- cross-posted to:
- tech@pawb.social
- technews@radiation.party
Whelp, here we go again
You must log in or register to comment.
Mmmm, gotta love that enshittification strategy every big tech company is working on right now.
Free money ended, they are trying to squeeze
Another executive-driven decision by people who clearly don’t use their own product (kinda impressive really when it’s YT).
I can’t help wonder if they saw an uptick in adblocking as a result of their absurd increases in ad-time recently and somehow thought this was a reasonable solution.
8-10 unskippable ads before a video? Holy shit. That’s ludicrous.
It really is hard to fathom how that got through any internal discussion.
Its not that hard to fathom when you have worked with these types of people.
All it was was a numbers meeting, no User Experience folks in the room. They said how much revenue they would increase quarter over quarter, and how much engagement it would drive. Everyone claps, the meeting ends they move forward with the next terrible design decision. Companies no longer take focus group testing seriously for anything.
Focus groups and qualitative data are so last season. It’s all Business “Intelligence” -driven bullshit nominally based on poorly defined and even more poorly understood metrics (excuse me, “KPIs”)
I rarely use YouTube, but my nephew (he’s two) was over the other day and we put on some cartoons for him that were in YouTube since my wife and I don’t have Disney plus. I couldn’t BELIEVE how many ads it showed. One five-minute merry melodies cartoon had FOUR SEPARATE ad breaks, the third and fourth of which were both 3+ minutes long if you weren’t paying attention to skip.
Wtf?! Not even shit ass normal broadcast television has that many commercials.
Feels like every year corporations rely on the naivety of youth in an attempt to push more and more egregious shit.
Exactly right they’re normalizing ads in everything. They’re indoctrinating the youth, who don’t know any better or differently, into just accepting/expecting that all content in all forms comes with ads, and you can’t watch any of it without signing in so they can track you and sell your data.
Executives don’t have to watch ads! They’re rich! I wouldn’t be surprised if they all had YT Premium or whatever it is.
Hearing how such people tend to be the very ‘whales’ that other executives rely on with mtx-driven games, I wouldn’t be surprised if many of them had twice as many subscriptions as they could name.
What’s with every big tech company trying to destroy their userbase this year?
Interest rates hikes stopped the free money, so companies need profit.
I’d argue they don’t need $500 million when they already make $400 million, but I’m just a lowly peasant.
tl;dr: capitalism
they think they have us sufficiently cornered on centralized sites, they may be right.
Especially with video. Reddit was easy-ish to leave – I haven’t left entirely – since it’s just a link aggregator and glorified forums. That’s nothing new to the Internet. And Twitter was easy to replace with Mastodon.
But hosting video? That’s a tough one to replicate. I know there are some other platforms out there, but I can’t imagine any could really take on YouTube, due to space and bandwidth considerations.
So yeah, I think YouTube has us all by the balls. And they know it.
Vimeo
They are right, they have deep enough pockets to pay people to run a proper analysis on the effects of locking stuff down. Even if they lose you, they don’t care, you produced $0 for them anyway.
They may be suprised…
And what are the consequences of “strikes”? Will you delete my Google account, including my email, and also screw up my Android phone and my kids Chromebook?
It’s scary to realize that Google has me by the balls here. They can screw me in so many ways, and screw my family members as well. I’d rather have my bank credentials stolen than my email credentials, at least I can get real customer service from the bank, I can even go to a physical location and speak face-to-face with someone who can help me. Google wont give me customer support, and my email account is the closest thing to an identity I have for most businesses I interact with.
It takes a lot of work to avoid Google. Yes, there are alternatives, but in D&D terms, avoiding Google is like a -2 to all stats for your entire life, and not something we can expect the general population to do.
All this shows the need for anti-trust enforcement. The same company is controlling too much. Bust 'em up!
Moral of the story: create separate account for YouTube that has no high value services or data on it.
I’ve seen enough horror stories to know that’s not going to help. They can, and do, associate multiple accounts to same users. Be it by cookies, IP addresses, or dark magic, the end result is the same - they can upend your entire digital life if they want to. r/degoogle better hurry up and migrate to Lemmy.
Moral of the story is: if you’re like me and still use a main account for youtube, transition away from that account starting today. Change your business emails slowly to another service.
I’d argue the bigger moral is that you should always own your online identity. You should buy your own domain (
@yourname.xyzor something like that) and make your email on that. So if Google bans you, you just switch email providers and keep your address.I’ve been using @fixnum.org and since a few years the alias @wim.land to do exactly this, but that’s just email.
My app purchases, photo storage, and YouTube account are all entangled in this. I could decouple from Google, but it would be very painful.
Article suggests you simply get blocked from watching additional videos. But there’s no info on how that works- is it account based? IP based? Can I wipe my YouTube cookies to bypass a block?
They’re good enough at fingerprinting now that they might be able to get around cookie wiping. So it might mean using Tor…at least until they also grow even more aggressive about blocking Tor exit nodes…
That’s the reason I’m hesitant to use a VPN for yt Premium from a cheap country. The lingering thought of losing my Gmail and android access…
We are nearing the cyberpunk future where corporations control every aspect of our lives
That would be the logical thing for them to do. All it takes is a couple of folks taking it in the neck from them to make the rest fall in line.
Recently found this gem: https://adnauseam.io/
It’s an ad blocker that only hides ads and clicks them for you in the background, which means you waste advertiser’s money, support creators, can’t get flagged for ad blocking as easily, and they can’t build a proper profile against your ad activity since it’s all noise. Haven’t installed it yet, but this might be the push I needed.
This might be an acceptable sollution, but what happens on the other side of the ad? If something maliciously is being spreaded, the click might have to happen in an isolated form from the rest of the system or the browser.
I cannot vouch for it, but this is their explanation: https://github.com/dhowe/AdNauseam/wiki/FAQ#does-adnauseams-clicking-put-me-at-risk-for-malicious-ads-or-ransomware
Does AdNauseam’s clicking put me at risk for malicious Ads or ransomware?
Absolutely not. AdNauseam simulates clicks on Ads by issuing an AJAX request to the adserver in a background process. This request is made without opening any additional windows or pages on your computer. The text-only request is safely discarded by AdNauseam before it has a chance to execute in the browser (no DOM is constructed and no code is ever allowed to run). Further, all cookies from AdNauseam’s visits are automatically blocked before they reach the browser’s local storage.
As a software engineer, I can’t speak about their actual implementation, but I can vouch that it’s a technically sound response, as far as blocking malicious ads from executing code from your browser.
However, I don’t know what headers or parameters are being sent with the request. It’s possible that a malicious ad could still track you using that metadata, so heads up on that
From the AdNauseum FAQ, they issue the ad “click” request in such a way that they are able to immediately discard the response data without feeding it to the browser in any meaningful way, so nothing gets loaded, rendered, etc
Interesting, thanks for the info, couldn’t find it when i flew over the site
The question is: How much data about me and my browser does clicking on the ads leak? I’m using libre wolf with additional hardening, including noscript, and I suspect that clicking on ads will not even register with the ad company?
I like it. It’s basically a spruced-up fork of uBlock Origin.
this sounds neat. I’ll check it out
Looks promising!
No data collection and no telemetry, plus it’s based on ublock origin
If this one works properly there is no way for a site to detect the ad blocking at all, I mean no “legal” way
Aren’t they going to realize that something strange is happening? No real person clicks on every single ad.
Part of why complex algorithms fail is their assumptions are baked in. Until we get literal AI deciding what ads to serve, someone would have to notice the unusual behavior in aggregate and explicitly program some heuristic to deal with it.
Ad blocker detection is not new, and other publishers regularly ask viewers to disable ad blockers
“everyone else is treating their customers like garbage, so they don’y hold it against us”.
Yes, we can.
I didn’t block when you had 5 second ads. I didn’t block when you had 15 second ads. I started blocking when you’d play 2+ unskippable 15 second ads back-to-back. I didn’t mind sitting through an ad when I appreciate the service you offered. Now, you’re just being greedy, and I will go to great lengths to damage your bottom line as notably as I can.
Did all these tech companies just get together and decide to fuck us over around the same time? Seriously, what is going on with all these companies rolling out hugely unpopular new rules/changes all on one another’s heels?
The end of 0% interest means “business” no longer have access to free money. So now they want benefits, and growth but without the spending.
Also we skipped a tech bubble crash around 2008, so these corpos deaths are more than overdue.
The cicle as Doctorow says in his enshification tesis is:
1.- be good to your users, spending tons of that VC and 0% interest loan free money.
2.- be shit to your users, be good to your clients (add buyers, business that use your platform to do business)
3.- be shit to everyone. Squeeze the platform and get every last dime of value as profit.
Once you are in 3 there is no coming back. But these corporations have pulling the ladder behind them using an extra decade of dominant position to try to stop the cicle.
Tbh, part of me hopes that they all fail. The internet does not need to be monitized more than it already has.
Let’s hope they will and that not much is lost. And let’s hope the next ones have a 5 year cicle and not a 15+ year like this ones.
Their business model and presence in society are not sustainable, so the more time they exist, the more they fuck things up. They kill competition and “disrupt” industries without a viable alternative.
Same. All this stuff is nice to have, but can live without it.
Seriously, what is going on with all these companies rolling out hugely unpopular new rules/changes all on one another’s heels
The lack of free money in the economy. Most of these companies are operating at a loss, and money has become way tighter over the last year. Expect these kinds of things to continue.
Someone in the Fediverse (I don’t know where and who) posted that you have to add the following filters into U-Block Origin. When done you shouldn’t see any anti-adblock-warnings :
youtube.com##+js(set,yt.config_.openPopupConfig.supportedPopups.adBlockMessageViewModel,false) youtube.com##+js(set,Object.prototype.adBlocksFound,O) youtube.com##+js(set,ytplayer.config.aras.raw_player_response.adPlacements,[]) youtube.com##+js(set,Object.prototype.hasAllowedlnstreamAd,true)I might add that I haven’t experienced any anti-adblock-warnings yet, but I added these filters in advance. I might be worth a shot!
Also or just use a front-end like as Piped (https://github.com/TeamPiped/Piped) or Invidious (https://github.com/iv-org/invidious)
A handy externsion of FIrefox wil automatically redirects you, see https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/libredirect/
Thank you! I was aware of Invideous and I tried that in the past. However, Invideous-redirected videos always seemed to be slow, then disconnected or I experienced buffering. I’ll give the firefox extension for libdirect a try. I tested it and it seems to work flawlessly.
I’m sure it hides the warnings, but it certainly doesn’t prevent you from being blocked…
They’re not just hiding the warning popup, they’re updating the Javascript for the variables that trigger them. We’re temporarily blocked from content if we continue to leave our adblocker on, which is why:
- The first one disables the warning popup’s trigger (view is false)
- the second tells YT there are no adblockers (blocks found 0)
- the third defines an array of where ads are placed in the video (at the following timestamps: …aka nowhere)
- the fourth tells YT that instream ads have been allowed
These are the js variables that YT is using to tell if you’re using an adblocker in the first place. When Youtube tells us we have to disable our adblocker or it will block us, we just put on Marx glasses and tell them we did.
Youtube’s method will still work on the majority of adblocker users that just use the addon without customising it (or updating it for public filters), so it will work for them. But it doesn’t have to work on us.
Nice! Im gonna throw these in. I havent had any warnings yet either but the experience of using the official YT site/app without some kind of blocker is horrendous.
I saw it posted here, can’t find the Tumblr post in the screenshot though https://lemmy.ml/comment/1053596
Time to use an adblock blocker blocker extension.
I think that would be NoScript.
NoScript would sadly leave you with NoVideo.
It doesn’t though? :s
Does youtube even work with NoScript? I just assumed that google has 50 different scrips running that break the site if they aren’t allowed
Nope, you just need to allow youtube.com and perhaps ytimg.com to load the front page, but I’ve disabled suggestions and whatnot with youtube enhancer.
Would YouTube even work with NoScript enabled?
You just need to allow youtube.com and maybe ytimg.com, but videos work with only youtube.com enabled.
Yep, it’s about to become a never ending fight
Ad blockers vs ad blocker detectors.
At least untill the lobbyist big companies lobby for laws to start suing people for using ad blockers in “violation” of their tos due to a form of “circumvention measure”
At least right now, the code is freely available due to the nature of how HTML, JavaScript and CSS works. - this nature is exactly how a government agency got caught leaking SSNs of teachers, and due to the law, couldn’t perform legal action at what they called a “hacking” attempt.
It feels like its only a matter of time before these shitty companies seek to close that law in order to start calling HTML analysis “hacking”
I don’t think publically available blockers can really win this battle in the end. After all, in the end game Google could just
- setup a system that runs a browser
- downloads the updates as they come
- automatically modify the system so that blockers are detected or they fail to block it
This is possibly even relatively easy with the help of LLMs nowdays.
On the other hand, Google backend code is completely secret and for frontend and protocols they can apply opfuscation techniques, requiring manual updates by blocklist maintainers or adblock developers, taking a lot of time continuously. I suppose LLMs could help here as well, but it’s harder and such attempts could even be detected by Google, because they would need to be tested against their system.
The only solutions I see are to move on from Youtube, have private blockers that don’t become too popular, or tolerate the ads.
Personally, I’d rather pay for Nebula than YouTube premium. Most of the creators I actively follow are on there anyways, and the few that aren’t (usually the ones with very long videos) I should probably just watch with ads anyways to support them.
I had a similar thought. How fair is nebula to their creators? I heard it was somehow creator owned, but other than that I have no idea how it works.
The owners of Nebula own half the company, and the creators own the other half. That’s at least my understanding of it generally. I believe Wendover Productions also somewhat recently uploaded a YT video explaining somewhat more in depth how it works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Alqt6RCEWdM
50% profits go to creators proportionate to their watch time i think. Wendover productions has a video about the history of the platform LINK
My understanding is it’s a joint venture between the creators and some LLC (don’t know too much of the details of that), so the creators have at least some ownership stake. The profits from subscriptions get split evenly based on watch time.
I remember them doing a lifetime subscription offer that I was intrigued by, but I can afford to support them through a subscription so I didn’t bite on the chance.
Wendover Productions, one of the owner creators, goes into it here:
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Alqt6RCEWdM
Nebula: https://nebula.tv/videos/wendover-how-a-small-group-of-creators-built-a-150-million-business
I watched a Wendover video on this recently. Apparently it’s on the contract that creators have stake in the company in such a way that if Nebula ever gets bought out then creators get some proportional cut relative to the value of their content. The specifics aren’t known, but they do also get paid as revenue directly from Nebula whenever they advertise on YouTube.
The most in-depth overview of how Nebula works I’ve seen, straight from the horse’s mouth: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Alqt6RCEWdM
Nebula is great in comparison, and apparently video creators make even more money from Nebula views than YouTube Premium views, which is already a lot more than ad-supported views.
Nebula’s content base is small in comparison but very quickly growing and already includes most of the longer-form video creators I would want anyway (Jenny Nicholson is one notable exception, but her Patreon channel is wildly successful so I sort of doubt she feels like torpedoing that to do a whole new platform).
But frankly, if I paid what I pay for Nebula and only got Jet Lag, it would still be worth it to me.
This is the first I’ve heard of it. I’ll have to check it out, sounds awesome
Twitch couldn’t beat my adblocking, it just taught me how to find and use custom scripts. Shoot your shot YT, I haven’t installed a script for your website yet but now Im gonna have too. Congrats the number of ads im gonna see from you is about to go down.
Cat and mouse game. May get me to watch a couple, but I’ll someone will have a way around it within a week.
What’s your Twitch solution? Blocking Twitch is considerably more difficult than YouTube, every solution I’ve found breaks after a month or so. Best I can get is have it display a blank screen while ads play, but I still have to wait it out, which isn’t ideal.
pixeltris on github, a search for pixeltris should get you there first result. Everything you need is on that page, including how to instal the script to ublock, im using the vid swap script and TTLOL pro. It’s not perfect but the ads are gone.
I use this. Works perfectly https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/twitch_5/
So if you are on android: https://apt.izzysoft.de/fdroid/index/apk/org.polymorphicshade.newpipe (Newpipe with sponsorblock baked in)
If you are on PC: https://freetubeapp.io/ (Piped with sponsorblock baked in)
You’re welcome.
Do you think Firefox with Youtube enhancer extension is safe?
Honestly I decided screwit. For desktop I have freetube installed, then I used the libredirect plugin for firefox to redirect youtube links to freetube. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/libredirect/
Thanks my lemmy brother, or sister, or person.
NP Brochacho 🙃
Thanks for posting! Great ideas.
If they want me to stop blocking ads, they will need to get rid of ads like this. I get ads like this all the time and it’s completely inappropriate.
Seems like ad targeting works
I don’t get ads like that too often, but the annoying thing for me is when the ad is 10x louder than the video itself.
There was this one add that had a gunshot sound then a really high pitched whistle.
They might have gotten in trouble as the whistle sound was eventually removed.
My kid has an old tablet that he uses, and I have to block & report this crap constantly. The little dude is 7. It’s not like he is getting targeted for those sorts of websites and apps. All he wants to do is play tower defense games. Just let the boy play tower defense games and save the porn ads for someone else.
It’s a shame that these things are being shown to him.
You’d think there would be a higher standard. I guess it is just about money.
Big web corps are a wild ride lately
Enshitification is in full force
Yeah what is it with 2023 and enshittification? This has been such a bad year in general
I’m guessing venture capitalists trying to reel in some profits after racing to outspend each other. I expect many services to implode.
A lot of tech companies grew unreasonably fast during the COVID lockdowns, and assumed their new traffic patterns were permanent. Couple that with a general global recession, and you’ve got companies that overextended themselves, desperate to make some money back before people realize the emperor has no clothes
That would make sense
I am here for it if the result is less ads and platforms in the hands of users and volunteers.
YouTube without an adblocker is such a mess. I wish alternatives like https://odysee.com had more of the content I watch and less Nazi bullshit though. YouTube really needs some strong competition since they have an effective monopoly on long-form videos on the internet. :(
Yeah, I’m glad at least a few YouTubers are starting to mirror content on sites like Odysee though (Such as Louis Rossman). I think that, like Lemmy, it just needs to reach a critical mass of users before it’s viable
I made an account there once and immediately got racist and homophobic results, so I quit using it.
I found a link to that somewhere and I thought, “Wow this looks pretty slick,” and then I started scrolling down the front page feed and was like oh… Oh no.
I’ve been looking at it again and I haven’t seen that type of content yet
Eh… just looked at the comments. Those people are still there on some videos.
