YouTube cracking on ad blockers.

InternetCitizen2@lemmy.world to Technology@lemmy.world – 1203 points –
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I imagine they'll eventually find a way to prevent us from blocking ads. Twitch TV for example has found some ways to make adblock useless.

It's a shame, and it's really just a side effect of google racing to the bottom of the adspace game. If ads weren't as cheap as they are today, they wouldn't be trying to maximize the amount of users who are forced to see advertisements.

I suspect ad blocking will always be an arms race. The server can only ask the client to play the ad, and then rely on the client to truthfully report whether it did so.

I'm sure they'll try to implement some type of DRM BS into the web that allows them. It's one of the good things about projects like Gemini. I used to think it was only good for the novelty of having a web alternative protocol.

No doubt Big Tech would lobby for Microsoft to use Windows to flag Gemini browsers as malicious and then run FUD campaigns against the Gemini protocol

Y'all remember when back in the day, Google's motto was "don't be evil." And then at some point somebody told them how much money there was in being evil and then they just pivoted to being a functional parody of a giant evil megacorporation from a cyberpunk novel? Cuz I remember that.

It still doesn't stop queueing a few videos ahead of time and watching them though, let it play the ad to noone and just cut it out after

But then you'll get prompts for "What product did you just watch an ad for?"

They already do this on the YouTube TV app

It's amazing how many times someone in this thread has joked about Google doing something absurd sounding only for it to already be true.

You have to be careful with that sort of thing - some percentage of people who do watch the ads will close the tab rather than read the prompt and answer it.

It’s only a matter of time before they start embedding them into the video like podcasts do and you won’t be able tell the difference between ad and video with software.

Timestamps can still be voluntarily marked for an auto-skip feature to jump throughthe ads.

Not if YouTube interjects the ad after uploading and the location is randomized.

Someone will create an extension to mute the ad and overlay it with suitably timed bite sized cat videos.

Oh, that's just brilliant! Instead of being interrupted by intrusive ads, I'm seeing videos of fluffy cats doing adorable and funny stuff all the time.

Will to be fair, Google is an ad company. We should have seen this coming.

Worst case scenario I think I'd just resort to downloading the videos to watch. Live videos is the challenge, but luckily I don't watch live streams.

Bruh, your not gonna believe this, but the ducks at the park are free. if you use one of these, you can download all the ducks you want. I downloaded 9000 ducks so far.

To be fair, he was talking about live streams, as in watching people in real-time.

That can be a fairly different experience, especially since downloaders don't grab the chat at the moment. Also for unarchived streams, they can only be downloaded if you are aware and able to download at the time that the stream is still active.

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You can block ads on Twitch... I use S0undTV on my firesticks and never see ads.

They'll start banning Google accounts, that'll stop quite alot of people just because of how many users use gmail or drive.

I don't think they'll resort to that because that would mean getting rid of their own source of income. YouTube may not be getting ad revenue, but they still collect data and that's where the real value is.

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