- YouTube is testing server-side ad injection to counter ad blockers, integrating ads directly into videos to make them indistinguishable from the main content.
- This new method complicates ad blocking, including tools like SponsorBlock, which now face challenges in accurately identifying and skipping sponsored segments.
- The feature is currently in testing and not widely rolled out, with YouTube encouraging users to subscribe to YouTube Premium for an ad-free experience.
Go right ahead. If they actually manage to do it, that will be the end of my YouTube watching. Except on extremely rare occasions. I don’t need it badly enough to deal with that.
As we learned from the reddit app changes, the ending of Netflix account sharing, etc etc the people who will take this action are few enough not to matter. Regretfully.
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
Everyone I’ve spoken to about it has noted that it’s become a very different place. I’ll still use it for reviews and getting tips for serious things like privacy and some basic DIY. But a lot of that advice will be obsolete in a couple years and very few people are replenishing it. Who’s going to give a shit about the best home theater setups of 2023 in two years?
It does matter because it inspires newer platforms that aren’t as shitty like Lemmy, PixelFed, Mbin, and PeerTube.
People will accept anything to not be inconvenienced in a purely consumer society.
It’s Idiocracy
Bruh, in Idiocracy, they at least wanted to do the right thing, even if they were too dumb to do so.
How sad is it that Idiocracy overestimated people?
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 .
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I’m sorry, I just find it funny that you walked back the “I’m done with Youtube” claim in the very next sentence.
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.
Same.
I’m excited for YouTube to end my YouTube addiction lol.
Please, Google. Do it. Dare ya.
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 went to watch a diy video at work with chrome and was like WTF is this shit, the ads were so bad I walked back across the shop to get my phone and pull up the same video and started watching it before the video even started on the computer. Who in the hell can actually watch shit like that? It’s insane.
Ngl, I’m torn on this because I’m honestly not sure I could stop using YouTube.
I hate ads with a burning passion, though, so we’ll see which wolf wins out there.
If i can’t get around this using something like SponsorBlock, I feel like I’ll probably just set up some kind of pipeline to download videos and remove the ads myself (maybe using AI if it’s that bad) and just serve them over Jellyfin or something. Gonna be a pain, though.
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.