• GravitySpoiled@lemmy.ml
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    4 months ago

    That’ll make youtube disappear for me.

    Over the years I watched less and less. I only seldomly have to look into youtube for things that are easier in video than in text.

    Teens and many people don’t know that there is a world without ads. They have to be educated that there are alternatives - not watching youtube is a real option. You do not depend on it.

    I’s a horrible world many people live in. Recently I saw someone browsing on instagram, each third post is an ad and oftentimes there are ads after ads. And people follow other people and watch their ads. Incredible!

    Recently, I was browsing linkedin and there were 12 ads instead of real jobs in a row. in a row. Unrelated to my profession.

    • Cheradenine@sh.itjust.works
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      4 months ago

      I think many people see it as normal/expected.

      A coworker showed me a video yesterday on their phone, I said ‘holy hell what is this shit? This is what it looks like for you?’ And opened it in Tubular. They had no idea such a thing existed.

      I rarely watch videos because I prefer to read. The people I work with spend a vast amount of their free time watching YouTube and TikTok. They just seem to zone out, or be really interested when an ad comes on.

      • Rolando@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        I think many people see it as normal/expected.

        Yes, that’s it. People born in the early part of last century (my grandparent’s era) only knew over-the-air TV which in the US included commercials. It was just part of reality, like billboards by the highway.

  • RotatingParts@lemmy.ml
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    4 months ago

    This is where we could use a browser plug in that uses AI to learn what an ad is and skip it for us. Now we just need someone to start working on it.

    • IllNess@infosec.pub
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      4 months ago

      Plugins can add controls and it can download videos, but plugins can’t interact with videos directly I think.

      Maybe use the Youtube API closed captions and figure out the patterns for ads that way?

      • Creat@discuss.tchncs.de
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        4 months ago

        Of course they can interact with it just fine, look at “sponsorblock” plug-in. It would also solve this problem completely. It already exists and works well, it just isn’t “AI” nonsense.

        • Jeena@piefed.jeena.net
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          4 months ago

          You are missing the point that sponsorblock only works without AI because everyone gets the same video delivered. Once they have targeted ads of variable length and amount you need someone to watch your specific version of the video and do the tagging where the ads ans sponsors are. You could pay someone to do it for you but that is expensive and very slow. Or you can train a ML model to recognize the patterns and tag it for you hopefully pretty fast.

        • IllNess@infosec.pub
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          4 months ago

          Yes, that is adding controls and using a database from the SponsorBlock server.

          What I mean is a plugin cannot see the video. Like you can’t write

          if(screen == adScreen) {
               then skipToNextSegment();
          }
          

          The plugin isn’t reading the video, it is getting info from a database. For AI or machine learning to work ad injection, which might change for every user, doing what SponsorBlock is doing is not enough.

    • Zerush@lemmy.mlOP
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      4 months ago

      For a lot of things I already had changed to alternative sites, the best alternative to YT IMHO is Odysee, music of all kind you can listen here 24/7, or in Bandcamp, for movies there is PlutoTV and the pages of the local public TV for free, news are in the homepage of the prefered newspaper, etc…

        • Zerush@lemmy.mlOP
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          4 months ago

          Certainly there are also neonazis, like in all other streaming platforms too, including YT, where I already blocked some channels because of this. Worst is removedute respect nazies.

        • Themadbeagle@lemm.ee
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          3 months ago

          Idk, Maybe instead of avoiding nazi spaces, people should take a page from their book and just invade them and overwhelm them. Idk about you, I have to put up with hearing and seeing bullshit daily, so my tolerance is high. A lot of these fascist can’t even handle a picture of a catboy lol

  • Turd Ferg@sh.itjust.works
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    4 months ago

    Thats fine. This just fuels developers to make more efficient ad blockers. Youtube wont win the long game and the more they try stuff like this, the more people find out about ublock and other adblockers.

    • Zerush@lemmy.mlOP
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      4 months ago

      uBO and other traditional adblockers can do nothing against embedded ads in YT vids, at least not those in the extension stores. YT won’t permit extensions in the official stores to make useless it’s new policy. The solution can only be in independent sources, that is the problem. In the stores you’ll find only descaffeinated adblockers which blocks only traditional ads on websites. Install, Greasymonkey or Violentmonkey, maybe Tampermonkey and keep an eye on the script repositories.

  • edric@lemm.ee
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    4 months ago

    Crap I just opened youtube today and it looks like I was chosen. The ads load like normal videos and it sucks. My brain actually glitched for a couple of seconds when I opened a video because I wasn’t used to seeing an ad. I dunno if there’s any chance uBO can even counter this.

    • Zerush@lemmy.mlOP
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      4 months ago

      Try to watch the video embedded, simply edit it’s URL, using instead of

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxxxxxxx

      this URL

      https://www.youtube.com/embed/xxxxxxxx

      • edric@lemm.ee
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        4 months ago

        Welp, restarted my laptop and I’m off the testing list so can’t replicate (unless I turn off uBO of course). But thanks, this will be handy if it happens again.

  • Zerush@lemmy.mlOP
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    4 months ago

    YT has 2 posibilities

    • Hosting all videos doble, one with ads and the same vids without for premium user
    • Insert also markers which at the end also are exploited by adblockers and userscripts

    I think they’ll hit their teeth against a rock with this.

    Meanwhile a lot of content creators a changing to Odysee

    • breakingcups@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      That’s not true. The way their streaming works is basically a Playlist of shorter fragments. They can easily insert their own fragments without obvious visual tells if they don’t alter other elements of the page to indicate that an ad is playing.

      • Deckweiss@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        But they will have to alter othet elements on the page. For example, scrubbing. It will either have to be paused at one specific timestamp while the ad is playing or the ad would have to be incorporated into the length of the video.

        In either case, it is detectable.

        The video chunks hash can be calculated and then blocked, in a crowdsourced way like with sponsorblock (but way more effective, because it will cover all videos)

        • WhatAmLemmy@lemmy.world
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          4 months ago

          The obvious solution to me is sponsorblock switching to sampling pixels out of each frame, like that project that encoded data into video streams (yet resilient to compression), there are algorithms that could fingerprint any ad with an extremely high degree of accuracy. It’d be more complex than the current implementation, but it’d also be more resilient. I’d settle for it hiding the video and suppressing the audio for the ads duration, possibly displaying a countdown timer, vs actually watching the ad. Then Youtube would get paid, but have no way of knowing you haven’t seen the ad, and the metrics around their ad effectiveness would ultimately suffer, so users still win.

          You could even go so far as to have the client cache the video, several minutes in advance, dropping all the ad frames, so it’s a seamless experience for the user. I got money, but will spend 10x as much ensuring Google gets less from me. It ain’t about money. It’s about sending a message!

        • vxx@lemmy.world
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          4 months ago

          Wouldn’t it show a Black screen for the duration of the add when you block it?

    • ShortN0te@lemmy.ml
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      4 months ago
      • Hosting all videos doble, one with ads and the same vids without for premium user

      Not quite sure why, they simply could in the fly stitch those files together.

      Twitch is doing that for a while now i think.

      • kevincox@lemmy.ml
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        4 months ago

        Exactly this. It isn’t even really “stitching” as YouTube videos are served as a series of short chunks anyways. So you simply tell the player that there are a few extra chunks which happen to be ads. There is no video processing required it is basically free to do it this way on the sever side.

        • ShortN0te@lemmy.ml
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          4 months ago

          That is true. But then you could probably use the chunk length to determine where the ads starts and ends since there is with a very high probability an unusually long chunk at those times.

          • kevincox@lemmy.ml
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            4 months ago

            I don’t know about YouTube but the chunks are often a fixed length. For example 1 or 2 seconds. So as long as the ad itself is an even number of seconds (which YouTube can require, or just pad the add to the nearest second) so there is no concrete difference between the 1s “content” chunks vs the 1s “ad” chunks.

            If you are trying to predict the ad chunks you are probably better off doing things like detecting sudden loudness changes, different colour tones or similar. But this will always be imperfect as these could just be scene changes that happened to be chunk aligned in the content.

    • Jessica@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      4 months ago

      I think they’ll hit their teeth against a rock with this.

      Press X to doubt

      Most people do not have an adblocker. Most people watch YouTube to varying degrees of frequency and duration. Most people will continue to watch the ads. I’d be surprised if YT noticed any amount of users leaving the site because of this. The privacy minded folk are few and far between.

    • Zak@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      one with ads and the same vids without for premium user

      If it worked that way, which others have already explained it doesn’t, that would break their business model of showing each person individually targeted ads.

      • Zerush@lemmy.mlOP
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        4 months ago

        Better than any other- Well, there are some selfhosted video sites like PeerTube and others, but respect content are not a real alternative, nor other proprietary streaming sites, like removedute, Vimeo, Dailymotion, etc. Front-ends or desktop clients (FreeTube) with the new YT policy will die. What other alternatives then?

  • Zeke@fedia.io
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    4 months ago

    Honestly, I just pull videos from Youtube to watch later. I don’t actually watch anything on Youtube. I do wonder if there’s an upcoming replacement for Youtube like there was for Twitter.

    • elgordino@fedia.io
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      4 months ago

      Because it’s actually really hard to achieve technically. When ads are served outside the stream you can easily serve different ads to different viewers based on their profiles. When the ads are baked into the stream you can either

      A) Create a whole bunch of different copies of the video asset with different ads baked in and then rotate these on a regular basis. Which would be expensive to update and store and limit the range of adverts that could be served to a particular user.

      B) Dynamically create a stream on the users request, which while possible means standard CDN caching isn’t going to work so there’s a distribution challenge.

      Or some other alternative they’ve come up with. I’d be really interest to know what their approach is here.

      • Solemn@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        4 months ago

        Look up how HLS (HTTP Live Streaming) works. They just need to generate a personalized playlist for each person which points at things already hosted on CDN, and insert the ads where they want in the literal text file that your video player reads from to serve you the video.

        I don’t know much about it, but it looks like there’s specific tags designed for dynamic ad insertion. Idk if YouTube plans to use them in this case though, if they want it to be undetectable to the client.

  • Track_Shovel@slrpnk.net
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    4 months ago

    What are the YT alternatives? I use it by default and I’m to exhausted to look for another landing place

  • Greyghoster@aussie.zone
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    4 months ago

    It depends on what the publishers publish for. If it’s money then Peertube is probably not attractive.

  • Bademantel@feddit.de
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    4 months ago

    That move would finally rid me of my addiction to YouTube. So much time, so many possibilities…

    • Zerush@lemmy.mlOP
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      4 months ago

      Not with the crrent ones, it’s easier to difference ads by code than by content in most Vids, eg, divulgations, news, influencers, etc. YT, to not destroy the own business modell, also avoiding that there later also 5 years old vids with outdated ads, must use some kind of dynamic insertion, that means, it can be discovered and skipped by some userscripts, for sure not in the extension stores, but in Greasyfork or OpenuserJS, which are independent from Google influence.