Out of curiosity, I looked up the numbers. This is correct, they make 9.2 billion per quarter from ads and 10.7 billion from subscriptions. I can’t find expenses per-segment, but in 2023 their total “Cost of revenues” was 37 billion. I doubt everything other than youtube costs less than 17 billion, so they’re definitely making a profit.

Source: https://abc.xyz/assets/95/eb/9cef90184e09bac553796896c633/2023q4-alphabet-earnings-release.pdf

Ok, but equally any competition would need to be profitable earlier, you can’t complain you got a service operating at a loss which is now operating at a profit when that’s exactly what any alternative you’d feasibly switch to would do

I’ll probably get hammered for this, but then again, you’ll have to pay for API access anyway. I’ve been testing out notegpt.io (not affiliated). Exactly because of my reasons listed, and because I often have to research or do trainings, I needed ways to save time and ‘sift’ through lots of information. I used to just play videos in say 1.5 speed, but even then it’s sometimes hard to stay focused or you might miss something and have to stop and go back. Sometimes language is a barrier too. Not to mention the ads. So for my own sanity, I’ve been testing that out. It’s been pretty damn good actually. I can get by on the lowest tier and you can try it free too. Again it’s not for everyone, but I’d rather give them money than Google for their Anti-customer behavior.

I can imagine a plugin system that gets submissions of hashes of specific frames - or just entire frames - when users play them, then checks those frames to detect which parts of the video are unique vs common, then automatically requests new frames to narrow down the timestamps and carve out the additions.

Probably wouldn’t take more than a handful of views across the entire network to get a pretty solid ad removal system. Even better it wouldn’t even rely on user input, which itself is already pretty fast. I have never encountered even the newest video that wasn’t already in the sponsorblock system.

Honestly this sounds like a fun project, I imagine it wouldn’t take the heroes that develop things like sponsorblock very long to figure it out. Plus they have spite on their side.

Edit: actually, rather than rely on randomised frame checks to find the collisions, have the clients submit frames then send frames out and ask clients to see if those frames appear in their videos. Then you very quickly determine which frames are unique.

EA, Ubisoft, and Activision are all on my do not buy list. Their games aren’t even worth pirating.

Can’t inject shitty ads in my mountain of board games.

EA has been on the boycott list since mass effect 3

The idea here is that ads will be unskippable, aka, you skip ahead 10-20 seconds but can’t. They’re will be controls that appear to catch this. If they incorporate ads and I can just fast forward, then who cares. This is google, they want to watch ads.

At this point you can just replace the video with the same video using a timestamped link from just before the ad started. Under IPv4 they can’t tell if it is the same person/device requesting the same video. So unless they put the ad at exactly the same timestamp (which they won’t) you can just blank out the video when an ad starts and replace the stream with the same video using the timestamp to start the view where you left off.

Sure, popover video of cute cats and turtles eating strawberries

what a time to be alive…

Ha, nope. But i see I’m not alone. There is hope dear people.

Is there a loophole where they could delay the ad marking like 5 seconds into a longer ad so you’d have to watch at least 5 seconds before an extension can detect it? Is the law specific about it having to be marked as an ad for the entire duration?

What law (and jurisdiction) are you thinking of?

My understanding is that this would be covered with a blanket note on the page if it detects you aren’t running Premium.

people can get the privacy benefits of going through those proxies.

Exactly. This is why it will still be a threat to data hungry Google.

Shhh. It is a huge “fuck you” to google to not use their bandwidth or servers for free. Not the actual goal of this.

Well I don’t know about the Reddit stuff not mattering—I occasionally still check on it for a couple of niche communities and the Reddit I used to enjoy has basically died, it’s like the place is filled with angry idiots now. Those people were always there before but usually buried under a load of downvotes where you could mostly ignore them; they now seem to be a majority of those left contributing over there.

They killed the golden goose in scaring off enough of the people contributing most interesting posts and comments (who were doing it entirely for free!) that the lunatics have taken over and shat on everything

People will accept anything to not be inconvenienced in a purely consumer society.

That doesn’t matter to me. When a company does shit like this, I won’t use it and will actively avoid it. People can do what they want and if they want to be abused constantly that’s on them. I don’t really care. I make my choice and I stick with it. Change will never happen with companies, they don’t care unless they actually get charged more then the money they make from their abuse and we all know that will never happen .

Here is the thing though. Those of us that are willing to try advanced projects and talk about them, we’re the real influencers.

YT has chosen to pander to the children and adolescent of mind, likely because those in charge are of a similar depth. The platform will be like cable television eventually; totally irrelevant.

Each of these exoduses moves the bar a little bit. We only lose if we give up. Eventually the bad decisions will catch up to them, as long as we keep pushing.

I don’t know about you, but what I learned is we’ll build our own Youtube with blackjack and hookers.

It does matter because it inspires newer platforms that aren’t as shitty like Lemmy, PixelFed, Mbin, and PeerTube.

I genuinely spend too much time on that site, but I haven’t seen an ad in years. If that changes, then I guess I’ll have to change, too.

I wouldn’t particularly like it, that’s for sure. But I would ultimately just bite the bullet and do it. At some point, you’re just pushed too far and it’s just not worth dealing with.

Unfortunately it is such a repository of information that it’s nearly unavoidable anymore. It’s a reference tool. Need to fix your car? YouTube knows how. Need to write a piece of code with a tool you’re unfamiliar with? A random Indian man has posted a YouTube video explaining how. Need to find a hidden item in a video game? YouTube. There are many and varied reasons I’d pull up a YouTube video outside of the intended purpose of “watching YouTube” for entertainment. Many of these things can, technically, be conveyed through different media but often poorly and with a much lower rate of understanding. The sheer volume of knowledge and culture lost if Google ever takes down YouTube’s servers will be akin to the burning of the Library of Alexandria and that is not a joke. I don’t want to “watch YouTube” anymore for the most part but it is inescapable to me for several purposes as a reference material.

I don’t think it can be completely avoided, but it can definitely be trimmed down a hell of a lot. As an example, if you watch YouTube for an hour a day and they make a change like this and you start watching it for 10 minutes a week, that’s a serious reduction.

Google’s own Shaka sdk (video playback with ads) gives ad markers in the initial video manifest so that they can be marked on the timeline, so hopefully it’ll be trivial. Usually (but not always) with SSAI, the ads are spliced into the stream just before being sent to the client. That way if a user has just recently watched an ad pod, the server can choose to ignore that marker for a better UX in hopes that they don’t bounce if ads are too frequent.

My client pre-downloads videos, so I can fast forward and rewind at will.

That’s neat, it’d be identifiable in a fashion similar to missile logic. You know where ads are based on where they aren’t. Actually skipping it would be difficult but muting and doing something else for a predetermined period has been a workaround since radio.

A solution would be for an extension to download the entire video 2x and delete the difference. But if you want to watch on 4k you’d need a connection that is pretty fast (although still in the range of what many people already have). However if they find a way to throttle the max speed on the server side for each client based on the quality there are watching, that would kill this possibility. You could block their cookies and throttling by IP on IPv4 would not be a possibility for them, but when everyone is on IPv6 idk.

But also processing the video on the fly to delete the difference in real time would be heavy, though at least I think it is possible to access the GPU with browser extensions via webGL but I am not sure if for HD and 4k that would be realistic for most people.

It’s not that hard at all. Twitch does this already, and they managed to make adblockers for that service.

I’ve heard that some versions of the Blockchain are not based on computing power and therefore are not nearly as awful re: emissions. But I don’t really know much about it so I decided to look into Odysee.

Instead I found out all about how the company that created the protocol was blasted out of existence by the SEC for selling unregistered securities & the website is full of Nazis because they don’t do anything about fucking Nazis.

Never did reach a conclusion about the blockchain thing. Kinda stopped caring. Sounds like a clusterfuck.

Fair enough. I completely forgot about peertube. Been using newpipe predominantly and odysee was the first alternative that came to mind.

Thanks for reminding me about peer tube. A client recommendation would be great. I’ve used p2play.