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YouTube is Losing The War Against Adblockers
(www.howtogeek.com)
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this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2024
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The other day I visited youtube without any add-ons and concluded I'd rather do anything else than use youtube under those conditions.
legit, if youtube ever beats ublock origin, i'll just stop watching youtube
Its an all out assault on half your senses without an adblocker. Literal torture.
The entire web is like that without an ad blocker these days.
I miss those cheeky gif banners from the 2000s
[With hindsight] The commercial use of the internet should never have been allowed.
I want the internet to be a network of digital libraries...communication, public events and sharing space...personal pages...services...the commercial motive starts from there and eventually consumes the rest :/
I reckon without the rule changes in 1993-94 allowing commercial use that the internet would have turned into a significantly more useful utility with higher quality innovation than the advert laden train wreck that we have now.
Ok, apparently it wasn't as gradual as I thought, there was a determining moment in 93-94 with Netscape and HTTPS that made secure transactions possible for e-commerce.
For this to happen, everyone using the internet should know HTML or there has to be a easy to use, MS Word-like web designer. And there should also be easy to use, free web hosting providers (neocities exists).
Owning a website as a non-techie should be normalized and be portrayed as "cool"
Hey, neocities is pretty good, I think I'll try to use chatgpt to get some boilerplate site running and then keep adding to it :)
These sites make me happy https://melonking.net/melon?z=%2Funiverse%2F 😂
Do online multiplayer video games count as a commercial use? I kind of like those
Yt-dlp download script + text file with fav channel urls + jellyfin.
No bullshit, saves bandwidth.
Also look into invidious.
And peertube, some content creators also post there, e.g., The Linux Experiment.
They were serving videos with ads spliced in, basically DAI in podcasting industry. I’m not sure how that experiment went, but if that’s how they’d serve the videos, downloaders will have ads embedded as well.
Yt-dlp supports sponsorblock, i am not worried.
I also dont even need tools for this as my usual style of watching is with my fingers on the arrow keys to skip back and forth
I actually don’t know if/how the ad block people worked around it or if YouTube pulled back. The problem with DAI on podcast and in stream ads is that the ads aren’t always 1:05~1:35, the ad could be longer or shorter, then the next ad won’t necessarily start at the same time, and most definitely won’t end at the same time. So sponsor block won’t know precisely where the ads are, thereby making it much harder for a crowd sourced solution to accurately skip embedded ads. Hopefully they figured out a way, but as mentioned earlier, I don’t know what happened to that experiment.
Put it on a VHS, then use one of those VCRs that removes the ads for you.
YouTube had beaten ublock origin for a while so I resolved to using invidious.
I've had YouTube Premium since the days when it was called YouTube Red, so like a decade. I've grown used to not seeing any ads from Google and anytime I watch a video not using my account it's torture.
Same here. FreeTube for desktop and NewPipe are all you need though if you don't want to pay and/or have access to music.
Tubular is newpipe + sponsorblock BTW
I use pipepipe but it's less stable
I haven't tried that yet. I think Libretube also does SponsorBlock too & have seen it on F-Droid.
Ya I think you're right.
I use pipepipe over tubular because it let's you change the ugly red YouTube banner to black (enable eye protection)
As a recent YT premium-tryer, it's amazing how many ads they put in that aren't obviously adverts - comparing between non-premium and premium browsing.
Not sure I'll keep YT premium beyond the free trial, until I find more decent content producers. Even then, it's skipping those video's paid promotion segments.
So it's like paying for a streaming platform to not get ads... But still getting ads
I agree... however, that is an issue with the content creators relying on using content promotions. I have noticed when skipping ahead in videos that it usually indicates in the progress bar where the promotion ends. If the content producers utilized other ways to contribute and I liked them enough, then I'd do that. YouTube now has a subscriber only feature that should help with this. There are also extensions that are supposed to block sponsors too. I don't think YouTube has implemented any functions to make blocking sponsored ads more difficult, especially for paying users... who knows though.
You‘re part of the problem then. It only got so shitty in the first place so they could trap people in the Premium subscription that will get increasingly more expensive and less useful.
That‘s where Youtube Premium comes into play for many fools who don‘t really know about adblockers. Google‘s goal isn‘t to destroy the website, but to turn it into a much more profitable Netflix subscription based on user generated content. Sadly the enshittification of the biggest video platform will continue because enough people are willing to pay a lot for it. The site will not improve until there are mainstream alternatives that actually take revenue off Youtube.
It’s so bad that I 1) refuse to pay for premium so I don’t enable the behavior and 2) ended up sideloading an alt YouTube app on iOS that just doesn’t display the ads. YouTube hasn’t been able to block that one yet as it spoofs as the original YouTube app. Totally unsanctioned and a pain in the ass to keep the certificate alive but worth it. YouTube is actually enjoyable again. All that because the ads interruptions were constant. If it was every 15 min or so I wouldn’t care, but every 5!? Get the hell out of here!
Same.
I came across someone who uploaded a 90 minute video as an ad as well.
I remember watching some video, falling asleep for a few hours, then waking up to a livestream of an ad. One of those "skip after 5s" but it was a livestream, so it just kept playing. I couldn't believe it!
Pro tip, LLMs do an excellent job summarizing YouTube videos now. I've never liked YouTube content, the incentives for creators are perverse and discourage conveying accurate information simply in favor of drawing out every video to maximize ad opportunities. About 95% of the content I might have been interested in could have been better conveyed in a 1-2 page blog post and read in 2 minutes instead of stretched out into a 15 minute video. Having a robot summarize that content is so much less irritating.
What do you use for that, fetch the transcript and just feed it to the LLM of your choice? Or are you talking of the actual LLM watching and summarizing?
I've always just used chatgpt for both tasks. I'll ask my SO, she does more of this and she might have better tools to suggest.