YouTube is currently experimenting with server-side ad injection. This means that the ad is being added directly into the video stream.
This breaks sponsorblock since now all timestamps are offset by the ad times.
For now, I set up the server to detect when someone is submitting from a browser with this happening and rejecting the submission to prevent the database from getting filled with incorrect submissions.
Genuinely I’d be fine if someone made a thing that when an ad started a black overlay would go up and the spund would be muted.
Advertising is poison.
We could just ban it.
People will say, “but then how could a website like YouTube exit at all?”
To which I say that we should retvrn to sharing funny videos via long email chains.
But think of all the people that would die because they didn’t forward those emails to 10 people they knew…
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.
I’ve got no problem paying money for a service that’s worth it. I still buy games on Steam even though I know how to pirate them because Valve’s service is so goddamn convenient it beats piracy in many ways.
Netflix used to be that good, and when YouTube Red rolled out I bought a year of it. But things have deteriorated significantly since then and the price has only gone up.
It was inevitable (and is arguably the “logical” extension of sponsor segments).
As for what it will do to timestamps: The same thing it does to timestamps in podcasts. Some podcast players have a special way to tag the timestamp to adjust with the inserted ads but NOBODY hosts with those. So they are rendered useless.
On the youtube side? They could potentially be auto-adjusted because youtube will know how many ads were inserted . But considering the goal of this is to serve ads…
Is this why I’ve been getting constant buffering at the start of videos?
Do you use Firefox?
because Google intentionally nerfs loading performance on any non-Chrome browsers.I usually find if startup buffering takes more than 2-3 seconds on my home Internet, just refreshing the page magically makes it go away.
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.
I wonder how that will interoperate with timestamps provided by users in comments or by the video creator themselves. Maybe those can be used to detect inserted ads.
I have actually been seeing some timestamps that are completely wrong lately, maybe this is why.
The server must have to send some metadata to the client telling when it’s running an ad because there are other things that need to happen client side during that like adjusting of the time or making the ad clickable
If they are part of the video you cant just skip them like any other part of the video, right?
Different users would see unique ads. So your ad could be 12 seconds long while my ad is 30 seconds long. A timestamp based skip would no longer work universally.
That’s what SponsorBlock already does. It however doesn’t detect the sponsor but instead it jumps over a part of the video marked with timestamp but with different people seeing different lenght ads, these timestamps no-longer match.
Jesus fucking christ YouTube really hates users
Switch to 3rd party clients like pipe-viewer (doesn’t need api key), it’s less likely (though I suppose not impossible) google would roll this out against 3rd party clients as they can’t track you for targeted ads.
To people thinking of joining Nebula because their marketing team/shills are currently spamming this thread, see peertube (federated like lemmy, open source)
To people thinking of joining Nebula because their marketing team/shills are currently spamming this thread, see peertube (federated like lemmy, open source)
Peertube is fine, but like lemmy (but worse), there’s barely anything there. Nebula at least got creators from YouTube to make ad-free versions for Nebula. If the channels that a person are subscribed to don’t exist in Peertube, that’s not an appealing alternative for them.
If they are injecting ads into the actual video stream; it won’t matter what client you use. You request the next video chunk for playback and get served a chunk filled with advertising video instead. The clients won’t be able to tell the difference unless they start analyzing the actual video frames. That’s an entirely server-side decision that clients can’t bypass.
While I think federated services are a good idea in theory, the unfortunate reality is that they’re also privacy and GDPR minefields that nobody has figured out how to make legal yet.
Has any federated service ever been in trouble for GDPR?
I think for that to happen, it would have to be on a server hosted in the EU, owned by a corporation, with a user that just happened to report them for violations.
I wonder if this is where AI might be useful where it’s used to filter out all of the megacorp ads, popups, and other random garbage?
- train LLMs on megacorp content and use it to filter out results
- sponsorblock adds this as a toggleable option just like the “skip segment” UI video overlay button
That would be cool.
I guess my AMD Bulldozer TV PC is gonna have to go in the ewaste bin though. Its already stretched to its limit running Linux Mint, Firefox, uBlock Origin and Sponsorblock as it is
Sounds wasteful, detection of ads could be detected with regular software, no?
How?
By the way, yes, it is.
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.
Often times that’s the case but some ads also use other tones. Trying to make a super emotional and sad story or something.
Using AI to fuck the megacorps would be amazing. Using their own tools against them.
They should still have to indicate that it’s an ad, the problem is that they’ll probably block you from seeking past an ad
imagine using Gemini for this, would be peak irony.
- train LLMs on megacorp content and use it to filter out results
At least it should still work with the hard coded sponsor spots that are actually part of the videos (like the “brought to you by Manscaped” or whatever).
Only if the ads are a fixed length and always in the same place for each playback of the same video.
Inserting ads of various lengths in varying places throughout the video will alter all the time stamps for every playback.
The 5th minute of the video might happen 5min after starting playback, or it could be 5min+a 2min ad break after starting. This could change from playback to playback; so basing ad/sponsor blocking on timestamps becomes entirely useless.
I miss the times when ads were just annoying gifs on the left or right side of a web page. Then they evolved, abusing javascript, to become pop ups that hid the URL bar and opened 3 dozen different pop ups while you didn’t close the mother popup. Then they started clickjacking: that close ad button? Just opens another ad. Ad infinitum.
Now, effectively editing the video to add an ad somewhere instead of serving it as a side file. The advertising industry as a whole feels like the absolute worst villains at a personal level, because they want to target you individually.
Google ads were originally a panacea for really bad popups of the early 2000s. Google had a strict list of dos and don’ts, and ad revenues were high enough that most websites only ran one or two.
Step by step, it seems, YouTube is evolving into something that has previously been called TV.
If they carry on with this bullshit I’ll be dropping them entirely for Nebula. I quite enjoy Nebula so far.
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.
I firmly believe that quality content needs to be paid somehow. And I’d rather not have that ad based. But I’m open to other platforms too. I’m just giving this a go and there’s some good content on Nebula.
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!)
There is quite a variety of services like that, curiosity stream is another one.
I guess NotJustBikes did a good job on advertising Nebula. Thanks for the recommendation, I’m in the mood for trying alternatives. I’m even in the mood to give Linux another go because of all the bullshit MS is pulling off again.
Same Herr. Notjustbikes is amazing. Also on track to try Linux again, since gaming is becoming more and more of a thing
Looks like I’ll finally get a reason to cut off another website I hate using, but never found the willpower to get rid off.
Good
I’ll buy premium when they finally manage to either prevent adblocking entirely or make it sufficiently inconvenient. Stopping using YouTube is not an option for me and neither is watching ads. YouTube (along with porn) is the internet for me. If I’m not viewing either content, I’m probably not on my computer.
Hell, I don’t even blame them. I can’t morally justify blocking ads and viewing their content for free. I do it because it’s easy and I get away with it. I don’t believe in ads-based business model and that basically leaves subscribtion as the only viable alternative. Not paying and still using the service isn’t exactly practicing what I preach.
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.
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.
Tbh, I don’t think there is a definite “youtube style” that describes all content on youtube. There are some similarities and within categories of videos you can find styles that are more popular within that category, but site wide I would say it provides quite a bit of variety.
What could be called youtube style is that it’s not TV. In that sense YT style and TV style maybe make some sense.
I see YouTube style as the ones that are formulic with the plea to like and subscribe segue to sponsor and the obviously algorithm driven increased lengthen followed by the same tired robotic plea for interaction which is pretty much every big YouTube channel or wannabe big channel.
Doesn’t help that search pushes up those type of channels and shoves smaller channels just uploading content just to share something.
I get what you mean, but don’t hate the player, hate the game. Even tho channels [have to] do that, there’s still a wide variety of content and the call to action doesn’t define the style of each individual creator.
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.
The fact that you use their services despite claiming to oppose them probably tells more about how you really feel than your words do. You’re benefiting from their abusive business model the same whey they themselves are. Justifying the continued use of their services by not paying is just a cope to deal with the cognitive dissonance.
It’s pretty hard to not use their services when among else even fucking university courses only upload their content there.
Fixed a word, it was supposed to be unavoidable, not unavailable.
I’m kinda surprised they haven’t done this already. Twitch has been doing this for a while now, and the only reliable way around it is to use a proxy in a country that Twitch doesn’t run ads in.
I think Twitch has gone to shit lately, because of their decisions, but I don’t know the numbers. Do you have any info about this?
Oh, it’s been pretty crap for a while now. I constantly see viewers complain about
AIDSads 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.
Thanks Limewire, even though you used to put virus on my computer.
Video length is incredibly important to The Algorithm and a LOT of content creators time their videos to the second. Taking away control of that (even if the end result ins the exact same length) is going to ruffle a lot of feathers and lead to a lot of people who want to “be a champion for the viewers who should like, comment, and subscribe and use my referral code for war thunder” as a result.
Surely The Algorithm will not know of the ads inserted, so that won’t influence the results.
Never underestimate the ability of a small change to completely break a system
Yeah it sucks, ublock can’t block twitch ads.
I think make ad run faster can circumvent this. wdyt? https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/video-speed-controller/nffaoalbilbmmfgbnbgppjihopabppdk?hl=e https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/nffaoalbilbmmfgbnbgppjihopabppdk?hl=en
How would it detect that the currently playing section was an ad then?
The state of whether it’s an ad has to be somewhere clientside as the ads can’t be skipped by the user.
