this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2024
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Enshittification
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What is enshittification?
The phenomenon of online platforms gradually degrading the quality of their services, often by promoting advertisements and sponsored content, in order to increase profits. (Cory Doctorow, 2022, extracted from Wikitionary) source
The lifecycle of Big Internet
We discuss how predatory big tech platforms live and die by luring people in and then decaying for profit.
Embrace, extend and extinguish
We also discuss how naturally open technologies like the Fediverse can be susceptible to corporate takeovers, rugpulls and subsequent enshittification.
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Adapt to what?
If they're mixing the content with the ads server side, it's going to be like trying to extract the flour from the bread loaf.
I've never understood why they haven't just provided a method of doing this for all their customers. Like a Google Ad service that meshes together everything on the page with the ads server side, so it's harder to target them client side.
I mean, the dream is to make the Internet like cable television, isn't it? Where it's all one signal/stream. When ads could never be targeted and blocked or skipped unless you recorded and played back later with fast forward. Feels like we'll get there eventually, with Chromium effectively calling the shots now.
If they're predictable with the timing and length then sponsorblock will still work.
And if they're not, the client can download the video twice and diff the copies.
The most pernicious thing they could do is randomize the ads across users, but serve each user the same ads each time. In that case, you'd need a peer-to-peer client to compare hashes of chunks with other users to detect the ad segments.
Dear Satan,
Your application for the Alphabet engineering position has been acce--[your message will continue after a word from our sponsors]
Honestly, I'd be happy to take the job and sabotage them from the inside.
We could use audio fingerprinting to detect ads in the buffer
Yeah that could work... What about creating some sort of *arr for YouTube videos that downloads them and processes them with some sort of AI audio/video processing to remove the ads and recombine the video.
Youtubarr it could be called. If we really want we can also remove the ads from the creator in the video too. It would still count as a view to the video too so creator won't lose out on money.
Anyone with objections to this?
It's a neat idea, but computer vision stuff can get quite computationally expensive when done locally and is prone to input poisoning attacks (especially if the models used are open source).
Not saying it wouldn't be possible, but I think some of the other ideas posed here would be better starting places.
Or get the video once with a YouTube premium account and cut out anything that doesn't match from the free version.
Oh, the diffing thing is clever!
There's no such thing as "download the video". It's a stream of small chunks, which can be re-arranged by back-end in any way, shape and form.
I think it's more like extracting raisins? ad contents are still separate from the dough. finding the boundary conditions or ads hashes is guaranteed to work. whether it is feasible for adblockers is a different matter yet.
Not really. Because there are no boundary conditions. Videos are not streamed as a one big file, they're streamed as small chucks, like 5-10 seconds short chunks. Replace one chunk content randomly on the back-end with an ad and no ad blocker will be able to spot it.
the lengths required to defeat youtube automatic copyright detection even for short segments of videos suggests that it can be done. if it can be done with the resources of consumer devices that's the question.
Their copyright detection doesn't work in real time on consumer browsers during video playback.
Not comparing feasibility though? Only the flour/bread analogy. Injected ads however it is done will always not be a part of the original video.
Even if adblockers aren't able to remove the ads, I'm sure they can still make it so you can skip over them with the arrow keys or video timeline.
That's why I said "What took them so long?"
I don't know, man. I hope they succeed. If they don't, then I will never visit YouTube again.
Some other frontend that would allow me to fast-forward them would be fine, though.
It's not that simple. Right now it's still separate video streams but presented as if they were the actual video, put in a queue of sorts.
Ublock Origin released a script to block them yesterday btw
The value that Google has always provided as an ad platform is that they're targeted ads. You can target estimated age, geographic location, gender, estimated income. You can target your ads so narrowly that only a single person ever gets them even.
To bake ads into the actual content stream they have to expend compute editing and re-rendering the video for as many times as they have ads that they intend to run on those videos. They can do it once with once batch of ads but then it's only as targeted as who clicks on that video. Realistically they'll want to do it 5x, 10x or more per video (and store every copie of the video, unless there's some tech to store it as segments and seamlessly stitch then together as a single stream) to continue targeting the ads which gets very expensive fast
Google is required by EU law to show what is an ad and what isn't. Adblockers could somehow detect that and skip forward.