Technology

59647 readers

3765 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

1276

Google admits it's making YouTube worse for ad block users (www.theregister.com)

submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

321 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Illegal to do...what? Not offer high-res videos? To have any delay before streaming videos? To refuse to serve you videos, even if doing so caused them to lose money? How would you enforce that on Google, much less on smaller startups? Would it apply to PeerTube instances?

Google sucks for doing this. It'll drive people to competitors--hopefully even federated competitors. But laws to 'fix' the problem would be nearly impossible to craft--and would be counterproductive in the long term, because they'd cement the status quo. Let Google suck, so that people switch away from it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Discriminate against browsers.

And I did write that it would be too hard to enforce. I'm a software developer so I understand that it's more complicated than it sounds.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

I agree with the spirit of what you’re saying, but they aren’t really discriminating against browsers at all. As far as I understand it, they pretty much have an

if (!adPageElement.isLoaded)
{
    showStupidPopup();
}

in there somewhere. It doesn’t rely on any nefarious browser implementation-specific extensions; everyone gets that same code and runs it. As for the 5 seconds thing, IIRC some FF configurations were triggering false positives, but I think it was patched. It does seem awfully convenient, and maybe they only patched it because they got caught, but they also must have been morons to think something that obvious wouldn’t be noticed immediately.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

I think they claimed they're not discriminating against browsers, they're just better at identifying adblockers on Firefox or something.