Looks like I'm testing not using YouTube.
Privacy
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Yeah, that'll be hard. I'm trying to use Peertube but network effect is big on YT (not sure if that's the right expression here, noone is using Peertube, everyone is on YT).
I'm sending my videos on my Peertube and Youtube. I send the link for Peertube a few days before Youtube, so people following me would have more interest on looking at it on PT earlier but the numbers can't be beaten : between 5 and 20 views on PT against 1K / 2K on Youtube.
try odysee, some creators mirror their yt vids there
I like Odysee, but there's a lot of right-wing bullshit on there that give me a major case of cringe.
So don't watch it? I would rather the platform all all legal content then trying to be the morality police.
I would also prefer to use third party recommendation engines (like people posting on Lemmy) then one run by any particular platform.
Sure, but it's literally every other thumbnail and it pisses me off as I do not tolerate intolerance.
be the change you want to see in the world
That's not unlike youtube really
I watch at most 1 video a week. It's not hard.
Been using Nebula for a while now. Going to miss some YouTube creators, but I'll expect to get over it.
That'll make youtube disappear for me.
Over the years I watched less and less. I only seldomly have to look into youtube for things that are easier in video than in text.
Teens and many people don't know that there is a world without ads. They have to be educated that there are alternatives - not watching youtube is a real option. You do not depend on it.
I's a horrible world many people live in. Recently I saw someone browsing on instagram, each third post is an ad and oftentimes there are ads after ads. And people follow other people and watch their ads. Incredible!
Recently, I was browsing linkedin and there were 12 ads instead of real jobs in a row. in a row. Unrelated to my profession.
But the point is there’s always been a way to avoid ads, even while browsing sites with ads and browsing YT. Personally, if that ability entirely disappears, i hate ads, ad-voice, and the concept of advertising so much that I will stop and close a whole tab if an ad plays. I’m in the minority though. Because, I think you’re right, a lot of people just don’t even think about it and mindlessly consume. I can’t. When Reddit fucked us and showed us our opinions and feelings didn’t matter, I left. I will do the same to YT.
This is where we could use a browser plug in that uses AI to learn what an ad is and skip it for us. Now we just need someone to start working on it.
Plugins can add controls and it can download videos, but plugins can't interact with videos directly I think.
Maybe use the Youtube API closed captions and figure out the patterns for ads that way?
YT has 2 posibilities
- Hosting all videos doble, one with ads and the same vids without for premium user
- Insert also markers which at the end also are exploited by adblockers and userscripts
I think they'll hit their teeth against a rock with this.
Meanwhile a lot of content creators a changing to Odysee
- Hosting all videos doble, one with ads and the same vids without for premium user
Not quite sure why, they simply could in the fly stitch those files together.
Twitch is doing that for a while now i think.
Exactly this. It isn't even really "stitching" as YouTube videos are served as a series of short chunks anyways. So you simply tell the player that there are a few extra chunks which happen to be ads. There is no video processing required it is basically free to do it this way on the sever side.
Actually the videos get stitched together dynamically.
I think they'll hit their teeth against a rock with this.
Press X to doubt
Most people do not have an adblocker. Most people watch YouTube to varying degrees of frequency and duration. Most people will continue to watch the ads. I’d be surprised if YT noticed any amount of users leaving the site because of this. The privacy minded folk are few and far between.
Not precise. They can dynamically generate the video stream from the ad-free original.
Crap I just opened youtube today and it looks like I was chosen. The ads load like normal videos and it sucks. My brain actually glitched for a couple of seconds when I opened a video because I wasn't used to seeing an ad. I dunno if there's any chance uBO can even counter this.
Try to watch the video embedded, simply edit it's URL, using instead of
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxxxxxxx
this URL
https://www.youtube.com/embed/xxxxxxxx
Welp, restarted my laptop and I'm off the testing list so can't replicate (unless I turn off uBO of course). But thanks, this will be handy if it happens again.
Oh dear lord no.
I'm surprised it took them this long.
Honestly, I just pull videos from Youtube to watch later. I don't actually watch anything on Youtube. I do wonder if there's an upcoming replacement for Youtube like there was for Twitter.
Peertube
Would sponsorblock be a solution for this?
From what I read, this also breaks sponsorblock - as the ads are part of the video, it moves the time stamps of the video so it makes it not correct. The ads will also change I imagine so idk if sponsorblock will be a solution.
So videos that reference timestamps in their own video won't work? And comments that reference a timestamp won't work?
They could on the fly change them.
Wouldn't that need to be done via some kind of API for cross-platform compatibility? An API which could be exploited to detect ad segments?
No, they would just do that internally in their own code, why would they need an API for that?
No, not in it's actual form, nor the front-ends can't not longer cutting the ads with their current form. Or they change their script, or you have the alternative to use YT or using another streaming service. But I think that there will be other solution in the future to show the middle finger to YT.
I'd just drag the time seeker though...
That move would finally rid me of my addiction to YouTube. So much time, so many possibilities...
What are the YT alternatives? I use it by default and I'm to exhausted to look for another landing place
Odysee ! I use a extention even so if I click a video on YouTube and it is also on odysee it opened odysee instead.
That is a good question
Honestly no idea why they didn't just do that to begin with.
Because it’s actually really hard to achieve technically. When ads are served outside the stream you can easily serve different ads to different viewers based on their profiles. When the ads are baked into the stream you can either
A) Create a whole bunch of different copies of the video asset with different ads baked in and then rotate these on a regular basis. Which would be expensive to update and store and limit the range of adverts that could be served to a particular user.
B) Dynamically create a stream on the users request, which while possible means standard CDN caching isn’t going to work so there’s a distribution challenge.
Or some other alternative they’ve come up with. I’d be really interest to know what their approach is here.
They’re probably inserting the ads “on the fly”. It can be finicky depending on codec, but doable.
Look up how HLS (HTTP Live Streaming) works. They just need to generate a personalized playlist for each person which points at things already hosted on CDN, and insert the ads where they want in the literal text file that your video player reads from to serve you the video.
I don't know much about it, but it looks like there's specific tags designed for dynamic ad insertion. Idk if YouTube plans to use them in this case though, if they want it to be undetectable to the client.
It's easier and less resource hungry to deliver targeted ads like that.
Can we train a local AI model to recognise ads?
Not with the crrent ones, it's easier to difference ads by code than by content in most Vids, eg, divulgations, news, influencers, etc. YT, to not destroy the own business modell, also avoiding that there later also 5 years old vids with outdated ads, must use some kind of dynamic insertion, that means, it can be discovered and skipped by some userscripts, for sure not in the extension stores, but in Greasyfork or OpenuserJS, which are independent from Google influence.
It depends on what the publishers publish for. If it’s money then Peertube is probably not attractive.
As said, some creators already had changed to Odysee, because there they also can monetize their work, but without all the YT crap and nags, apart Odysee is freemium OpenSource https://github.com/OdyseeTeam