Technology

They already did something similar back in the day. I remember watching a music video some ~10 years ago where they placed an ad like five seconds before the end of the song, right at the musical climax, ruining the mood with surgical precision. I was absolutely infuriated and went off to Google wondering if there's a way to block ads. And the rest is history.

Youtube has ads?

Right when the guitar solo hits

LOL. Like every tech story from the US is about enshittification. too funny.

So I'm sure this will just cause more people to use Ublock and other ad blocking services if that one fails. Maybe this will cause more people to look into making their own Peertube instances. But who am I kidding, normies usually don't like hosting communities themselves...

It would be wrong to call it a replacement, but this is a good place to plug !peertube@lemmy.world - there's more quality content on there than many might suspect, especially if you are into FOSS and people tinkering with stuff they are passionate about.

I've been noticing lately that 800lb Gorilla specials have been cutting to ads right between the setup and punchline of a bit. Mad fucking annoying.

EwTube underestimates a person's primordial instinct to skip ads

I swear to god, one of these days the update will be "Today Youtube has announced that they will be removing the annoying videos from their ads".

I am used to listening to streams while walking, but I've been noticing the most annoying ads pop-up when I'm interested in something they are saying. This isn't going to make me pay attention to those ads, it's going to drive me to the plethora of other services I can use. The worst thing about it is that it doesn't even pause and cache the stream, meaning that if I was listening to something interesting, the ad just causes me to miss it. Google just keeps eating its own tail.

Google seems bound and determined to destroy itself trying to escalate it's profits from "staggering" to "colossal." The search is so bad AI is actually better, and that's saying something. And now they want to enshittify YouTube? Okay. I'm sure it won't die right away, but this will be one of the thousands cuts.

I don't understand why this needs AI. I'm guessing this is just more marketing nonsense. You can already see the "most engaged moments" by simply hovering over the timeline.

They mean - maximize irritation? Put ads in the most obnoxious way?

There's a good global task for FOSS alternatives of YouTube and other places where life happens.

A decentralized scraper. Something similar to SETI@home, or that hentai analog for storage. So that based on some metric YT content would be divided between users willing to contribute their machines and accounts to scraping YT (a bit similar to searching DHT, and probably some kind of DHT would be useful), and then they'd download that and re-publish in some p2p alternative.

TBH probably also good for that little of the web that is still possible to represent as static pages and browse via links.

The issue is that alternatives lack content, and the closed nature of proprietary services gives them an advantage - there is content there which doesn't exist outside of them.

And people just reuploading by hand what they themselves consider interesting are a little fraction of the majority that doesn't bother.

Once they finally lock down the player so it's impossible to block or skip ads, I look forward to coding a script which screen records each video on my sub list, feeds each video with ads into a purpose made classifier model which labels the ads, stitches out of ads with FFmpeg, and then uploads them to my jellyfin server.

I am a YUGE fan of FreeTube, a cross-platform YT client for the desktop. You can subscribe to channels, create, save, import, and export playlists...and no. Ads. Tis the bees knees.

And just a friendly reminder to donate to your favorite FOSS projects.

Google enshitifying things? Who would have thought? Seriously, it's as if they want to test how far they can go upsetting users. There's got to be some (a lot?) of that, for sure.

That's definitely a different ML classifier than what Gemini is currently doing. Is Google just using the brand Gemini to mean "any ML system provided by Google"?

YouTube really likes to just destroy itself huh?

Wow. Fuuuuuuuuck YouTube.

Also, Firefox plus Ublock Origin makes ads on YouTube go away.

Because nothing endears your platform to users like throwing ads in their face during the high points of whatever they are watching.

uBlock Origin zaps all of the ads for me on my laptop.