Every single day. Thats 1000 terabytes, and thats 1000000 gigabytes.
I bet you haven’t even seen a petabyte of storage in one place (assuming you didn’t go to a data center yourself). How is a small company, or even fediverse, gonna handle that? Thats absolutely insane amount of data and, without moderation or curation, it is not feasible.
It’s a giant waste of space and resources, to be honest. Most videos are seen once, and the rest is mostly spam or bad quality content.
Well break it up “lemmy wise” or more? I mean nobody can replace youtube but it would be possible having your own fishing channel for example. If it gets wildly watched you probably have to figure out some sponsorship for sure.
BTW no I haven’tseen a PB storage, but I did write visualisation and computation software for treating and seing datastructures up to PB size with hdf5.
Actually the cost issues wouldn’t be the storage it’s self. Storage is pretty cheap, it’s content delivery networks. YouTube is supported by being owned and run by one of the worlds larges content delivery networks. There’s virtually no latency, videos play immediately.
Having millions (potentially billions in YouTube’s case) of people accessing data at once is an immense challenge and YouTube perfected it pretty early on, that’s part of why there’s no competition.
Content delivery is not cheap, but not hard to do, either. I’d wager storage would be a bigger problem, because it just keeps rising. Sadly, YouTube is the one with money, and the monetization comes from people.
There’s a tool that does this. It speeds up the ad so it takes only a couple of seconds. The ad is “watched” but muted the whole time so you don’t actually have to deal with it.
Edit: The article isn’t great but the tool is sort of the same as what you mentioned. https://9to5google.com/2023/11/25/youtube-ads-speed-up-workaround/
Somewhere out there a CEO thought this was a good idea. All it seems to be doing is pushing people to other platforms (the younger gen moving over to tiktok and the older gens moving 3rd party or just offline).
While I agree, the amount of people who’d do this is negligibly small, compared to their total userbase. Obviously a bunch of people use ad blockers, but only a tiny amount of them have modified apps, followed by an even tinier amount of those people with fully custom frontends. For YT it might work out as a net positive, because the annoying blocks and reminders will just pressure people into paying for Premium.
At the end of the day, I could just stop watching youtube entirely, if this trend continues. I have nothing to gain there
Yes, been thinking I’ve just been substituting YT for * TV, and while the consumption can still be customized, it’s still a habit that can be kicked. I bet I’ll get more sleep and productivity.
- Lol autocorrect
I guess what there really winning is all those non tech-savvy people who currently have an adblocker installed because their friend helped.
Good. Let their stranglehold die.
I hope they understand soon why we have ALL of those tweaks and adblockers. Because vanilla youtube SUCKS, Ads everywhere, not customizable and tracking even if you are paying.
