YouTube warns it might make your viewing experience worse if you don’t turn off your ad-blocker::YouTube has been cracking down on people using ad blockers. Now, a spokesperson says that using ad blockers could lead to “suboptimal viewing.”

    • Blue and Orange@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • NightOwl@lemmy.one
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        1 year ago

        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.

      • rob299@bookwormstory.social
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        1 year ago

        It’s optimal to them. You just don’t understand Youtube’s perspective of it yet. And then it’s unoptimal for them when you watch with the adblocker.

      • Hamartiogonic@sopuli.xyz
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        1 year ago

        How to quit YT in a week?

        1. disable adblocking
        2. Suffer watching ads
        3. Get bored, because you no longer feel like watching adTube
        4. Switch to something else
    • gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      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.

        • xe3@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Some of those alternative “YouTube” apps are not limited to YouTube as a backend/source of content. I don’t recall if it’s freetube, new pipe or both that allow using Peertube and YouTube from the same app, which helps bridge the gap in content / ease the transition from an end user perspective.

    • AbidanYre@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      The fact that my children know the Liberty Mutual jingle from watching YouTube at school says no.

  • archonet
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    1 year ago

    which is a hilarious threat because the #1 way to make my viewing experience worse would be turning off my ad blocker, lmao

  • dezmd@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • TragicNotCute@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • 𝒍𝒆𝒎𝒂𝒏𝒏@lemmy.one
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        1 year ago

        Honestly this is what pushed me to look into alternative ways to watch YT years ago. Muting every time an ad comes on gets old quick, especially when the ad is way louder than the content

    • EternalWarBear@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      S0undTV is a good app for Twitch if you have an android TV device. No ads and support for the emotes if you like having the chat up. You’ve got to login to twitch through the app though to start watching. It’s broken before and had ads play, but gets fixed within a few days. Lastly there is a delay compared to desktop. If that’ll be a deal breaker.

    • Dicska@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I just thought I would log in to Twitch just to say hi to the streamer I was in the same game with. Twitch loads, starts to play the stream with no problem. BUT when I try to login, it says Firefox is not a supported browser. It had no problem playing all the content, showing the chat, etc. - but for some reason it still says my browser is not supported and I can’t log in. I looked it up. FF is “not supported” because it has an enhanced tracking protection feature. Twitch wants to track you, and it can’t if you use Firefox. Such a petty way; this will just turn me away from Twitch even more.

    • r3df0x ✡️✝☪️@7.62x54r.ru
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • AnAngryAlpaca@feddit.de
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        1 year ago

        I get some dodgy casino and gambling ads … Before a children’s program. Reported the ad multiple times, but it keeps coming back under a different name.

    • rob299@bookwormstory.social
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      1 year ago

      in the short term they work, but YouTube can cut those 3rd party apps access at any time for any reason. Use Peertube for the better long term.

      • Lettuce eat lettuce@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        I thought All three of the ones I listed weren’t reliant on YT APIs and instead scraped their content.

        Edit: Just confirmed both NewPipe and Freetube do not use YouTube’s api. I’m not sure about GrayJay though.

    • Sterile_Technique@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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?

      • Lettuce eat lettuce@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        For android, the stock newpipe from the fdroid repositories was just download and play for me. Easy and simple interface.

        For Grayjay, I use the direct download .apk from their website. It’s been a little more buggy because it’s still new, but all in all quite stable. Less features right now, but does all the basics and has device casting to TV which Newpipe doesn’t.

        For my PC, Freetube. I just use the Flatpak version for Linux. I’m on Nobara for my distro currently and it’s worked fine.

      • Digestive_Biscuit@feddit.uk
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        1 year ago

        I gave up using Piped. It was really good when it worked but sadly most of the time it was frustrating. Takes ages to get a video going then breaks up multiple times.

      • Sphks@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        1 year ago

        From my experience, it depends on the instance. Sometimes, one instance of Piped will not work, but another will be OKish.

  • mvirts@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    YouTube is just messing around. They could encode ads randomly on videos if they wanted to, like podcasts.

    • FartsWithAnAccent@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • n0xew@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        They would just be able to create and stream 2 or more ad-encoded versions where ads are encoded in differently positions. Then no sponsorblock could save us since it would skip the wrong segments for some people…

        • 𝒍𝒆𝒎𝒂𝒏𝒏@lemmy.one
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          1 year ago

          Those ads would need to be unskippable, otherwise we could just pull the timestamps that the Skip button uses and sponsorblock will be all complete again 👌

          • n0xew@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Fair point! I wasn’t thinking they would be skippable, but boy do I hope that I was wrong…

            • Azzu@lemm.ee
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              1 year ago

              Even if they’re not natively skippable, ads have to be indicated as such by law. Whatever indication they use can be detected and used to create blockers.

        • space@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          1 year ago

          Just build a database of ads. Then use some kind of image hash to compare against the displayed content.

          • pirat@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            I like your way of thinking. This isn’t even limited to image. Comparing just a short snippet of the audio from a playing ad to a db could work very well too, thinking of how quickly Shazam etc. are able to identify a song if it’s in the db.

            App/plugin idea for the sad future right there: Shazadblock, tuneBlock Origin. Succesful ID leads to skip/mute/ragequit or whatever will kill the noise. Though, the downside of this method would be if an ad in the db uses licensed music that regular content creators use in their videos too, it will eventually lead to blocking some segments wrongly, unless the db excludes this, making it less effective at its purpose… Maybe image is better.

      • ArxCyberwolf@lemmy.ca
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        1 year ago

        That’s not quite how it works. It’s crowdsourced, someone has to manually add every sponsored segment from a video into Sponsorblock. It can’t detect them on its own.

    • Justin@lemmy.jlh.name
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      1 year ago

      cheaper to just have the interns code buggy Javascript then to reencode millions of videos.

      • MiltownClowns@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        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.

        • bamboo@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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          1 year ago

          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.

          • my_hat_stinks@programming.dev
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            1 year ago

            I think there’s a simpler reason; if you embed ads as part of the video linking to a specific timestamp becomes a nightmare. One person might have no ad, another might have a 30 second ad, and a third might have 5 minutes of ad. Attempting to link to a time after the ad would give three different timestamps, and loading that timestamp could give you the clip you want or could drop you right in the middle of an ad.

            To solve that issue you’d need some way for the client to determine the “true” timestamp, but then you’re also giving ad blockers a way to determine where the ad is so you’re back to square one.

    • seeCseas@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • Chickenstalker@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        It’s not the ads. They want your data and these adblockers prevent them from doing it. Google had and continue to lie to advertisers about their ad views anyways. Simply use Firefox + adblockers or go to alternative sites that are springing up.