blocker blocker blocker blocker blocker
MUSHROOM MUSHROOM
blocker blocker blocker blocker blocker
(and when things go bad…)
Ad! Ad!! Oh, it’s an ad. :(
Blocker blocker blocker blocker blocker blocker blocker blocker …
Oh Great Cthulhu, we’re old.
A møøse ønce bit my sister
Pøør sister!
It’s times like these that online advertisements need to get creative to get ahead in this never ending adblocking arms race, just like the very subtle advertisement in the car chase scene in the Academy Award nominated film, “Barbie”, now available on Blu-ray and select streaming services.
I know right? The other day I was drinking a coke and wondering about side effects of weight loss drugs such as Ozempic, and it occurred to me that advertising could be a lot more creative and subtle.
But there is something to be said about superliminal messaging as well.
Instead of trying to subtly influence people to watch your movie, why not tell them directly to watch your movie instead?
Forget telling you, they should just start playing the movie and bill you
Rick Astley has been doing this for years!
Inside, we both know what’s been going on We know the game and we’re gonna play it.
Sneaky upvote!
So we have:
- Ad Blockers
- ‘Ad Blocker’ blockers
- ‘‘Ad blocker’ blocker’ blockers
- ‘’‘Ad Blocker’ blocker’ blocker’ blockers
- ‘’‘‘Ad Blocker’ blocker’ blocker’ blocker’ blockers
- ‘’‘’‘Ad Blocker’ blocker’ blocker’ blocker’ blockers’ blockers; and finally;
- ‘’‘’‘‘Ad Blocker’ blocker’ blocker’ blocker’ blockers’ blocker’ blockers; with;
- ‘’‘’‘’‘Ad Blocker’ blocker’ blocker’ blocker’ blockers’ blocker’ blocker’ blockers
in development.
It’s like playing Uno; but with reverse cards only.
It’s like playing Uno No Mercy, with only reverse-draw-10 cards
Youtube is wasting ressources, it’s a fight they can’t win
They have infinite resources. They’re making gestures to dissuade normies. I suspect this will get them most of the result they want. They’re also wasting time, effort and resources of adblock programmers (and that is a far more limited resource).
If they had infinite resources, they wouldn’t need to worry about adblockers.
They aren’t worried about them. They are squeezing what they can out of the platform.
Iirc YouTube has a positive revenue now
Because they wouldn’t need advertising?
Sure but as long as there is a least one dedicated bearded dude hidden in a dark underground room behind his screen, they will be defeated. No matter how much they spent on the new technology. What I mean is that devs might burn out, they will still be replaced by others. And we get such people faster than youtube is able to burn them out
They don’t need to actually unblock everything. They just need to convince their advertisers and stock holders they are.
Exactly this. They ALWAYS lose this fight.
nah, if they embed the ad into the video stream (they were testing this for some users!), the only adblocking option will be to blank out the screen and wait through the ad (or download the video in advance and edit the ad out automatically), both of which would make it a lot more annoying to adblock than currently.
This is actually one of very few valid cases for an LLM, to help sponsorblock determine ad segments by analyzing the word choice and speech patterns in segments of the video.
YouTube Revanced already has a blocker for sponsor segments embedded in the video.
you can skip through sponsor segments, but these are ads from youtube, not from the creator, and youtube will not let you conveniently skip through the ads. if implemented correctly, youtube could ensure that the ad is fully played, which would need downloading and automatic editing to counter.
How would they determine if the ad is played without trusting the client? I guess they could screw with the buffer, but that would really piss of people with poor internet, and most people would prefer an ad-length black screen to whatever attention wrenching dark pattern manipulative brown noise wants to infect your mind today.
Don’t worry, I have been using the powerful technology of “the mute button” and “doing other stuff” since before cable TV existed. We always have alternatives.
That is an interesting question. From what I know, youtube has every video in chunks that they serve to the client, and so server side ad injection is just serving some ad chunks before the video. I think you’re right with the buffer thing, it seems to me like the only way to make sure the client can’t skip it would be to make the buffer shorter, impacting some people (although seems like only really people with internet thats fast enough for streaming some seconds, but not other seconds, which is an odd catagory)
Ultimately it would be a tradeoff for youtube, but the fact that they put the effort into doing mass testing of the idea at all shows that clearly there are some good incentives, and it may eventually be implemented.
No, you just need to skip the ad. Sponsorblock has been working for years now, solving pretty much the same problem
Sponsor Block relies on the ads being at the same timestamp for all users
They can be detected
nope, the ad time varies unlike a sponsor segment, and also youtube would not let you skip through an ad while streaming it, whereas sponsors you can, hence the download and edit out with LLM or whatever algorithm works best
It can be detected
yes, but if youtube only serves you the real video chunks after your client plays through the ad chunks (all in the same media stream to the client), theres gonna be some waiting involved, not like adblocking today where it is instant.
You could trick youtube into believing you are ahead in the video so that it fills the buffer earlier
Mushroom mushroom
Ad ad oooohhhhh it’s an ad.
It’s a big ad It’s a big ad Fooooooorrr beer https://youtu.be/_wM2c3WtDjQ?si=7G_HBu8FMGMZpdoe
Mushroom mushroom badger badger
Ad blocker blocker blocker blocker blocker blocker blocker blocker blocker blocker blocker blocker
What this? I cant hear you over my high definition yt-dlp content.
Where i am going I haven’t needed a google account in over a year.
What will happen when ads are injected in the video stream directly.
At that point i will either have to use an ai tool to scrub the filth out
Or
Consider if i really need whatever content is within it and touch some grass instead.
The same thing that happened with sponsored segments.
Look forward to the day they require eye tracking & answering questions about the ads they showed
Please drink a verification can.
Then those prompts will be skipped. Just like you can skip age verification with user scripts
Sponsored segments are fixed. Injected ads won’t be.
With yt-dlp? Skip them manually.
Like, my main issue with ads is all the tracking they do. If they add non-targeted ads to the video file I downloaded, whatever, I’ll just fast forward through that part of the video.
Personally, I use Tubular on my phone ( Newpipe fork with sponsorBlock ), freetube on PC, and Smart tube on my android tv.
Point us towards salvation, Grand Master!
…where can i sign up…?
Are you familiar with Jellyfin?
If you can set up a server of this then its as easy as making the library folder the output folder for yt-dlp
https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp
I didnt even have to write me own script. I gave chatgpt a notepad with channel urls and just told it to write me code to load these urls one by one and download the Last 2 videos. (Trust me you dont want to accidentally download a whole channel). Yt dlp can maintain a log of sort so videos aren’t downloaded more then once.
I run this script on a schedule and delete the video when i am done with it. Nice and clean. I can also recommend trying to run an invididious instance for general video browsing but mine took some twiddling to setup right.
Also if someone else wants a prebuilt solution for this, I’ve heard good things about tube archivist
Cheers!
No one can beat Ublock Origin
I hope it stays that way.
Dunno if I’m not updated but occasionally ads will actually load or at least try to load and completely restart my video. Usually only happens when I wake the computer up and it has a YouTube video midway through.
Blocker & Blocker
2 Blocker 2 Blocked
Blocker Tokyo Drift
…
Block of the Bockers; Return of the Blockings
BlocX
The Final Blocker
The Final Blocker 2: Electric Boogaloo
Blocker
Blockers
Blocker 3
Blocker Resurrection
Blocker vs Inline
Blocker vs Inline: Requiem
Revanced
Blocker: Covenant
Blocker: RomulusThe new timeline reboot:
- Blocker: The beginning
- The Blocker Returns
- The Dark Blocker
- Blocker Homecoming
- Rise of the Blockers
- Dawn of the Blockers
- War of the Blockers
- Kingdom of the Blockers
And to bring it full circle:
- Planet of the Blockers
I truly hope the new planet of the apes franchise is building to an actual planet of the apes remake. Time traveling astronauts and shattered statue of liberty. I feel like they’re already sowing the seeds for human mutants living underground worshipping an unexploded atomic bomb. Man those movies were weird.
Youtube’s crackdown on adblocker usage has created a huge Streisand effect. There’s a lot of people all over the world that would’ve never known about adblockers if youtube just didn’t say anything and didn’t do exactly what they did.
Now, all the major adblockers and ad-blocking browsers have stepped their game up and made it so people can still block ads on youtube.
There’s userscripts you can get from greasyfork…or is it greaseyfork that allow you to bypass all of youtube’s bullshit.
100% of the videos that actually belong on youtube are almost always demonetized anyway.
If you’re not constantly getting demonetized on every video you put out, despite bending over backwards to follow the rules, you’re doing something wrong.
There’s a lot of people all over the world that would’ve never known about adblockers
I see this sentiment a lot. Is there any reliable data to support it?
Not OP but in my personal experience I’ve talked to countless people that had no idea watching YouTube without ads is possible (without paying) and their minds were blown. With Google calling out attention to it like this, I’m sure many will get curious. Most people don’t use their electronics beyond basic functionality…
And tbh you’re gonna be hard pressed to get real data of how many ppl are suddenly finding out about it.
Exhibit A: Youtube premium
yes, ublock, adguard and brave all stepped up their game
Not to mention that Vanced-type apps and content mirrors are still going strong, and proper alternative platforms like Grayjay and Nebula are getting more attractive.
I wonder how soon self-hosted video distribution will be feasible. Does ActivityPub support that yet?
I think Peertube fits that description: “PeerTube is a self-hosted ActivityPub-federated video streaming platform using P2P directly in your web browser.”
YouTube can definitely afford a war ship and pay people to shoot…we may have enough people to operate a death star for free but can we afford one ?
The image doesn’t quite work because youtube needs a MASSIVE solution that works, scales, doesn’t fuck up their infrastructure and on and on and on.
Meanwhile on the user front, all your doing essentially is just skipping parts of a video, that will always be infinitely cheaper easier to do. Challenging for sure, but the solution can be small.
Even something as stupid as delaying your video start by 1 min, pre buffering then skipping ads. It’s brute force and barbaric but the point is that Google can’t do shit against that.
My ultimate vision is AI that preloads videos you want and detects ads / sponsor segments and just skips them / cuts them out on your device.
Another way to think about it… YouTube has huge amounts of compute resources, but per user it’s an extremely small amount. Your phone has orders of magnitude more power to dedicate to you than YouTube does. Collectively, we have more processing power than YouTube.
as a firefox user i cant give up and just installed freetube, exported everything from yt. its great
This just in: Google suddently discontinues support for popular and profitable ad blocker blocker blocker blocker, because literally all they know how to do is kill things that work.
God I love the web platform!
What of I told you there is an easier way of blocking ads: noscript.
I guess you haven’t heard they’re experimenting with injecting ads right into the videos on the server. Just turning off scripts won’t do anything for that.
Depending on your country, these ads still need to be marked clearly as such. And for accessibility reasons, that mark will always be machine readable.
So blockers will be fine.
Sponsor block gives me a nice list of options to do in that case: skip automatically, show a skip button or ignore. All based on what type of interruption there is.
Yeah I’ve seen it on twitch. We are joeover.
