YouTube's ‘War’ on Adblockers Shows How Google Controls the Internet
404media.co
Another great article from 404 Media highlighting the power that the tech giants have amassed over how how we use the internet.
This brings me, I think, to the elephant in the room, which is the fact that Google has its hands on quite literally every aspect of this entire saga as a vertically integrated adtech giant.
This extreme power over the adtech and online advertising ecosystem is one of the subjects of an FTC antitrust suit against Google.
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Ya I'll never stop using ad blockers, the internet is essentially unusable without them. Mine still work on youtube but if the day comes that they don't I'll just stop using it. We need some competition here, things have gotten increasingly anticonsumer and the companies have gotten too comfortable doing and charging whatever they want
The problem with any youtube competitor is that there is no way in hell they can cover the costs of the infrastructure required to host the same amount of videos youtube has and streaming them to the millions of users youtube serves daily.
How about a decentralized, federated service instead of hoping a major corporation tries to "save" us?
I don't think even a decentralized service could hold a mass equal to youtube. That would require that either the owners of all instances pay from their own pockets with mostly no income to support it, or that every user paid up, which is not going to happen, at least not in a service like youtube.
Some of us are data holders and have Gigabit internet with options to go even higher. Don't count out the little guys ability to share massive amounts of data... been doing it since zip drives and CDs
Let's say only 500gb of video are uploaded every hour in this hypothetical federated YouTube (actual volume for the site looks to be ~200tb an hour). Are you honestly going to argue just that is even conceivably maintainable? You have to infinitely add storage space, multiple TBs a day.
Let's say I run my own hypothetical, federated, userpeer-to-peer and opt-in server CDN function-platform, also known as PeerTube...
I'd only accept those video uploads/uploaders I consider quality content.
I'd love to host many content creator's videos. From the goodness of my heart, for free, as a gift to you all. But certainly not all videos, and nowhere near 200 TB/h. But I can afford to host many TB's without it impacting my private economy.
That video of some idiot eating tidepods or whatever the current thing is? They could find somebody else that will host. Or if unable, host their own videos. Now we're both happy.
Cool, I like that idea unironically. So how are you going to do that? To accept only "quality uploads" you would have to somehow know, ahead of time if the uploaded content is acceptable. Sure maybe you have a white list but have fun maintaining that.
Okay so different idea maybe you let people vote on the video somehow and delete videos that are deemed poor quality. Great! So now you burn through writes instead of storage itself which is probably desirable though it only lessens the need for more drives. There's a flaw in this system though. How do you prevent a community from removing a video that's been voted to be poor quality (IE fake "bad" reviews)? Are these videos gonna be manually reviewed? Manually reviewing would have the same immense maintenance problems as a whitelist so again have fun maintaining that.
And who pays the creators? They are usually partly or mostly ad supported. At best they have a patreon/floatplane or other support platform.
They will simply not come over since there's no audience. No audience, no creator. No creator, no audience.
Just like nobody would leave reddit for Lemmy since all the content is on reddit?
To be honest, I miss the times when people made videos because they wanted to make videos, not make money. I'm willing to forego quite a lot of YouTube content if that helps build a new paradigm for how the internet works. Would you?
Let's get real, most of the people stayed on reddit. Only a very small fraction tried lemmy and an even smaller fraction have completely stopped using reddit.
That's OK, I stopped using reddit completely almost a decade ago. I'm happier with a small group of nice people than with a large group of unpleasant people.
A lot of people seen to focus on profitability and maximum exposure as the goal. More and more people don't think like that anymore.
Wow can't believe you're being down voted on this, guess it shows a lot of people don't understand that it's the foodcarts that lead to a good restaurant scene. The hobbiests that provide valuable content(that is later repackaged and sold as a product by leachers large and small).
There are some legitimate ideas to work through as far as a decentralized video hosting platform but the idea that something would be lost by every fucking nitwit looking to "make money on ads" not having a central video source foist their content on you...uhhh I'm down with that for sure.
When stuff is done for passion and interest, it's almost always better than a paid product or service, and if you haven't learned that yet in life you're making me feel old.
The beauty of the fediverse is that "if you don't like it, make your own" actually works.
I don't like down votes as they're abused as a tool to suppress "unwanted" opinions. So the instance I'm on simply don't accept downvotes... This ride only goes up.
Thanks for your support though, people on "hate filled" (😉) instances might find some of my opinions interesting but might not see them due to the group think downvotes.
The mistake was allowing the internet to become “the cloud” in the first place.
People should be able to host their own shit on their own machine at home. This should be simple for people to set up, like a NAS with an App Store. Default to a secure config. Don’t make it too easy; if you try to sugarcoat it all, people won’t realize what they’re getting into (like now with cloud shit)
Otherwise we get what we have now - everything from TVs to social media to fucking door locks and lightbulbs needs a connection back to the manufacturer, and they can drop support at any time. This allows the worst of rent-seeking under the guise of “everyone too dumb to do on their own”, very similar to “we must not allow security because bad guys could hurt KIDS” (while true, it’s just an excuse to read everyone’s mail to protect the ruling class from any negative opinion brewing)
Uploaders would be manually screened at sign-up, I wouldn't run an open server. Many fediverse servers in general and several PT-instances in particular does it. It works fine for a community based platform. It's not meant to be one, monolithic server doing it all, open for all.
There are many ways to handle storage requirements, I like datacenters with easily expandable storage.
You bring up "have fun with that" but I'm having great fun already helping out running both a Mastodon and Lemmy instance. I don't see how a video hosting service would be much different, in regards to moderation. Maybe I'm missing part of your point?
My moderation point is that with a video service you are forced to "watch" the content in the video in order to properly moderate (though you can just block people of course). You could have a bunch of filters like YouTube does to determine if your video should have ads and whatnot or you can rely on the community (or both).
The main issue with it is that we want to prevent "bad content" that being very poor quality content to skip being all detailed. To do that kind of filtering really requires some form of community review of the content as it's infeasible to have it all manually reviewed. If you have a community review process you open the door to mass reporting and the like so you cannot simply automatically remove content if it gets a lot of reports, it must be manually reviewed (by watching the content) to ensure it's fair to remove it. Lemmy, at least in my usage doesn't have this desired "bad quality" filter outside of up votes/down votes which notably don't remove the content (and so doesn't remove the immense storage requirement)
It seems like we have fundamental differences in how the fediverse could and should work. I don't see this conversation going any further, thanks for the interaction.
Yeah dude this was quite nice compared to my experiences on Reddit. Might have come off too strong from all my time there.
Oh no! Censorship /s
No need to be sarcastic, in my kingdom I'll be absolute ruler and "censor" and suppress others as I see fit.
And everybody else is free to do the same and tell me to feck off.
I think censorship in the Fediverse works because you can always find a host which aligns with your ideology. Bad ideas automatically die out if the overwhelming majority of people stop spreading it, not because a giant megacorp decides it's not a good message to show to their shareholders.
But good ideas can be hidden from users if an admin bans instances or remote users. It's a new type of censorship.
Great, so you pretty much only host established creators. Nearly all big channels on Youtube started with what is now considered shitty contend. They trained their editing skills over time, bought proper equipment once they really got into it and probably only found their style halfway through their "career". If YouTube pre-filtered it's videos, then the site would be dead by now.
Sure you can shove all responsibility to someone else and say they should self host it, but then you also have to acknowledge that peertube and the like eliminate 98% of all content before its made with its cobsiderably higher entry point, and that includes the good and the bad.
Have you seen the sheer amount of data hosted by YouTube though? There's no way any amount of hobbyists are going to hold a candle to that.
That doesn't address the issue of storage and compute power for streaming to the absurd amount of users.
There's been attempts before and it all comes down to file transfer time and storage (because at the time the servers weren't transcoding for streaming the file. Secondary issue of buy in, like what we see with niche communities staying on reddit instead of moving to the fediverse.
There already exist a number of projects out there like peertube. Take a look at how even the most popular instances are doing. It's not well.
The closest thing was around a decade ago, the popcorntime or popcornflix or whatever it was called app/program that was just a nice front end for torrenting videos and watching them before they finished downloading. Each individual user was responsible for their own storage, network connection speed, and compute power to render the video for themselves. Each end user was also contributing back through helping others to download the file via standard torrenting p2p stuff.
So now you need a front end to host the magnet links to the files, and a robust set of seed servers so no video is ever truly lost. That still doesn't cover a significant portion of youtube's functionality like reccomendations, comments, allowing creators to edit/adjust videos after the fact.
Unlike reddit, youtube is technologically complicated and impressive. Hell, read up on some of the stuff Netflix has had to do to achieve reasonable streaming quality and speed on an insanely smaller curated library.
A decentralized federated solution is possible, but there's a shit ton more that would have to go into this than just appealing to the concept.
Would you mind sharing some 'essential' articles to read about this? I know the principle of how Netflix works, but always interested in learning more.
Seems to me that anything beyond the actual hosting and serving of the video file is unnecessary to include by default in a federated video streaming solution. To drill down a bit, recommendations don't need to be handled by an algorithm, the content creator can make their own list of videos or playlist - do we really want another reco algo passively controlling what we feed our minds? Comments could be something as simple as a mastodon or lemmy thread with the video as the OP. Content editing after the fact doesn't seem like its that big a deal aside from computational and bandwidth overhead which would seem small compared to the task of serving multiple thousands of viewers at once.
You are basically saying "Other than the most expensive and complicated parts" the rest is easy or unnecessary. Which isn't necessarily accurate but still is being a bit dismissive of the problems at hand.
And one of the biggest criticisms of Peertube (aside from the dearth of content, which helpfully avoids the "expensive/complicated" parts) has been Discoverability. How do people watch your videos (or your playlist) if they don't have a way of knowing that your videos even exist?
I think we missed each other. My overall point is that aside from the hosting/serving, other federated networks/services could pick up the slack. The Federated Youtube doesn't have to mirror Youtube exactly, or even mirror functionality all-inclusively (ie with reccos and comments etc. built-in), but could lean on other federated servers to provide similar functionality.
As I said, comments could be a lemmy/mastodon thread. Recommendations or other discoverability could be other threads or maybe even a completely different service that hasn't been created yet, I don't know, but I do know that any reco algo needs to be open and subscribed to, not jammed down our throats and gamed. In the meantime, everyone's got a search engine, right?
Ultimately I don't live in this social media/open source/development space too much, I just saw a way for these things to be built/used together to achieve an effect, distributing dev and process overhead and load across all the networks. I don't have any insight on the bigger, more pertinent, file distribution problem.
At best word of mouth or users sharing it on lemmy (etc.).
Good luck getting the niche stuff out of the bubble like it sometimes does with the algo.
I agree with you so much a mere upvote won't do.
That method is still around, it's just called stremio and you use a plugin called torrentio to get the torrent streaming functionality that popcorntime offered.
I’d rather the storage and retrieval is just kind of built in to the network itself (p2p) and companies like Google can just do search on it.
Make your money on ads, but keep it off my content if I don’t want to use your services. No need to vertically integrate so hard.
It's still just as expensive, you're just adding administrative overhead.
You'd also spread the cost to more people, true, but who would operate a server for free (based on donations, but if it's federated why should I pay for that one server?). Also, do you trust all those people to keep operating the storage for years to come? Or are you done with losing access to videos, because someone lost interest in running their instance?
Storage and bandwidth costs for video on demand are so incredibly high, I don't think we'll get a federated alternative to YouTube any time soon.
https://grayjay.app/
Honestly this feels like the only possible way to win against Youtube. Goal could be to just create standardized decentralized platform where number of different companies/organizations can host and serve their own content while still being searchable and accessible from single client application.
Major problem with Mastodon, Lemmy and Peertube is searching and browsing content from multiple instances is still difficult.
peertube started with that idea. Unfortunately is poorly maintained, also because humans are inherently evil, it's a nightmare to moderate.
I think it could work if most users contribute to the maintenance cost of their favorite instance. It’s just like mastodon and lemmy, but everything costs more.
One alternative that seems promising is Nebula. It only fills a small part of the role YouTube currently occupies, since it focuses on being a platform for high quality professional content creators to make unfiltered content for their audience, but it's funding model seems to be much more honest, stable, and so far viable than an ad-supported platform or the other alternatives. I don't think anything could realistically replace all facets of YouTube (and I think the internet might be healthier if it were a little bit less centrally-located). A self-sustaining, straight-forwardly funded platform like Nebule seems like the best path forward to me.
I think Floatplane has more future but I don't use either of them so I can judge.
Lifetime licenses are weird.
Interesting, I thought Floatplane only hosted LTT content. Nebula has a LOT of creators spanning a very wide gamut of highly content. It has been gaining momentum steadily for several years now.
That said, I'd be happy to see them both succeed. We need more competition, having all internet video (minus NSFW and some short-form) hosted on one platform seems neither sustainable nor ideal.
Afaik they try to market it to otger creators but also sell tge llatform like IaaS.
So the answer is don't. Let your clients help you. Like peer tube. If a video gets incredibly popular, then it will have lots of watchers at the same time. If it has lots of watchers at the same time, that means anybody who starts to watch it after those watchers have started will be downloading the video from the watchers and not from the server.
The problem with any competitor is providing enough value to content producers to get them to make the move.
Eh, kinda. Tbh youtube didn’t use to be that way, it was just a place to upload your videos and search for other videos. Over time they grew it into a creator focused site much to the detriment of the quality of content imo. Like sure, creators are producing 4k videos with great lighting and yada yada yada, but they have to create so much content constantly that the videos favored by youtube’s algorithm are fairly soulless, low effort mass produced crap that looks shinier. Classic youtube was some dude with a heavy accent recording on a nokia potato a 25 second video that immediately showed you how to do exactly what you entered into the search bar.
It was like that in an age that no longer exists, and can no longer exist. Things were generally decentralised as everyone was doing and hosting their own shit. And people were fine and accustomed to finding weird holes with a collection of strange content. The average user is now focused on convenience rather than exploring, especially as web content has come to supplant other forms of entertainment.
Yeah everyone talking about how many additional TB of data you need to host every hour - if content had to justify it's existence on it's own merits a lot less of it would exist and it's quality would be dramatically superior.
Pretty much all creators on Youtube start with shitty videos you wouldn't even glance at a second time. If you pre filter all videos then said creators could never get feedback or encouragement and most would've stopped long ago.
Why not? Youtube was big before google bought it
Youtube had a space devoid of competition. The next guy doesn't. If the next guy wants to compete, they have to have all the features of Youtube or people will complain. Many of Youtube's current features cost money and weren't present when Youtube started.
The space is also more regulated now that Youtube exists, meaning the new guy has to follow regulations which normally costs money. When Youtube started, those regulations didn't exist, because Youtube didn't exist.
Youtube got big by building a city in an open field surrounded by nothing but open fields. The next guy has to build a city directly next to Youtube, follow all the same laws as Youtube, and ask you not to drive into Youtube.
Two reasons:
Now you'd need to distinguish yourself from YouTube in a meaningful way as well as provide a sustainable revenue model, such as advertising, in order to gain access to a similar amount of venture capital.
Did youtube at the time serve millions of users daily and stored a gargantuan amount of petabytes worth of videos?
Even if a competitor rises, they will need money somehow, and in this hell of a capitalist world, only big corporations have it.
They were big through investors throwing money at a money sink for years. Youtube was losing tens to hundreds of millions of dollars a year for a long time, before it finally became profitable.
A new competitor wouldn't get such favorable support from investors.
I've used adblockers for like 15 years and I genuinely get disgusted when watching YouTube without it. There's no way I'll go back. I even do sponsorblock to remove in-video ads.
The unfortunate thing is that I'm willing to pay a reasonable price for a lot of content creators, just not via Google/YouTube.
A dollar per channel? I follow 104 content creators om YouTube through RSS. And many more if we count all the other platforms. I can't afford that.
It's a difficult situation for viewers, creators and providers. I don't have an answer, but a stop-gap solution I'd be happy to see is like 480p max for adblockers, pay for HD+. That's reasonable based on how much ad-dodgers impact YouTube from what I've gathered.
I cannot watch a video from start to finish anymore. Thanks youtube. Almost every video is filled with bs fluff to reach the 8 minute mark. It annoys me greatly. Maybe also because I am in the industry and I learned in school to not use meaningless shit in my videos.
I've not thought about them time markers in a long time. One that was kinda funny and bearable was Dave509's twist.
"I need to reach a certain time limit on my videos, so for a few more minutes I'll just sit here, nod and say "I agree" and "I understand". Feel free to share whatever with me...
Sits in absolute silence for 30 seconds while staring at the camera
Yes, I agree."
But I have noticed I've gravitated to longer form videos, 30m+, for the last few years. I guess it has a lot to do with the fluff.
We shall from now on call such content creators "fluffers".
i've gravitated to long form interviews, 8+ hours has nothing on me. i listen to them when i go to sleep or watch art videos.
The thing that gets me is how little creators actually get per individual ad view. Now, collectively, with tens of thousands and millions of views, they get a good bag. But my watchtimes of that minute worth of ads per video? Literally nothing. A fraction of a cent so small it doesn't exist. I could watch a creator semi-regularly for like 2 years and my contribution to their income by watching ads would be in the single digits. I give them two bucks over Patreon or something just once and that's worth as much as me giving up hours upon hours of my life watching ads. Now, I can't afford to give literally everyone I watch more than once a dollar or two. But I give some money here and there to a couple I watch a lot. To make up for my using an adblocker.
Honestly, I'd probably get YouTube Premium if it wasn't fucking Google behind it.
i also have always used adblockers, but once i had to put in effort circumventing YT ads earlier this year, i discovered sponsorblock and added it. kind of funny that had it not been for YT being an ass, i would have been fine with other kind of ads.
Now that's a solution.
Detecting adblock: 480/576p
Watching with ads: 720p/1080p/1440p Watching with Premium: 4K and high bitrate 1080p (and maybe 1440p?)
I guess if you don't use ad blockers you somehow get used to it. It's like someone whose job is 100% outdoors vs. someone who works indoors and then has to do a day working outside. The person who is used to cold, wind, rain, scorching sun, etc. stops noticing, even though it takes a toll on them too.
Every once in a while I end up using a browser without ad blockers enabled and it's incredible to me that some people live like that. It really is almost unusable. Things jump around as ads load in. Ads / videos pop over the content you're trying to use. The useful part of a page might be 60% ads: ads along the sides and breaking up the text. And then there's the bottom area of the page which is an endless scroll of "related content" ads.
That's not a good analogy. It's more like saying that whenever you go outdoors for a walk on the park or do grocery shopping, you have to give up 15 minutes of your time to "donate" blood to the rich.Edit: I just finished reading your whole comment. Sorry friend. We're on the same page.
No analogy is perfect. Yours gets at the reason for the ads -- they want something from you and you have no chance to bargain or say no. Mine is more about how people can become accustomed to something that's really unpleasant and after a while not really notice it.
My point is that to me (someone who blocks ads), trying to use the web without an ad blocker is extremely painful, and I find websites almost unusable. But, to someone who has never used an ad blocker, they're used to the crap, and have developed some 'immunity' to the distracting images and work-arounds for the broken thing.
Anyhow, we're on the same page. I just felt like explaining a bit better what I was getting at.
I was quite content with tolerating banner ads. Then they became animated and it went downhill after that.
I'm fine with a variety of ads, but I really hate distracting animation. The current trend seems to be that every ad is animated, so every ad is blocked.
There never will be a YouTube competitor, it requires continuous investment from a multibillion dollar company.
Nebula isn't too bad, I like a lot of those informative creators and they collaorated and made a startup video hosting site, its essentially everything i want youtube to be. If more creators decided to do this it's be great.
For static ads there will eventually be visual adblockers which detect ads not from their source but because they look like ads. (The mandated paid advertisement notice helps).
There is the utility that journalists use to capture YouTube video. A version that captured video content and then filtered ads visually would be unblockable.
AI will be good for that. For once it will benefit the people.
Download newpipe and never use YouTube again.
Can't be used on desktop
https://freetubeapp.io/
Age restricted videos are a problem otherwise it's great. I have it on an android TV box.