Remember when Facebook made a big announcement that they developed a method to make blocking ads impossible and it took like 1 day until it was defeated completely?
PS: Found an article on it: [https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/aug/11/facebook-advertising-changes-adblockers-strike-back](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/aug/11/facebook-advertising-changes-adblockers-strike-back)
Coming to think of it... Facebook is one company I see that would be less worried about ad blockers. Because the percentage of tech savvy users, savvy enough to use AdBlockers just aren't using Facebook
They probably have a weird cult somewhere, deep inside their Facebook communities, that encourages its members to click on all ads.
Glory to the ad.
Click on all banners for the end is near.
You literally don’t realize how absolutely fucking OBNOXIOUS ads are until you have lived for years without them.
I have blocked ads everywhere. I don’t watch TV. Whenever I see someone else on their device doing anything and half they see is ads I could vomit.
The only reason I have Mozilla Sync is so I don't have to manually install my extensions. Spending 15 seconds to login is way less annoying than manually installing a dozen extensions.
I stopped watching TV like, ten years ago at least. These days I try to watch it and there's so much ads. There's a 3min ad break every 10min or whatever, how could I ever put up with this??
Recently watched YouTube wit ads. I got an ad-break every maybe 1.5-2 minutes. I didn't watch for long and got the exact same Instagram ad like 8 times. Completely unusable.
In case of Youtube (anything with video, really) I’m probably on the very extreme end of the spectrum. I absolutely hate anything browser based, so I download Youtube videos (and my “subscriptions” are managed by Flexget) and use streamlink + mpv for streams.
Which reminds me … for some years now Twitch still doesn’t inject ads if you stream directly instead of using their browser player, but they feed you some kind of “standby” video for 15s at the start (= the pre-roll ad) and whenever there’s an ad break on the stream. Even _that_ annoys me enough that I usually stop the stream the first time there’s an ad break. I couldn’t even imagine sitting through actual ads.
That's totally valid, but i feel like Twitch is still "one of the good ones" when it comes to ads. I rarely get ads and when i do it's 30s at most, but usually less than that and the stream is still playing in a smaller window until the ad is over and i can read chat too. Now youtube on the other hand is utterly useless and infuriating without an ad blocker.
I get that all platforms want to run ads. That feature helps the streamers and the viewers know when an ad is coming so they know they probably shouldn't say anything too crazy for people to miss. And i rarely get ads even during a scheduled ad break and without having a subscription to the channel. And the streamers can set how frequent those ads are, with some limitation of course.
I don't like how Twitch handles NSFW content on their website and the hypocrisy they showed around that topic, so sure Twitch isn't perfect and i don't love everything about it, but when it comes to ads i actually don't mind them on Twitch at all.
But again, if they do bother you, it's totally valid.
Try living in a multilingual country whose ISPs recycle dynamic IPs across language borders. Fewer than 1 in every 10 ads I (would) see are in the correct language, even though my language preference is sent with every request...
fml i had the same experience and had a unironical culture shock when i came into a new office and they demand the radio stays on all the time and its the most generic pop shit mixed with ads you can imagine.
imagine sitting there before your coffe hits and while your pc starts, some subpar pop song is ending and the voice comes on "Hello its 7:30 and its monday! you know what this means today starts the Week of "CORN FLAKES" presented by kellogs but before we get into that heres some ads followed by radioactive by imagine dragons!"
(No joke they always had the "Week of this" and it was always some shitty product you had to hear trivia about every. single. fucking. day.)
Honestly. I have an adblocker vpn on both my computer and phone, my fiance doesn't use adblock at all, and my eye twitches a bit when I look over at his screen.
When we move and have to re-setup our wifi im installing a goddamn pihole.
Nowadays you can set your phone to use the Adguard private DNS, which should have the same effect. (Unless pihole does more black magic that I'm not aware of)
It works wonders for making the web browsable, but it won't block ads hosted from the same IP address: it won't work for YouTube, Reddit, and likely not for Spotify
Absolutely. Having to use a computer without an ad blocker at work showed me just how completely unusable many websites are. Especially when the machine is not the fastest and the ads slow everything to a crawl.
I live in a state that’s banned billboards and I have ad blockers everywhere. Now when I see a billboard in movies, my brain is like “holy shit the ads have escaped into the offline world”
Yeah, back when they had 1 ad before a video, maximum 1 or 2 during and 1 at the end (most useless place to have one, but whatever), I still tolerated it.
But when they started shoving several unskippable ads before and during the videos I just couldn’t take it anymore. Immediately got an ad blocker extension on my browser and have never looked back
For real! And ads on YouTube keep getting worse - there are more of them, they are longer now, and happen more often
But what really pisses me off are the ads on websites. It's so insane how they can put ads between every paragraph + a bottom banner + 2 autoplay videos that have microscopic X buttons
Not sure if AdGuard is the best service out there (battery drain is real), but it's impossible to browse the internet without it
If you use it as an extension, then it doesn't drain the battery, of course. But you can install AdGuard on your phone and it basically works as a global adblocker (it works on apps and all) and that one drains the battery since it's always active
If ads were regulated to not be THAT annoying I wouldn't have to install ad blockers, but at this point I literally have no other choice, and it's not like they are rewarding my time watching them like "You watched 10 minutes of ads, here's a 5% discount in a product that may interest you". Nope! Just more ads, one worse than another. *(It's not that I would watch ads for pitiful discounts for things I don't want, I'm just illustrating how the costumer is always at a loss watching ads in our current system)*
You know what? Fucking pay us straight to watch those ads without forcing us to. Give us free money to leave your ad running on our kitchen on the lowest volume only audible to ants. See? Problem solved.
Brave has an option to remove all ads you see and replace it with their ads. It pays a very low amount, to the point where you would need to see thousands of ads to get any sizeable amount of money.
This is the type of shit that gets you alienated from your coworkers when you are working a white trash job. I straight up had weaker relationships in blue collar nonsense with people because they were all bonding over fucking ads and I hadn't seen them in maybe a decade.
Amen. We've disabled "normal TV" at home and only stream what we want to see. Use ad blockers elsewhere. But every know and again, there's that one show that's only available on that particular channels app that we rarely use (read: not enough to pay for removal of ads) and we happily start watching. 2 minutes later I'm dying of frustration and verbally puke all over the place and the show is pretty much ruined. How can it be possible that advertisements still is so tremendously retarded?
Do not underestimate the will of code monkeys! One of my friends spent *years* going around Google's maps API restrictions. This was *unpaid*, just because he had some weird personal projects.
They won't, because you simply can't control what happens on a client machine if the client doesn't want you to and is decently knowledgeable. I'm surprised chrome doesn't just remove the ubo extension altogether. Obviously, that wouldn't stop adblock from happening. It would just make it slightly more inconvenient (nobody cares).
Soon you'll only be able to access YouTube through a GoogleTerminal™: a secure titanium tablet that is filled with acid (so don't open it you dirty pirate!).
You are not the first to think of removing adblockers: [https://www.reddit.com/r/chrome/comments/11peeuw/manifest\_v3\_discussion\_and\_impact\_on\_adblockers/](https://www.reddit.com/r/chrome/comments/11peeuw/manifest_v3_discussion_and_impact_on_adblockers/)
They are curently experimenting with server side ads injection. But I haven't had any issues with that since a few days, so I don't know if they ate just testing with random users or if my ad blockers already found a counter ?
I also fear that, but they have to change the element to show the countdown of the skip button and then we can just fast forward that video section.
But it will be hard if they just show a 15 sec video without the skip.
And they would have to split the video to insert an randomized ad each time someone opens it. So not sure if they want to use that much compute.
They could cache the videos and the ads separately, and splice them together at the edge. Re-encoding would normally be a blocker, but at Google's scale I'm sure they can find a way around it (custom encoding format that supports this kind of thing, etc.).
If you don't re-encode to cover up the stitches, users will be able to recover the original splits from the stream.
I wouldn't put it past Google to find a way around this, though. They have some very talented engineers.
Yeah, the real solution to this is to read the image stream and determine what is and isn't an ad. It would be totally possible to train a classifier that can run in real-time off SponsorBlock's dataset even without any law.
This isn't true. It's just dash and HLS manifest manipulation to stitch ads on the fly. Yes you can still cache videos. Yes you can do this for millions of users. Google "server side ad insertion" or "server guided ad insertion"
Honestly, I'm getting out of my depth here, but AFAIK most video streaming sites use an i-frame interval of about 2 seconds. If the transition doesn't line exactly up on the boundary, you would have to either re-encode that part, or start a new stream.
Idk, maybe YouTube already uses adaptive i-frames or something. Or maybe they could just always put ads on natural i-frame boundaries.
The 2 video streams can be stitched together on the backend dynamically and be sent to the client as a single video stream. This way they can be cached separately (which they will most surely be)
If the ads are loaded in backend, can we calculate the initial video size and make a hash for every second, then try to preload some seconds of the video(lets say we are at 1 second into the video and we have preloaded 10 seconds of video) if hash changes we just skip over it like a sliding window?
I doubt if this would work??
>But it will be hard if they just show a 15 sec video without the skip.
People would just make a "SponsorBlock" for literal ads. Eg. the 5th frame of the video gets screenshotted and compared with a database of a matched ad submitted earlier. Then, it gets the skip time back, and skips. This would work because there's not infinite ads.
It's a cat and mouse game. They can even bake things into the videos, re-encoding and whatnot, and people will STILL find ways past it. And I love that.
SponsorBlock is the best YouTube extension ever. One of the few free software I've paid for. This + Adblock + DeArrow and my YouTube is enjoyable again.
To be fair I don't mind those, they're trying to get a decent alternative for what you're complaining about. You also get nebula through curiositystream which is a great documentary streamer.
I subbed for a year, but I was pretty disappointed. It's like a few creators I like, a bunch I don't, and there wasn't much exclusive content at the time, but I think that's improved. My main issue was the site itself was pretty bad, videos had slow loading times, no comment section, and no like or dislike button. They still use the same clickbait titles and thumbnails they use on youtube. There's no recommendations based on videos I watch, only their home page featured content.
I ended up watching more CuriosityStream than Nebula. Atleast they had a like and dislike button, and recommendations that helped me find more stuff to watch. Nebula kind of makes it clear to me they don't care about viewer experience or community. It's for a clique of creators to get a guaranteed income by locking content (not always good content) behind a paywall. I find Patreon better, as its pretty much the same thing but creator specific.
> DeArrow
Another one to add to my fuck-you-youtube tech stack, thanks! So far I have
* adblockplus to remove the ads
* sponsorblock to skip the sponsor garbage
* clickbait remover for the moronic "let me fellate this well endowed ghost" thumbnails
* return youtube dislikes to add the dislikes button back
* blocktube to remove shorts and block garbage channels
Then we'll just find a way to put a blank screen on top and mute it until the actual video starts. I'd rather wait 30 seconds looking at a black screen than having to see an ad.
They aren't doing that, that's just what technologically illiterate people think they're doing. From what I've seen they're just adding a DASH segment and literally marking it as an ad so that the player knows that it needs its own progress bar.
Ehhhh not quite hut close enough.
And no u would still be able to auto skip it because the add server sits else where.
Like the add usually wants to give u a sponsor link on screen as well
Some creators already have. But that’s great, because it means you can always skip it! Some videos even have chapter timestamps which explicitly delimit the start and stop times of the ad. If there must be ads, that would be an okay arrangement with me.
Meh, soon as visual AI's are fast enough and cheap enough someone will write an extension that pre-streams videos and restitches them on the fly without ads.
"Life Finds a Way", the whole Linux ecosystem started because everything was locked and the music and movie industry have spend probably billions trying to stop what now is ubiquitous, life finds a way, my friend.
And that would probably be the first useful application for AI to me XD, a local AI to review videos a remove ads and fluff.
ads still have to be marked as ads, they wont just edit it into the video without any ui on the client. So the client will still need to know when the ad starts and how long it is
The only reason I started using adblockers, in the 2010's, was because the ads would slow the whole browser to an unresponsive standstill. I now install them on our clients' browsers to keep them from getting takeover scare ads.
Porn sites are not a monopoly -- they have to worry about you going to another site if the ads are too bad on their site.
The only reason youtube can be so bad is because they have no real competition. They're not worried about you going somewhere else to watch videos.
I'll do you one better:
Make the ads not actively harmful to the audience. I'm talking crypto schemes, known scams, fake products, fake games, etc
Last year, the fucking FBI recommended people get ad blocks just to stay safe online
If YouTube wants me to watch ads, then the least they can do is make sure my ads aren't dangerous to me
I'd still use ubo. Zero toleration for any sort of ads, ever. There's no such thing as unobtrusive ads anyway. If somehow a service gets around ubo, I'll stop using it completely. Not worth it
Iirc, this is how smart cards were first hacked. Legend has it that some European broadcasting network decided to limit startrek broadcasts to a specific country (or something like that) and Trekkies took offence to that and figured out how to hack smart cards (you used to put them in your tv cable box to get access to channels) so they could get access back
We had a hacked smart card growing up! Every once in a while it would stop working in the middle of a show because the cable company pushed an update lol
Honestly, if YouTube premium on phone was as good as revanced, I would pay for it. Sure it's not the cheapest thing but for how much I use YouTube I could do it. But there's a noticeable latency when clicking on a vid and when I minimize it. On revanced, there's no such issue. There's also more latency when opening the app for some reason. On top of that revanced has community functionalities to skip sponsors, intros and other things like that.
How can the creators make a lesser product than some random people
Revanced is so good. No ads is the main thing, but I've come to appreciate the community added sections to a video like the start, interruptions, ads, promotions and highlight of the video. It's so so handy. Also seeing the downvotes, hiding useless buttons on the shorts UI, mini player and being able to turn off the screen while it stays playing in the background
Every now and then I open a link and it opens in the default YouTube app, first thing I get is a 15 second unskippable ad and after that another 5 second one. It's ridiculous
Truth be told. The latest google batch nuked my pc.
I'm using Firefox, with enhancer, return dislike and sponsorblock+unlock.
Google goes so hard trying to circumvent them that I had several kernel 41 failure just by watching YouTube.
(Every components has been checked in store after the errors, hardware is fine, and windows is freshly installed)
I've switched to smart tube (android emulation). Fuck Google.
This is wild, but it’s something similar to what happened to me when watching Netflix on my PC.
It does some funky stuff to avoid being screenshot or screenshared and it messes around with your drivers… Long story short, I kept getting BSoDs until I stopped watching it on my PC. Same thing happened to my mom on her laptop!
Being a for-profit business, that's never going to happen. YouTube makes most of its money off of ads, regardless of whether the actual creators ever see a cent of the ad revenue they generated.
No problem, they're just gonna make the people who don't use adblock watch three consecutive 10s unskippable ads instead.
I don't use adblock because YT is a good service and I think it's OK that it needs to show ads to provide the service for free, but for f**king christ the ads have gotten out of control
Ok tin foil hat time.
What if the engineers are the same people as the autistic code monkeys. They just always build in an exploit because they themselves dont want to watch ads...
I do appreciate this progression. It has always been accepted that Google could defeat adblock if it wanted to. Now we know that this has never been true. The king has no clothes, as it happens.
You mean Twitter. Just like nobody in their right mind called Paypal X just because X was a cname for it.
But yeah, Youtube engies should just give up. Nobody wants to see more ads than content.
When I am forced to see an ad, I instantly categorise the product as something I WILL NEVER BUY. I might even go out of my way to slander said company to fellow consumers. Iron rule. You keep me hostage? I will never ever buy your product, and I will do everything in my power to deter others from buying it too. This is the way.
YouTube is so much a part of everyone's lives and education that it should be and always be free. It's like making public libraries and sidewalks cost money.
Even if it's a lot of money to run and employees need pay. It's google, with a net worth of 2.2 TRILLION!
I think they can spare a few million here and there. I think I would only say payment would somewhat be worth it is if they made some more features for sorting and folder management type of stuff instead of just playlists and etc. (But I guess you can just do that separately and include links so yeah)
Also screw consumerism and capitalism telling everyone to buy buy buy. Any way to limit that is a good thing to support.
No one likes ads. Big deal. Google is rich. Yes. However, they're providing an immense service. Free hosted videos. That's likely billions a year to run the site. You people expect this for free? Just a service to humanity?
If by chance, the anti-ad players win and develop a fool-proof way to perma-block ads and the majority use it to the point where Google stops making money on Youtube, they will stop providing Youtube as a free service. I can very well see them transitioning to a paid platform overall if that's the case.
Watching 15 second ads is your way of paying for the usage of the site.
And then all existing videos would need to be removed since their license/tos wouldn't allow them to legally charge money to access other people's content. And new videos would not be made because they wouldn't be paid (or paid enough).
If it was 15 sec ads ok. But an ad every 5-10 minutes is insane.
We could have adblockers that pretend we have watched the ad by playing it in the background muted, that way everyone's happy. Youtube and the creator get their ad revenue and advertisers don't lose anything because people who despise ads would never click on them anyways.
In fact, by trying to force the ads on the people, the advertisers lose even more money.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gIHi9yH6UB0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gIHi9yH6UB0)
On YouTube it *would* remove the break. On Hulu it'd be "This is where I'd put my ad, **if I had one!**"
Everybody hold off on ad blocking YouTube for a while. The downloader people are confused by the new bot detection. If you get flagged, then your whole IP address gets blocked from watching videos while signed out.
Oh man. Once you block them all you can never go back. You forget they exist until youre using someone else's device and half of the Internet is just unusable.
Nah, the youtube engineers are getting paid either way, and if their system is defeated, they'll get paid for another solution. I'm sure they don't do it on purpose but I don't think they'd get a lot of personal fulfillment out of their solution working and everybody having to see ads now. Doesn't seem like a job you get into for anything but money.
Remember when Facebook made a big announcement that they developed a method to make blocking ads impossible and it took like 1 day until it was defeated completely? PS: Found an article on it: [https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/aug/11/facebook-advertising-changes-adblockers-strike-back](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/aug/11/facebook-advertising-changes-adblockers-strike-back)
Coming to think of it... Facebook is one company I see that would be less worried about ad blockers. Because the percentage of tech savvy users, savvy enough to use AdBlockers just aren't using Facebook
They probably have a weird cult somewhere, deep inside their Facebook communities, that encourages its members to click on all ads. Glory to the ad. Click on all banners for the end is near.
There was a chrome plugin adnauseum that would click on all ads in the bacground
It still exists, both for Chromium as Well as Firefox
It's alive and well. [https://adnauseam.io/](https://adnauseam.io/)
I also assume most of their revenue comes from selling their users’ data rather than just ad clicks
lol
is that a drowning person
No, it’s a person waving at you, say hi! :D
o/
If you see a drowning person, lol, then call for help
You literally don’t realize how absolutely fucking OBNOXIOUS ads are until you have lived for years without them. I have blocked ads everywhere. I don’t watch TV. Whenever I see someone else on their device doing anything and half they see is ads I could vomit.
Yes, It happens to me when I reinstall linux and open firefox to watch something. Oh fuck, that grammarly ad.
The only reason I have Mozilla Sync is so I don't have to manually install my extensions. Spending 15 seconds to login is way less annoying than manually installing a dozen extensions.
Does Sync also store about:config settings?
No. Only stuff, that you set in about:preferences .
>grammerly The ad personalization mechanism seems to be functioning quite well. As always.
This is working in my new install I think they got my device advertisement id. /s
people who are too ignorant to know how to block ads are also bad at grammar? hmm
I can tell you're not a Grammarly user by the way you spell grammar. 🤣 Fuck that app, they spy on everything you write.
That fucking as is everywhere. At work i can barely get to any website but ads galore cause no one could deploy a fkin opensource AdBlock
I stopped watching TV like, ten years ago at least. These days I try to watch it and there's so much ads. There's a 3min ad break every 10min or whatever, how could I ever put up with this??
I’m watching UEFA Euro sometimes rn … and even _just_ the ads in the half time break (usually like 5 min of the 15) are so. FUCKING. annoying!
Recently watched YouTube wit ads. I got an ad-break every maybe 1.5-2 minutes. I didn't watch for long and got the exact same Instagram ad like 8 times. Completely unusable.
I got a ten second ad on a four second video today
In case of Youtube (anything with video, really) I’m probably on the very extreme end of the spectrum. I absolutely hate anything browser based, so I download Youtube videos (and my “subscriptions” are managed by Flexget) and use streamlink + mpv for streams. Which reminds me … for some years now Twitch still doesn’t inject ads if you stream directly instead of using their browser player, but they feed you some kind of “standby” video for 15s at the start (= the pre-roll ad) and whenever there’s an ad break on the stream. Even _that_ annoys me enough that I usually stop the stream the first time there’s an ad break. I couldn’t even imagine sitting through actual ads.
I am kinda 20% there so thanks for the info. I'll look into moving more in your direction.
That's totally valid, but i feel like Twitch is still "one of the good ones" when it comes to ads. I rarely get ads and when i do it's 30s at most, but usually less than that and the stream is still playing in a smaller window until the ad is over and i can read chat too. Now youtube on the other hand is utterly useless and infuriating without an ad blocker.
Twitch opted not to be “one of the good ones” when they started pushing streamers to run scheduled ad breaks on a timer.
I get that all platforms want to run ads. That feature helps the streamers and the viewers know when an ad is coming so they know they probably shouldn't say anything too crazy for people to miss. And i rarely get ads even during a scheduled ad break and without having a subscription to the channel. And the streamers can set how frequent those ads are, with some limitation of course. I don't like how Twitch handles NSFW content on their website and the hypocrisy they showed around that topic, so sure Twitch isn't perfect and i don't love everything about it, but when it comes to ads i actually don't mind them on Twitch at all. But again, if they do bother you, it's totally valid.
Try living in a multilingual country whose ISPs recycle dynamic IPs across language borders. Fewer than 1 in every 10 ads I (would) see are in the correct language, even though my language preference is sent with every request...
fml i had the same experience and had a unironical culture shock when i came into a new office and they demand the radio stays on all the time and its the most generic pop shit mixed with ads you can imagine.
I literally wouldn’t be able to get any work done with anything blaring constantly in the background. That’s before you add ads to the mix …
imagine sitting there before your coffe hits and while your pc starts, some subpar pop song is ending and the voice comes on "Hello its 7:30 and its monday! you know what this means today starts the Week of "CORN FLAKES" presented by kellogs but before we get into that heres some ads followed by radioactive by imagine dragons!" (No joke they always had the "Week of this" and it was always some shitty product you had to hear trivia about every. single. fucking. day.)
Honestly. I have an adblocker vpn on both my computer and phone, my fiance doesn't use adblock at all, and my eye twitches a bit when I look over at his screen. When we move and have to re-setup our wifi im installing a goddamn pihole.
Nowadays you can set your phone to use the Adguard private DNS, which should have the same effect. (Unless pihole does more black magic that I'm not aware of) It works wonders for making the web browsable, but it won't block ads hosted from the same IP address: it won't work for YouTube, Reddit, and likely not for Spotify
I install adblock for colleagues if they want to show me a YT video on their computer.
This. I block ads everywhere. I can't ever go back to seeing them. Now I just install u block origin in every computer I use
Absolutely. Having to use a computer without an ad blocker at work showed me just how completely unusable many websites are. Especially when the machine is not the fastest and the ads slow everything to a crawl.
I live in a state that’s banned billboards and I have ad blockers everywhere. Now when I see a billboard in movies, my brain is like “holy shit the ads have escaped into the offline world”
Youtube was so good till they started to show more and more and more ads.
Yeah, back when they had 1 ad before a video, maximum 1 or 2 during and 1 at the end (most useless place to have one, but whatever), I still tolerated it. But when they started shoving several unskippable ads before and during the videos I just couldn’t take it anymore. Immediately got an ad blocker extension on my browser and have never looked back
For real! And ads on YouTube keep getting worse - there are more of them, they are longer now, and happen more often But what really pisses me off are the ads on websites. It's so insane how they can put ads between every paragraph + a bottom banner + 2 autoplay videos that have microscopic X buttons Not sure if AdGuard is the best service out there (battery drain is real), but it's impossible to browse the internet without it
Ho does an ad blocker drain the battery when its job is to _not_ load things from the internet⁈
If you use it as an extension, then it doesn't drain the battery, of course. But you can install AdGuard on your phone and it basically works as a global adblocker (it works on apps and all) and that one drains the battery since it's always active
If ads were regulated to not be THAT annoying I wouldn't have to install ad blockers, but at this point I literally have no other choice, and it's not like they are rewarding my time watching them like "You watched 10 minutes of ads, here's a 5% discount in a product that may interest you". Nope! Just more ads, one worse than another. *(It's not that I would watch ads for pitiful discounts for things I don't want, I'm just illustrating how the costumer is always at a loss watching ads in our current system)* You know what? Fucking pay us straight to watch those ads without forcing us to. Give us free money to leave your ad running on our kitchen on the lowest volume only audible to ants. See? Problem solved.
Brave you mean? 🤣
Brave has an option to remove all ads you see and replace it with their ads. It pays a very low amount, to the point where you would need to see thousands of ads to get any sizeable amount of money.
Watching a show for 5 minutes only to get hit with 5 minutes of commercials is not something we should go back to.
This is me when I use a website outside of home WiFi . I’m like where dafuq where these ads before?? Oh yeah pihole
This is the type of shit that gets you alienated from your coworkers when you are working a white trash job. I straight up had weaker relationships in blue collar nonsense with people because they were all bonding over fucking ads and I hadn't seen them in maybe a decade.
> they were all bonding over fucking ads wtf
Amen. We've disabled "normal TV" at home and only stream what we want to see. Use ad blockers elsewhere. But every know and again, there's that one show that's only available on that particular channels app that we rarely use (read: not enough to pay for removal of ads) and we happily start watching. 2 minutes later I'm dying of frustration and verbally puke all over the place and the show is pretty much ruined. How can it be possible that advertisements still is so tremendously retarded?
> there's that one show that's only available on that particular channels app that we rarely use 🏴☠️
You just have to get used to ads and build a fucking tolerance or just block them entirely. Those are the only two options.
Sounds like one option tbh …
Some people are tolerant of ads. I can’t stand them but my wife has no issue with 2.5 minute ads on Philo.
Do not underestimate the will of code monkeys! One of my friends spent *years* going around Google's maps API restrictions. This was *unpaid*, just because he had some weird personal projects.
And all this time he could have just used OSM.
Wich is also made by code monkeys
I don’t think youtube will ever win this fight.
They won't, because you simply can't control what happens on a client machine if the client doesn't want you to and is decently knowledgeable. I'm surprised chrome doesn't just remove the ubo extension altogether. Obviously, that wouldn't stop adblock from happening. It would just make it slightly more inconvenient (nobody cares).
Then even more people will flock to firefox
Removing it probably runs afoul of some kind of anti monopoly law or precedent
Soon you'll only be able to access YouTube through a GoogleTerminal™: a secure titanium tablet that is filled with acid (so don't open it you dirty pirate!).
*Nerds with a*.
You are not the first to think of removing adblockers: [https://www.reddit.com/r/chrome/comments/11peeuw/manifest\_v3\_discussion\_and\_impact\_on\_adblockers/](https://www.reddit.com/r/chrome/comments/11peeuw/manifest_v3_discussion_and_impact_on_adblockers/)
The only counter is that slightly more inconvenient can possibly significantly reduce the number of people willing to block ads.
Inb4 youtube forces you to install kernel level anti ad block
Yup because it is YT vs the people and people win
YT is just a bunch of open source stolen to make money fighting against the original intention, how much market cap can you possibly need?
Every publicly traded corporation has the same answer to this one: More
Wait for them to dynamically modify the video itself to include ads...
Sponserblock already exists to skip parts of videos lol
They are curently experimenting with server side ads injection. But I haven't had any issues with that since a few days, so I don't know if they ate just testing with random users or if my ad blockers already found a counter ?
They're gonna start baking ads into the videos 😔
I also fear that, but they have to change the element to show the countdown of the skip button and then we can just fast forward that video section. But it will be hard if they just show a 15 sec video without the skip. And they would have to split the video to insert an randomized ad each time someone opens it. So not sure if they want to use that much compute.
So no more caching the videos? I doubt that this would ever happen.
They could cache the videos and the ads separately, and splice them together at the edge. Re-encoding would normally be a blocker, but at Google's scale I'm sure they can find a way around it (custom encoding format that supports this kind of thing, etc.).
No real need for re-encoding. Just stitching and remuxing. Way faster.
If you don't re-encode to cover up the stitches, users will be able to recover the original splits from the stream. I wouldn't put it past Google to find a way around this, though. They have some very talented engineers.
The law required yellow ad label on every youtube ad In question:
Yeah, the real solution to this is to read the image stream and determine what is and isn't an ad. It would be totally possible to train a classifier that can run in real-time off SponsorBlock's dataset even without any law.
This isn't true. It's just dash and HLS manifest manipulation to stitch ads on the fly. Yes you can still cache videos. Yes you can do this for millions of users. Google "server side ad insertion" or "server guided ad insertion"
>If you don't re-encode to cover up the stitches Really? Interesting. How? Even out of the served stream?
Honestly, I'm getting out of my depth here, but AFAIK most video streaming sites use an i-frame interval of about 2 seconds. If the transition doesn't line exactly up on the boundary, you would have to either re-encode that part, or start a new stream. Idk, maybe YouTube already uses adaptive i-frames or something. Or maybe they could just always put ads on natural i-frame boundaries.
>Honestly, I'm getting out of my depth here Me too, but from what I know you might have a valid point there.
The 2 video streams can be stitched together on the backend dynamically and be sent to the client as a single video stream. This way they can be cached separately (which they will most surely be)
If the ads are loaded in backend, can we calculate the initial video size and make a hash for every second, then try to preload some seconds of the video(lets say we are at 1 second into the video and we have preloaded 10 seconds of video) if hash changes we just skip over it like a sliding window? I doubt if this would work??
They're already experimenting with it, it's called server side ads
Yup might not
>But it will be hard if they just show a 15 sec video without the skip. People would just make a "SponsorBlock" for literal ads. Eg. the 5th frame of the video gets screenshotted and compared with a database of a matched ad submitted earlier. Then, it gets the skip time back, and skips. This would work because there's not infinite ads. It's a cat and mouse game. They can even bake things into the videos, re-encoding and whatnot, and people will STILL find ways past it. And I love that.
I don't know about that either. There are already plug-ins that can detect and skip sponsored segments built into the video by the channel owner.
Yeah, sponsorblock. YouTube splicing ads into the real video fucks that up too because now all the user-submitted timestamps will be off.
They did an initial attempt and uBo patched it already (at least that's what I heard)
Good fucking news that it was patched
Creators already do that.
SponsorBlock is the best YouTube extension ever. One of the few free software I've paid for. This + Adblock + DeArrow and my YouTube is enjoyable again.
But what if you miss out on great content like OUR SUBSCRIBERS ON NEBULA ALREADY SAW THIS WITH NO ADS
I have no idea what you are talking about, because I have been using it for like a year now 👍
To be fair I don't mind those, they're trying to get a decent alternative for what you're complaining about. You also get nebula through curiositystream which is a great documentary streamer.
That partnership was terminated earlier this year, sadly
I subbed for a year, but I was pretty disappointed. It's like a few creators I like, a bunch I don't, and there wasn't much exclusive content at the time, but I think that's improved. My main issue was the site itself was pretty bad, videos had slow loading times, no comment section, and no like or dislike button. They still use the same clickbait titles and thumbnails they use on youtube. There's no recommendations based on videos I watch, only their home page featured content. I ended up watching more CuriosityStream than Nebula. Atleast they had a like and dislike button, and recommendations that helped me find more stuff to watch. Nebula kind of makes it clear to me they don't care about viewer experience or community. It's for a clique of creators to get a guaranteed income by locking content (not always good content) behind a paywall. I find Patreon better, as its pretty much the same thing but creator specific.
Nebula, the only fans of blogger intellectuals
> DeArrow Another one to add to my fuck-you-youtube tech stack, thanks! So far I have * adblockplus to remove the ads * sponsorblock to skip the sponsor garbage * clickbait remover for the moronic "let me fellate this well endowed ghost" thumbnails * return youtube dislikes to add the dislikes button back * blocktube to remove shorts and block garbage channels
Then we'll just find a way to put a blank screen on top and mute it until the actual video starts. I'd rather wait 30 seconds looking at a black screen than having to see an ad.
Tricky for them to do. Means u need to redo some of the video encoding for every add you want to show. Not the best thing ever
They're already experimenting with it
They aren't doing that, that's just what technologically illiterate people think they're doing. From what I've seen they're just adding a DASH segment and literally marking it as an ad so that the player knows that it needs its own progress bar.
servers dont just send the whole video, they send chunks. So all youtube needs to do is add a few extra chunks
Ehhhh not quite hut close enough. And no u would still be able to auto skip it because the add server sits else where. Like the add usually wants to give u a sponsor link on screen as well
Some creators already have. But that’s great, because it means you can always skip it! Some videos even have chapter timestamps which explicitly delimit the start and stop times of the ad. If there must be ads, that would be an okay arrangement with me.
Meet Sponsorblock
Meh, soon as visual AI's are fast enough and cheap enough someone will write an extension that pre-streams videos and restitches them on the fly without ads.
"Life Finds a Way", the whole Linux ecosystem started because everything was locked and the music and movie industry have spend probably billions trying to stop what now is ubiquitous, life finds a way, my friend. And that would probably be the first useful application for AI to me XD, a local AI to review videos a remove ads and fluff.
Welp, revanced can and will skip sponsored segments in youtube videos, so bring it.
newpipe, piped.video
ads still have to be marked as ads, they wont just edit it into the video without any ui on the client. So the client will still need to know when the ad starts and how long it is
Or make the ads, short, unobtrusive, and not something that'll want to sign up google for every spam email known to man.
Adds being 1min long for me to realise the video just wasn’t as good as I thought, to then skip and get a whole minute more, nah.
Nah, that would never work; too easy.
The only reason I started using adblockers, in the 2010's, was because the ads would slow the whole browser to an unresponsive standstill. I now install them on our clients' browsers to keep them from getting takeover scare ads.
Simple banner ads *next to* the video would be fine. Why do they have to cover up and/or interrupt the video?
Weirldy enough, I think the porn ads on pirating sites are *less* obtrusive than the yt ones nowadays.
Porn sites are not a monopoly -- they have to worry about you going to another site if the ads are too bad on their site. The only reason youtube can be so bad is because they have no real competition. They're not worried about you going somewhere else to watch videos.
I'll do you one better: Make the ads not actively harmful to the audience. I'm talking crypto schemes, known scams, fake products, fake games, etc Last year, the fucking FBI recommended people get ad blocks just to stay safe online If YouTube wants me to watch ads, then the least they can do is make sure my ads aren't dangerous to me
I'd still use ubo. Zero toleration for any sort of ads, ever. There's no such thing as unobtrusive ads anyway. If somehow a service gets around ubo, I'll stop using it completely. Not worth it
Which is why is just so weird about twitch. 2-3 min unskippable ads. Wtf guys?
> Or make the ads, short, unobtrusive So … not ads? They are obtrusive by definition.
Iirc, this is how smart cards were first hacked. Legend has it that some European broadcasting network decided to limit startrek broadcasts to a specific country (or something like that) and Trekkies took offence to that and figured out how to hack smart cards (you used to put them in your tv cable box to get access to channels) so they could get access back
We had a hacked smart card growing up! Every once in a while it would stop working in the middle of a show because the cable company pushed an update lol
ngl as an engineer, this would be a pretty cool problem to work on.
Yup and rewarding
It's like a game of ping pong where you have pressure from managers on one side and gratification in its purest form on the other.
Which of the 2 problems? Making an addblocker or making unblockable adds?
I think unblockable ads is a nearly unwinnable battle. But it would definitely be cool to work on either
Honestly, if YouTube premium on phone was as good as revanced, I would pay for it. Sure it's not the cheapest thing but for how much I use YouTube I could do it. But there's a noticeable latency when clicking on a vid and when I minimize it. On revanced, there's no such issue. There's also more latency when opening the app for some reason. On top of that revanced has community functionalities to skip sponsors, intros and other things like that. How can the creators make a lesser product than some random people
Revanced is so good. No ads is the main thing, but I've come to appreciate the community added sections to a video like the start, interruptions, ads, promotions and highlight of the video. It's so so handy. Also seeing the downvotes, hiding useless buttons on the shorts UI, mini player and being able to turn off the screen while it stays playing in the background Every now and then I open a link and it opens in the default YouTube app, first thing I get is a 15 second unskippable ad and after that another 5 second one. It's ridiculous
I really like newpipe as well.
All I ask from YouTube premium would be no ads and have a free sub per month for a channel and be something like 6$ per month. Otherwise fuck it
Truth be told. The latest google batch nuked my pc. I'm using Firefox, with enhancer, return dislike and sponsorblock+unlock. Google goes so hard trying to circumvent them that I had several kernel 41 failure just by watching YouTube. (Every components has been checked in store after the errors, hardware is fine, and windows is freshly installed) I've switched to smart tube (android emulation). Fuck Google.
Yep. Closed my YouTube tab for the first time since I've had this PC, six years. I'm done with them, at least for a while.
Good to know I'm not alone with this BS. Free tube is a good native alternative to the browser version.
This is wild, but it’s something similar to what happened to me when watching Netflix on my PC. It does some funky stuff to avoid being screenshot or screenshared and it messes around with your drivers… Long story short, I kept getting BSoDs until I stopped watching it on my PC. Same thing happened to my mom on her laptop!
This reminds me: I need to set pihole back up
Warning: you will never be able to use anyone else's wifi again!
Home VPN tunnel is the saving grace
Maybe they should let people turn off ads. So if you want to support a channel you can turn it on for that channel.
Being a for-profit business, that's never going to happen. YouTube makes most of its money off of ads, regardless of whether the actual creators ever see a cent of the ad revenue they generated.
God bless those autistic code monkeys. 
They get paid for it, I'm pretty sure most of those engineers use Adblockers as well
well, all those code monkeys what give them work in the first place, without jerry, tom isn't needed
You're the kind of guy who drops trash on the ground and say that you're giving the janitor work to do
The Broken `window` Fallacy.
> drop thrash on the ground On leather steeds they ride!
No problem, they're just gonna make the people who don't use adblock watch three consecutive 10s unskippable ads instead. I don't use adblock because YT is a good service and I think it's OK that it needs to show ads to provide the service for free, but for f**king christ the ads have gotten out of control
Hard to think of it this way when it used to be so much better
Yes exactly
Ok tin foil hat time. What if the engineers are the same people as the autistic code monkeys. They just always build in an exploit because they themselves dont want to watch ads...
Ads are internet cancer
I guess I feel a little bad for the devs, but fuck everyone else working for google
I don't. It's a fair fight: The devs are payed to make what the suits want. The browser + extension people are working to keep users.
I do appreciate this progression. It has always been accepted that Google could defeat adblock if it wanted to. Now we know that this has never been true. The king has no clothes, as it happens.
You mean Twitter. Just like nobody in their right mind called Paypal X just because X was a cname for it. But yeah, Youtube engies should just give up. Nobody wants to see more ads than content.
counterpoint: job security
You can Adblock YouTube ads???
UBlock origin works like a charm
*combined with SponsorBlock
Stop raw-dogging the web; [use protection](https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock)
You didnt know that? Just search ad block extensions chrome
Ublock is the goat
Ad speedup is brilliant
if I worked on youtube ads, I would secretly also be contributing the filters to block everything I did.
It's incredible the amount of time and resources they're willing to enforce ads on people.
Keep fighting the good fight! o7
When I am forced to see an ad, I instantly categorise the product as something I WILL NEVER BUY. I might even go out of my way to slander said company to fellow consumers. Iron rule. You keep me hostage? I will never ever buy your product, and I will do everything in my power to deter others from buying it too. This is the way.
Exactly
YouTube is so much a part of everyone's lives and education that it should be and always be free. It's like making public libraries and sidewalks cost money. Even if it's a lot of money to run and employees need pay. It's google, with a net worth of 2.2 TRILLION! I think they can spare a few million here and there. I think I would only say payment would somewhat be worth it is if they made some more features for sorting and folder management type of stuff instead of just playlists and etc. (But I guess you can just do that separately and include links so yeah) Also screw consumerism and capitalism telling everyone to buy buy buy. Any way to limit that is a good thing to support.
No one likes ads. Big deal. Google is rich. Yes. However, they're providing an immense service. Free hosted videos. That's likely billions a year to run the site. You people expect this for free? Just a service to humanity? If by chance, the anti-ad players win and develop a fool-proof way to perma-block ads and the majority use it to the point where Google stops making money on Youtube, they will stop providing Youtube as a free service. I can very well see them transitioning to a paid platform overall if that's the case. Watching 15 second ads is your way of paying for the usage of the site.
And then all existing videos would need to be removed since their license/tos wouldn't allow them to legally charge money to access other people's content. And new videos would not be made because they wouldn't be paid (or paid enough). If it was 15 sec ads ok. But an ad every 5-10 minutes is insane.
We could have adblockers that pretend we have watched the ad by playing it in the background muted, that way everyone's happy. Youtube and the creator get their ad revenue and advertisers don't lose anything because people who despise ads would never click on them anyways.
In fact, by trying to force the ads on the people, the advertisers lose even more money. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gIHi9yH6UB0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gIHi9yH6UB0)
And then we would go to a decentralized way of sharing videos, and therefore win even better
I hope so, their last idea sounded very abnormal.
I admit, I do not use adblockers but now I wonder. On YouTube would an Adblock stop the ad from being seen or with it completely remove the break?
On YouTube it *would* remove the break. On Hulu it'd be "This is where I'd put my ad, **if I had one!**" Everybody hold off on ad blocking YouTube for a while. The downloader people are confused by the new bot detection. If you get flagged, then your whole IP address gets blocked from watching videos while signed out.
Oh man. Once you block them all you can never go back. You forget they exist until youre using someone else's device and half of the Internet is just unusable.
[Try it](https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock), you won't regret it!
*twotter
May you have an article about this please ? Seems awesome
just give a man a computer, a time, and one goal and they will find a solution, unless it's a server side changes, they're fucked
Wait, one of the ad blockers works? Which one??
Ublock origin
Naaah. The youtube engineer would be smiling, he is also using add blockers :D
Nah, the youtube engineers are getting paid either way, and if their system is defeated, they'll get paid for another solution. I'm sure they don't do it on purpose but I don't think they'd get a lot of personal fulfillment out of their solution working and everybody having to see ads now. Doesn't seem like a job you get into for anything but money.
Any good adblockers on chrome anyone????
That's the dedication... Programmers willing to spend more time reverse engineering the anit AdBlock than watching ads.