What took them so long?
Anyway. I'm sure the adblocking Industry will adapt.
this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2024
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Enshittification
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What is enshittification?
The phenomenon of online platforms gradually degrading the quality of their services, often by promoting advertisements and sponsored content, in order to increase profits. (Cory Doctorow, 2022, extracted from Wikitionary) source
The lifecycle of Big Internet
We discuss how predatory big tech platforms live and die by luring people in and then decaying for profit.
Embrace, extend and extinguish
We also discuss how naturally open technologies like the Fediverse can be susceptible to corporate takeovers, rugpulls and subsequent enshittification.
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Adapt to what?
If they're mixing the content with the ads server side, it's going to be like trying to extract the flour from the bread loaf.
I've never understood why they haven't just provided a method of doing this for all their customers. Like a Google Ad service that meshes together everything on the page with the ads server side, so it's harder to target them client side.
I mean, the dream is to make the Internet like cable television, isn't it? Where it's all one signal/stream. When ads could never be targeted and blocked or skipped unless you recorded and played back later with fast forward. Feels like we'll get there eventually, with Chromium effectively calling the shots now.
Google is required by EU law to show what is an ad and what isn't. Adblockers could somehow detect that and skip forward.
If they're predictable with the timing and length then sponsorblock will still work.
And if they're not, the client can download the video twice and diff the copies.
The most pernicious thing they could do is randomize the ads across users, but serve each user the same ads each time. In that case, you'd need a peer-to-peer client to compare hashes of chunks with other users to detect the ad segments.
Dear Satan,
Your application for the Alphabet engineering position has been acce--[your message will continue after a word from our sponsors]
Goodbye YouTube. Hello…?
PeerTube. Except nobody's going to use it until everybody uses it.
Kind of bootstrap paradox
It's called network effect
Fedierse admins get your PeerTube instances ready, they're coming to move
Even if it comes down to a browser addon placing a black rectangle over the video and muting browser audio when an ad plays, I'll be choosing that over watching ads.
Honestly, I am surprised it took them this long. This technology has existed for a while, there is even a standard for it (see: SCTE-35).
The harsh truth of the matter is that YouTube is a victim of its own success. The sheer scale of what is needed to keep the platform running at its current level of activity is something that I think most people don't give a second thought to. It requires a truly astonishing amount of technical expertise, infrastructure, monitoring, throughput capacity, not to mention sheer compute and storage, to keep it running. And that is considering the technical side alone, never mind the business that has evolved around it
All of the above costs money. A lot of money. So much money that only a shitty mega corporation with no moral scruples would ever be able to afford to run the platform, let alone turn a profit. And so here we are.
There are niche alternatives like PeerTube, but in practice it is currently in no state to be a drop in replacement. If the fediverse had to deal with the amount of traffic and content from YouTube in its current state, it would collapse immediately. This won't change until the user base begins to increase, but to do so requires an incentive for people to jump over. And sadly, far too many people just don't care enough about avoiding ads to do so.
I think in the long term there will be a reckoning; no matter the size of your platform you are not invulnerable to change. Nobody back in the early 2010s could foresee Twitter falling from grace, and look how that turned out. YouTube will eventually die, the only question is who will be footing the bill for what replaces it.
In the meantime, if you're unable or unwilling to deal with YouTube's ads, or pay to skip them, then just don't engage with the platform at all. Read a book. Touch some grass. They haven't found a way to monetize that (yet).
Stop this tantrum throwing and just buy premium.
Hosting/streaming videos is not free.
If you watch yt at least 10 hours a month then it's good deal.
YouTube used to host and stream videos for free, without ads, for years.
They operated at a loss just for this reason. Years of loss revenue to trick people into using the service and building a user base only to pull the rug out from under us and go ad crazy. They did this to themselves, we got used to being ad free so now they think we will just roll over and accept the ads. Too bad there wasn't a way to sue companies for operating at a loss on purpose to artificially create a market then fundamentally change the product after the fact but as it was a "free" service there is only one stakeholder.
"bait and switch" is the technical term.