I often see the sentiment that YouTube and adblockers will be forever locked in a cat-and-mouse game. However, for many years now, Twitch has entirely eliminated adblocking on desktop web.
What is stopping YouTube from replicating Twitch’s advertising strategy of embedding ads directly into their videos?
Youtube (like Reddit) has forgotten that they only exist in the first place because of the uploads of their users. They produce no content themselves. They need us a LOT more than we need them.
The issue with YouTube is that while they don’t produce their own content, they’re currently hosting a wealth of information and there is no competitor at this moment who can come close to consolidating all that archival information.
I don’t mean react videos or mrbeast. If those ever disappeared from the face, nothing of value would have been lost.
I mean science, history and engineering channels. Tutorials and full blown college or university lectures. Documentaries. Archival videos and audio recordings. There is a great wealth of information currently hosted on YouTube and they’re holding it hostage.
Those will have to find a new home and it will likely be spread out over different hosting services so we will lose the convenience of having all this great information under one roof. Look at how dispersed lemmy is at the moment. I have no doubt that Lemmy will eventually match reddit, but lets be honest. We lose a great centralized location for information, tech support and memes.
I don’t think the centralization of information is necessarily a good thing. Besides, having information on different sites is why search engines exist. When I need to learn how to replace, let’s say a toilet shut off valve, I start with a search engine, so it doesn’t matter to me if I find a video on YouTube, Vimeo, or some other service, as long as I don’t have to sign up to view it.
The convenience that YouTube offers is a centralized place for entertainment, like Netflix used to be, and like we’ve had to do with streaming, we’ll adapt if we must.
YouTube was an amazing idea that changed the world, but now it’s being squeezed for every penny that Google can get, a company that found “Don’t be evil” too restrictive. It’s just another example of what happens when a company has to be more profitable every year in order to be considered successful.
Don’t get me wrong. I never said it was a good thing.
But unfortunately its what we have now. Same thing with Wikipedia. If they one day decided they wanted to squeeze a few pennies out of Wikipedia or just close shop overnight, we’d all be shit outta luck because its the only massive scale encyclopedia around. Nothing else comes close.
We should absolutely seek to decentralize that repository of videos yet somehow maintain the ease of having a collective index we can easily scour through to find the information we need.
I apologize if I put words in your mouth.
Fortunately, it’s actually pretty easy to download a copy of Wikipedia and it’s not even that big. For YT, it would be a pretty massive undertaking. I suppose a good way to start would be to download all the content from channels that you found interesting; I’m pretty sure there are tools that facilitate that. Then, ignoring licensing and copyright issues, hosting the content would depend on how big the data is. Maybe something like Plex or Jellyfin? I kinda want to try it now with a smaller channel just to see.
You realize as revenue and premium subs are the only reason they host video right? They’d rather you quit using their bandwidth. You literally cost them money.
Good. Considering that they roll in billions, I have no sympathy for them.
I will not shed a tear at the death of the advertisement based internet. Or the horrible things that it has motivated companies to do to maximize advertisement revenue.
K. Not sure how you think the Internet works if you don’t want to pay for anything and don’t like enforcement of ads. The free money is gone. You’re going to have to start going outside more I guess.
I do know how the Internet works. It used to work so much better. I know it can be much better because I lived it.
It was never free money. This ad based revenue model. That money came from the direct extraction of a social resource. It was a system that turned our labors of love, our very thoughts, our ability to express ourselves into a business venture. It gamified a system where it used our labor for their profit, their product.
These spaces belong to us, not the small handful of companies that aim to monopolize our internet. Federation is a great step in the right direction. And rather than fund sites by ad revenue, where they would be motivated to follow that engagement algorithm, we can have communities rewarded for supporting it’s own.
The massive growth we’ve seen over the last 15 years is where the “free” money came from. Tons of companies didn’t have to make money are now needing to pivot. Everyone’s doing it. Everything is changing because there are no longer investors funding growth.
There’s a distinct difference between the Netflix area of the Internet and then Geocities era. Most people aren’t thinking of the later.
This right here. If you block ads you’re literally worth less than nothing to them and they couldn’t care less where you go. You’re just a bandwidth leech. I use uBlock, but have some self awareness.
And they’re not losing us any time soon, for years I’ve seen people saying that YouTube is going down because they do shit the users don’t like and yet everyone keeps using them and in general making no effort in changing that.
It’s just like Reddit, a few of us left but that didn’t change anything, everyone’s still using it and they’re not stopping any time soon.
Even if not abandoning the platform, it would only take a decent portion of the users reducing their use of the platform for them to feel a punishment of some sort, but nobody’s really willing to do anything other than complain and automatically dismiss any suggestion of an alternative.
If an alternative presents itself, things can go quicker than you would expect.
There won’t be an alternative. It’s not profitable.
Nah, because no alternative can be a complete replacement and if it’s not the exact same experience, people aren’t willing to put that tiniest bit of effort.
Again, look at Reddit as an example, alternatives exist, yet none of them are the exact same because there’s not a comparable size, and because of that people will just pull down their pants and begrudgingly accept reddit’s problems.
Never forget the YouTube rewind video they produced themselves which beacme the most disliked video ever! Lol
They produce their own content. It’s worse. Never forget Logan Paul’s Hunger Games ripoff YT movie
I unfortunately can’t speak to this directly as I don’t have direct knowledge of ad blockers.
However, in these systems, it will always be a cat and mouse game. And there are more of us than them, so to speak. There always will be.
So they embed the ads. Then someone does some clever coding to watch for ads and auto skip. YouTube finds a way around that, the community circumvents their fix. It always has and always will work that way. The technology works for all of us.
Sponsorblock is a thing already.
Which is mostly crowd sourced correct? That was another example I’d considered.
It’s crazy though because I see people mark videos that released like 30 minutes ago. I need to start doing my part
Yep, and it’s a lot more successful than you’d think. I’ve been using it for over a year now and I literally have not come across a sponsored video yet that hasn’t had its sponsored segments reported. Not even on videos that were uploaded literally 10 minutes ago. Highly recommend
I unfortunately can’t speak to this directly as I don’t have direct knowledge of ad blockers.
Yeah me too
I think video platforms should be hosted by the government, like public libraries. They are very difficult to run at a profitable rate, and YouTube is basically a monopoly in this space. But it has an incredible value to society.
To that they will immediately answer - but do you want all your youtube habits to be in the hands of the government?
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The company anonymises your data and sells it to get the most value out of it.
The state on the other hand will eventually use it to spy on you and controll you if necessary.
I feel like a lot of people don’t realize this, keeping your data a secret is these ad platform’s top priority, knowing what you like (for highly targeted ads) while others don’t is one of the biggest ways they make money
do you want all your youtube habits to be in the hands of the government?
They already are
People out there not really understanding the cooperative roles of the state, government and capitial under capitialism to reinforce bougerois rule.
Yes if it’s good government. Of course there’s problem of getting good government that won’t abuse anything.
The problem is that we have tried this, there was a period of time when during the Great depression, in order to keep the Arts alive, the Government tried hosting stages for performers to enact plays on.
This did not work because the government kept trying to encourage that the plays promote a piece of propaganda that made the US look good or would punish plays that were accused of showing anti-American sentiment.
Imagine if government did Run YouTube, what would happen the second a Donald Trump got in office?
Suddenly only the alt right are allowed to make videos.
What we need is something like fediverse, but for online videos. Something where the host is an entirely neutral party that does not moderate the videos unless required to in order to comply with law enforcement or in instances where action against the video is obvious, such as a call to arms or if someone starts hosting Kiddie porn
What we need is something like fediverse, but for online videos
That’s Peertube right? I haven’t used it.
That’s pretty much the problem with every federated service right now 😬
Even if it was used it’s unlikely Peertube could compete with YouTube due to the nature of storage space required for HD videos.
Streamlink+Twitch GUI
Blocks ads and performs better (at lest for me).There will always be a way.
It works, you won’t see ads but the video stream will stop while the ads are playing
There are workarounds.
Which exactly? It doesn’t really point out any obvious ones that work
You are right, stream will still pause, sorry.
I guess in my country they arent showing embeded ads (or maybe its the streams I watch) and thought it was working because I dont have that problem (yet).
The difference is that yt videos are of defined length and content, there are already sponsor blocks that can find an in-video sponsor segment and cut it in real time, I can’t see why wouldn’t it be the same with ads
use Brave, it still work.
Or looking for alternative youtube front-end (on github),
Only anti-adblocker work with general public. We are dev, nothing can stop us.
they’ll kill adblockers pretty quickly if they start banning gmail accounts for using them
Give me one more reason to abandon my gmail account.
So people will stop using Chrome? Holy shit, win win.
They’d have to force people to be logged in for this to be effective, but yeah, it’s definitely a possibility.
I think this is on their eventual roadmap, somewhere just after not allowing anyone to log in without a verified WEI check for “”““security””“”
Then you can stop all the YouTube rehosting sites like piped by baking in little 1 pixel changes that uniquely identify the account that ripped the video. Netflix and others will do this as well too try to stop piracy.
They’re going to go scorched earth on this, I just know it. The Internet will become as bad as cable was and this is the turning point.
Google gave up WEI, for now at least. They will try again later though. https://securityboulevard.com/2023/11/google-wei-is-dead-richixbw/
Wouldn’t say “dead” just put on the back burner. They’ll get their way eventually just like they did with net neutrality. (Responding to the article headline not you exactly)
what is a verified WEI check?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Environment_Integrity
Google is pushing for websites to implement this software that talks to your TPM (trusted platform) chip on your computer and has it attest to the state of your web stack. Then, the website gets to decide if that’s okay and can deny you access if there’s any “funny business” such as ad blockers installed, or you’re using a browser they don’t like, or maybe even running an os they don’t like. We’ll almost certainly find ways around it for a while, but it’s going to get better (for them, worse for you)
Don’t you ever ever ever ever ever say some negative things like that again
Who wins in the end is beside the point, since the time adblock works is a victory for it
But yes, YT has a set of substantial advantages over any free service
Nope.
Piracy/adtech evasion is actually a very similar paradigm to infosec/security: you have to succeed all the time, always; the attackers/exploiters only have to succeed once, and there’s a lot more attackers than your company has employees, let alone security specialists.
What? They have to succeed every time also.
Nobody uses an adbloxker which blocks 1 ad
You’re not getting what I’m saying.
The definition of total success for people who are on the defensive side is to to block every possible exploit, always, without exception.
The definition of total success for people who are on the attacking side is to find one way around whatever the defense side has put in place once, and then they can get what they want.
I still think it’s not a comparable situation. Since winning once in afbloxking does not give you a permanent gain or anything like gaining access to a system would.
I’m speaking in general terms. It absolutely is analogous at a high level.
… What?
Youtube has to detect every type of adblocker.
Ublock origin only needs to find 1 way around their detection.
And even if ublock ever gets stumped, a thousand people are trying to find their own version of 1 way around detection.
Youtube is playing whack a mole against a thousand moles, and just one unbopped mole destroys their hammer and they need to go craft a new one from scratch.
The moles win every time.
I agree it’s a game of whack a mole
But it’s not directly comparable to infosec. In adblocking is a game of whack a mole on both sides. And even if you get around the adblocking today, there’s no guarantee you’ll do it tomorrow.
Indeed, it’s why Nintendo will never win the war against piracy, the Pirates only have to break the code once. I’m sure Nintendo could update it to make it harder to crack, but it will never be impossible to crack. And it’s not like they are going to support the Nintendo switch forever. Eventually everybody is getting there rare shiny event Pokemon and their smash mods to make Waluigi and whoever the meme character of the week is playable
Twitch has entirely eliminated adblocking.
Lmao, no they haven’t. For example.
I’m not OP and I don’t understand a thing but ironically Ublock blocked me from opening that link
As another commenter said, that’s because it’s not the official site!
Yeah… Pretty sure it’s just like how antivirus blocks certain apps that have code that looks suspicious.
Or it’s not the official site.
The link goes to the revanced app.
Yeah re-vanced and their affiliate urls got tossed into a few blocklists annoyingly.
No, it’s because that’s a bootleg site. There’s a ton of them for revanced for some reason
True, but I’ve found all their urls to be blocked (.app .info and .net) and all three distribute the official app(s) (verified by comparing the apk hashes).
Doesn’t really matter which one you use.
Annoyingly, it’s more intentionally. Youtube has people working both sides, it makes it easier when two services they’re fighting start blaming each other instead of focusing on YouTube.
Am actual official link: https://revanced.app/patches?pkg=tv.twitch.android.app
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Still incorrect.
If I use streamlink or similar to watch there are no ads. At least, I have yet to see one.
Twitch has all of amazon’s power to code in anti-adblockers. The most they ever get is about 24hours before someone finds a work around to their new updates.
But ya, twitch very much can be adblocked. https://github.com/pixeltris/TwitchAdSolutions
What’re you talking about? I use a Firefox plugin that blocks ads on Twitch. I haven’t seen one since I started using it.
which plugin?
Man I’d happily pay for YouTube if every video didn’t spend half of it banging on about their sponsor
If you’re using desktop, SponsorBlock is a pretty good extension for this. Works for most browsers and auto-skips right over most sponsored segments. I don’t think YouTube is fighting this sort of adblock since it doesn’t actually target the “actual” ads, just skips to certain video times.
On mobile, LibreTube and ReVanced have Sponsorblock. There’s also a fork of Newpipe with Sponsorblock.
Sponsorblock is included in Revanced too!
You know how you can spend that time? This comment is sponsored by Raid Shadow Legends.
Recommending Sponsorblock Add-on if you are not familiar with it already.
Kind Regards!
SponsorBlock was a complete life changer. 😍 Can’t recommend it enough.
Or ReVanced… has sponsor block skip.
How does that work? Do these blockers somehow know which part of a video is sponsored material? Or is it crowd-sourced (for want of a better term) with people manually submitting reports of sponsored sections which are then applied for all users?
It’s all crowd-sourced.
Nice one, thanks
It’s user submitted as to where the blocks are, so a very new video won’t have it yet. One that’s been up for a while, and with enough votes, then yes.
Cool, thanks for the info.
Big channels will pretty much immediately have it in place for a new video
Congrats, that already exists as a browser addon and it’s free. Look up sponsorblock.
Advertisement Blockers in Safari work fine too!
The European Union is about to ban anti-adblockers since they run scripts on your computer without your consent, thus violating GDPR.
There will just be another popup and everything is fine. Ads are youtube business model, they can ask you to deactivate adblock, pay up or leave the site like a lot of news sites do. Running anti-adblockers is entirely within the law if you get informed about it on the site.
How is that any different from any other javascript on a website?
You don’t need permission for essentials. If your side requires a JavaScript to open a window it is fine, same as css, login scripts,etc etc. Even some cookies are fine.
But there already have been rulings by EU courts in the that a script to detect adblockers is not essential. Also GDPR and the cookie regs forbid negative consequences for refusal.
That sounds like an absolute clusterfuck in the making
How so? I would love to see this in my country.
How do you determine what’s essential?
If I have a script on my site that implements page transitions (eg. when an internal link is clicked, fade out the old page and fade in the new page), is that essential or non-essential? It’s a part of the site’s design, however the site still functions without it.
It’s a slippery slope.
It’s not even a slippery slope, it’s a giant cliff of unattended consequences. Innovation in web technology could be haunted by bureaucracy.
