moe90YouTube might slow down your videos if you block ads
Lost_My_MindThey’ve been doing this for close to 20 years. Ever since shortly after google bought them.
You know the people who created youtube are all part of the same OG corp/group that gave eise to the monsters who have created the hell we currently live in.
The PayPal mafia.
Thiel, musk, howry, Chen(yt), wong(reddit),Hoffman(LinkedIn)
If they know I’m blocking their ads, why wouldn’t they just block the video altogether? That’s what they currently do.
If it’s already blocked, slowing it down to “blocked… but slower” seems rather pointless?
SibshopsThey are probably trying to find that spot where it’s just slightly more annoying to block ads than leave them unblocked.
Currently blocking ads consists of keeping uBlock Origin up to date. Not blocking ads generally means going to a different platform after a single ad roll.
I have no issues with pre-roll ads; it’s the interstitial ones that drive me away.
I have an issue with pre-roll ads. Some of them are extremely long and can’t be skipped
BeigeAgendaRemember 10 years ago the YouTube app only showed ads on every 3rd video and often only a single 5 second ad, and everything longer could be skipped.
Like a frog in a pot I could tolerate that amount, a few years later they started the ad ramp-up and what finally drove me to install vanced were 3 unskippable ads you had to endure just to watch something.
i added 2-3 other adblockers. and i use UBLOCK origin to bypass facebooks login popup.
Frellwiti added 2-3 other adblockers
Never run multiple adblockers at the same time. You gain nothing except broken websites, performance issues, and an increased chance of triggering anti-adblocks.
QuarterSwedeAbsolutely the same for me. The only reason I block their ads is because of how frequently they interrupt the content. It’s just unacceptably greedy. Pre-roll ads is fine, I get they have bills to pay too.
If they give you what you want, but harass you enough, you may just stop using an ad blocker to watch the video and might just forget to turn it back once you are done.
If you had to unlock your bathroom door to enter or exit, you will either put forth effort to correct the problem or you will take the lazy route and just prop the door open.
It’s a tarpit. If they simply displayed a blocked “no vids for u” message, you’d get outraged, go complain online, look for workarounds, and eventually find a bypass. If everything still works but poorly, you get annoyed, turn off your adblocker to troubleshoot, possibly blame the adblocker for being “buggy” and keep it off. Their help page solution implies they are hoping for just that. There is no “smoking gun” blocked message to go complain online about, even though it is indeed their servers that are degrading your connection on purpose in secret. Or maybe you give up and leave their ecosystem entirely, which is no big loss for them.
The proper solution is to develop an adblock that they cannot detect is blocking ads. This may require actually downloading the ad video in background, and then lying that the video has played.
I’d be more likely to just assume delivery quality was going downhill and look for another streaming video hoster/provider. Why would someone link slow speeds to a plugin that filters out the stuff you don’t want?
Stripping down to a skeleton of a software is standard troubleshooting procedure. Ever had a plugin crash and consume 100% cpu? I had. Only way to sense is that fans are spinning up and page is laggy, and then look in about:performance and there it is. No one would have ever suspected that the website you’re visiting is deliberately introducing bugs in secret if it thinks you’re adblocking.
Relevent Username: If you went to Tau Zero, you can finish watching every youtube video in mere moments from your point of view
Because the “Why is the video being slow?” pop-up now sends you to the page blaming adblockers instead of the ISP shaming thing it used to do.
I actually wouldn’t mind that. An ad blocking method that just plays ads in the background with the sound muted and not visible on screen.
If google only lets me stream the content I want when I stream content I don’t want, that’s fine, I just don’t want to watch it as it’s my eye balls, not theirs so it’s my choice at the end of the day
I’ve been wondering about that, also perhaps a browser where your mouse position has seperate client and software side states? I know a lot of data can be gleaned from mouse movements so if the browser only updated its internal cursor position when you actually clicked that would potentially cut out that source of information?
In the ultimate, you’d need to do something like run a headless browser in a virtual machine, have it play out and record the entire video, then use something like AI to splice out the ad segments and distracting elements (a souped-up sponsorblock will work for a while, but eventually ads will be injected into the raw video stream at random intervals), and present the pristine finished content to you. Basically we are going to re-invent TiVo all over again xD.
In worst case, you can’t start watching until the pre-roll ad timers expire. This is how adblocking works on Twitch streams currently - you can only see a purple screen even if you block the ads.
And yes, the headless browser will need to use AI for human-like mouse movement and to solve captchas - basically whatever state-of-the-art technologies spammers and scrapers are already currently using.
Google is anticipating this future and is trying to implement and force hardware-based DRM for web video before then.
AI might be overkill? I recall back in the day people working out which images where manipulated by the way the underlying flow of colour and pixel layout didn’t line up, each image ends up with a kind of grain of different size and direction. You could spot ads by detecting which image data doesn’t line up with the majority and cutting it out that way.
I know Lemmy hates AI, but this actually would be a perfect use for it. The problem is the idea of what an ad is. Yes, you could try to use secondary characteristics like image color or sound normalized volume (WhyTF do youtube ads still sound 3x louder than content? are we living in cable era again?), but they would be error-prone for any content more visually intense than a podcast. They would also not capture sponsorblock content like “I love showing you all these foreign countries but what I love even more is having my internet connection secure” that match the video flow. A crowdsourced lookup table of all known ad clip fingerprints would go a long way, until ad videos themselves start being AI-generated on the fly for that sweet personalization revenue.
No, what I really want is to distill the idea of what I want to see into an AI and have it filter out what I don’t want to see for me. I know an ad when I see one, so AI can too. Pre-roll/mid-roll ads? Gone. Sponsorblock content? Gone. Like and subscribe? Skipped as if it didn’t exist. Virtual billboards on the sidelines of sporting events? Overlayed with kittens. Idiocracy banners squeezing the video from either side? Cropped and rescaled. Watermarks? Excised and content-aware-filled.
The last frontier is when the content itself is secretly an ad, imprinting upon you some idea or point of view. You’ll have to watch out for that one on your own.
queermunist she/herSo you don’t find something else to do.
i have been blocking them fro 10+years with none other than UBO.
That’s probably a bad idea, as it makes it more likely YouTube will detect the ad-blocking. Better to add your own custom rules to UBO instead.
tabularIf you went somewhere else their competition is winning (directly as another video site and indirectly as anything else you would do with your time).
TrackinDaKrakenGoogle will never get a cent out of me, willingly.
If it gets annoying enough, and FreeTube stops working, I’ll find something better to do with my time.
shortwavesurferI have already started finding peertube replacement channels.
Any recommendations?
Techlore, futurism, jeff geerling
Thanks
ZeroOneReminder Techlore is an Apple shill
I have already started finding peertube replacement channels.
Please share!
I’m happy I am finding some people on Nebula but being a payed service, it’s doomed to eventually show ads.
I now watch Climate Town and City Nerds on Nebula. I wish Dr Becky would move. I love her videos.
…katehildenbrand.com/…/3PD7HDunumrCR1zJKHUVfo
Kate Hildebrand is a marine ecologist that has a bunch of videos on her peertube instance.
peertube.wtf/w/adtBd3vNKKJ7Y5dvWU7ivq
Parker’s microbes combine music and microscopy in OC creations.
Life near the OCEAN SURFACE: The Upper Pelagic
Maybe people will start torrenting youtube rips if they somehow manage to kill ad blockers.
Yep, lol. Same mindset here. Although I doubt YouTube will ever do a hard cut on piracy. That would lead to a major decline in viewership and wouldn’t look good to shareholders.
RandomStickmanThanks uBO team I don't even know yt is trying anything
Using uBO, but have noticed a slightly longer delay of a few seconds between hitting play and the video starting, but I can deal with that over being forced to watch 30s of ads.
Ricky RigatoniHonestly it just felt like youtube’s servers were shittimg themselves again, so I baely even register it as a real interruption.
There have been periods where one of my accounts was getting an ad-length black screen with buffering throbber (I hate that name) and, the most recent time, it was accompanied by a pop-up asking me if I'd like to find out why that was happening. Yeah. I know why that's happening, thanks.
Then that stopped happening again. Either they gave up or UBo have worked around it somehow. Never ending arms race.
Bobby TurkalinoThis happens to me too, especially when it’s a computer that I haven’t used in a while, which makes me think that yeah it’s the arms race. It stops once my browser is open long enough for uBO to update
It’s the people that make blocking lists that we should thank. I don’t think uBO makes anything themselves
tymonI’m trying very, VERY hard to pound the correct knowledge into my brain to be able to switch my freelance business services away from Google to something like Proton Unlimited.
Leaving the Google ecosystem will literally make me lose work, but man, this shit has gotta stop
The problem is, nothing short of NA and EU governmental intervention will force Google to stop being such a nefarious, monopolistic, antitrust piece of shit. They’re just so utterly ubiquitous for Western businesses. You literally cannot have a small business and hope to be successful without partaking in either Google or Facebook/Meta’s ad services. TikTok was becoming a huge threat to both those companies and look how viciously they were attacked.
The whole thing is beyond fucked, man. Kudos to you for trying to break free for your business, but I feel like you’ll just be fucking yourself in the long run.
Agree with this. For my business, and most customer facing ones honestly, Google is how people discover you. They are the modern day Yellow Pages. You don’t exist on Google and you may as well not exist.
Depending on which services you want to replace, Nextcloud might also be worth a look. There are quite a few hosted options available by Hetzner and others.
UlrichJokes on them, I already watch videos at 0.5x
Little8LostThats a good one for 0.5x (soup store)
youtube.com/watch?v=fNcYtcVn-8k
youtube.com/watch?v=fNcYtcVn-8k
Code Geass: Soup Store
how did you turn those anime boys into New York City grandpas, that was amazing
it already happened, it takes few seconds to star the video, a popup comes upa nd says, “whats slowing your video down”
I mean, when I want to watch TV or Movies, I load it into my torrent program 🏴☠️ and let it download in the background. I could do the same with youtube videos.
Yeah, I download whatever I want to watch and fire up vlc. 0 ads, 0 buffering.
Technically that’s 100% buffering.
Touché :P
Technically VLC buffers 1.5 seconds by default which actually broke streaming over SSHFS (phone’s filesystem mounted via KDE Connect) for me, had to increase buffer to 10 secs
Wait, you think all YouTube content is available in torrents?
I mean like the downloading aspect. There are a lot of youtube downloading tools available for practically every OS desktop or mobile (well except iOS)
You specifically said BitTorrent. Do you know how that works?
I already do this. There are several apps for it but I really like [Pinchflat] (github.com/kieraneglin/pinchflat) because it has metadata settings for Jellyfin.
All I have to do is add a video to a playlist and it gets automatically downloaded. I use it for archival but there’s nothing stopping you from making it the only way you consume YouTube content.
I had a time, when i had frequent internet disconnections, and connection speed was slow in general, so while i had the internet connection, i just downloaded a bunch of videos, to then watch offline. Suprisingly, downloading video even with slow internet is faster than streaming it, despite when streaming it, videos was always buffering.
Now i have stable internet and i can just stream videos without the problem, even by using third party app with no ads and without account.