• porcupine@lemmygrad.mlEnglish
    121·
    5 months ago

    I salute comrade Google in their ongoing attempts to ruin every leisure activity until only domestic terrorism is left

  • Dirt_Owl [comrade/them, they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    102·
    5 months ago

    Lmao the reason things like YouTube and streaming killed broadcast TV in the first place was because of the lack of advertising those platforms used to have.

    They’re really trying to kill themselves with this

    • Rom [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
      40·
      5 months ago

      Hell, one of the appeals of cable TV when it first came out was that there weren’t any commercials. It’s a never-ending cycle.

      • Dirt_Owl [comrade/them, they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
        22·
        5 months ago

        Capitalist cycle:

        Nature or the people make something good

        Capitalism sees a chance to make profit and hollows out the good thing until it is a shell of its former self

        They move on to the next thing.

    • machiabelly [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
      27·
      5 months ago

      They probably aren’t going to kill themselves. They’ve cornered a big enough section of the market that they can count on a large portion of their userbase staying. If this change increases their revenue by 45% and reduces their userbase by 30% its still a net gain. The longterm issue here is losing the creators that make really high quality content. But most of their revenue comes from people like Mr. Beast and random beauty vlogger and angry gamer man. So idk.

      • ProletarianDictator [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
        13·
        5 months ago

        If this change increases their revenue by 45% and reduces their userbase by 30% its still a net gain.

        Please be the thing that helps PeerTube get off the ground. Video hosting is too damn expensive, so its probably wishful thinking that this could be like the event that gave us thousands of new libs to bully.

        All these proxy frontends should implement federation and caching, then have a setting where admins can set the instance to cache the last X gigs of videos they proxied. Better yet if Lemmy and Mastodon were to also cache posted videos too.

      • DamarcusArt@lemmygrad.mlEnglish
        10·
        5 months ago

        The problem with a 45% increase is that people who actually use adblockers is only around 10-20% of their userbase, but more intrusive ads will probably affect the other 80-90% of people and make at least some of those people use youtube far less as well. It also primes the market for a youtube competitor to come along and offer the same service, but with far less intrusive ads. I don’t believe any company can be “too big to fail.” I don’t think this will be some massive overnight thing though, but it might start a chain reaction that leads to people using something else in the future. (Like if something like TikTok started letting people make long form content in response to this, it could cause a lot of people to move to their platform from youtube)

        • machiabelly [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
          5·
          5 months ago

          What market can emerge to take a bite out of youtube? All I can think of are tik tok, video games, and books. Youtube makes plenty of money off of podcasts. I doubt nebula or similar will grow enough to take a sizable portion of youtube’s userbase. Alternate hosting sites might be neat but I don’t think enough people are tech literate/savy/informed enough for that or are simply too lazy to seek out stuff like that.

          • alexandra_kollontai [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
            3·
            5 months ago

            I subscribed to nebula so I could watch the jet lag series early and all the other videos on there are literally just the liberal war analysis videos. so nebula has that market covered but any other genre of video will have to rely on youtube. also nebula doesn’t have comments which may be a dealbreaker for many.

    • BynarsAreOk [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
      15·
      5 months ago

      Every western alternative to YT failed so far and things like p2p are obviously not anywhere near viable.

      If there is ever a non-western alternative like Tiktok, well its obvious it wont be allowed. So realy there is very little reason to be optimistic about this.

      If YT dies it will be because people moved on to some other entertainment form, maybe VR will be the big thing in 2060 and people will laugh at us idiots wasting time watching “non interactive media” just like we laugh at newspapers and radio. Maybe the “AI” nonsense will actualy deliver something remotely useful for making videos on-demand or something, though that is just cringe and silly it may happen…

      So unless that is where we’re heading I think sadly YT will be here to stay for at least a another 10-20 years.

      To be honest in the medium-long term I’d bet on climate change making energy prohibitive and therefore killing most of current social media server capacity than anything else.

  • laziestflagellant [they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    102·
    5 months ago

    damn I guess I’ll just have to actually commit to downloading and watching pirated TV shows and movies instead of endlessly grazing on video essays while I’m working on stuff

  • GrouchyGrouse [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    101·
    5 months ago

    Every ad executive should be thrown into the Marianas trench. Without pity or hesitation. Every tech nerd that facilitated their plans will be chained to them at the hip. One of them will be shot before they get tossed overboard.

    How will we determine which gets shot? We’ll use an aLgOriThM.

  • Des [she/her, they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    75·
    5 months ago

    this will effectively kill the entire ASMR community.

    nobody wants a loud ass ad injected into a soothing calming noise video. i’m just going to DL my favorite vids before this shit ruins them

  • FALGSConaut [comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    73·
    5 months ago

    So far I’ve managed to get by with Firefox and an ad blocker, but the second I start seeing ads I’m dropping YouTube (which I should anyway) and putting in the effort to pirate music/movies/shows/etc.

    • DamarcusArt@lemmygrad.mlEnglish
      14·
      5 months ago

      Wouldn’t surprise me if that is already over 50% of ad “watches” on youtube. People setting up a server that just watches tons of youtube videos simultaneously to boost their ad revenue.

      EDIT: Did some quick maffs, if a PC is running 24/7 it would use about $4.8 worth of electricity per day, and internet may cost around $2 per day, (We can assume unlimited broadband for simplicity). Youtube pays out an average of 0.018 cents per ad watch, so taking that as a quick and dirty amount gives us 378 ad watches per day, or 16 per hour, which isn’t really a huge amount for an program set up to just watch multiple videos in multiple tabs (I haven’t checked to see if youtube will not pay out for ads watched in a different tab). It probably wouldn’t be worth doing it though, as this would just be an amount to break even, and even doubling this amount would only be a profit of less than $7 per day. You’d probably have better luck just wandering around the streets looking for loose change. Unless you could do this in such a way to get tens of thousands of views per day (and not trigger any bot detection on youtube), it is probably just easier to make Elsagate content if you want to try a get rich quick scheme off of youtube.

      • alexandra_kollontai [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
        4·
        5 months ago

        No one was really watching the trailers, but Netflix didn’t need to know that. The goal was to passively run these phones 24/7, with each collecting a fraction of a penny for each ad they “watched.” Hobbyists and those looking to make a bit of money across the U.S. have been doing the same, buying dozens or hundreds of phones to generate revenue so they can afford some extra household goods, cover a bill, buy a case of beer, or earn more income without driving for Uber or delivering for Grubhub. The farms are similar to those found overseas, often in China biaoqing-point , where rows and rows of phones click and scroll through social media or other apps to simulate the engagement of a real human. Every few months, a video of these Chinese farms goes viral, but in bedroom cupboards, stacks in corners of living rooms, or custom setups in their garage, American phone farmers are doing a similar thing, albeit on a smaller scale.

        source

    • monobot@lemmy.mlEnglish
      8·
      5 months ago

      I just need it to mute and unmute it. Maybe also put black mask over video.

    • EpicKebabEater [he/him, it/its]@hexbear.netEnglish
      67·
      5 months ago

      Also a bizarre move considering they are so hard on for ads because Youtube is incredibly expensive to maintain. You are going to pay for comically large servers by… burning more computer time inserting ads into streams? Google screwed adbuyers before by not actually showing the ads where they were supposed to, Idk why they are trying so hard instead of doing more of that.

      • Cysioland@lemmygrad.mlEnglish
        21·
        5 months ago

        Possibly they don’t want to be actually showing ads, they just want to threaten you with hard to skip and hard to block ads so that you’ll buy Premium, but they won’t actually go out and say “yeah YouTube is pay to play now” because that’d be a bad move

    • Kairos@lemmy.todayEnglish
      11·
      5 months ago

      Not really. If you know what you’re doing video stream manipulation is easy. They might just do the Webm concat thing (two webm files put together is just a single webm)

      • GaveUp [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
        27·
        5 months ago

        Not just that, these big tech companies have some genuine black magic fuckery with their tech it’s unbelievable. I about lost it when I discovered that Google Drive files are not all copied 1:1 in their datastores. Same runs of 0s and 1s in your file and other files in anybody’s Google Drive files are stored only once, and so when you retrieve the file, it actually recreates your uploaded file with a bunch of pointers in sequence to all these different data locations

  • Hexagons [e/em/eir]@hexbear.netEnglish
    44·
    5 months ago

    Hahahaha, this is what made me quit twitch, for good. I’ll do the same with YouTube. It’ll suck, yes, but it’ll ultimately be good for me and my mental health. 3 years from now I won’t miss YouTube.

        • CindyTheSkull [she/her, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
          18·
          5 months ago

          A few months ago ublock origin wasn’t working for a subset of users (that youtube was using to test features that would break ublock origin for everyone). Ublock had to do make changes to counter youtubes efforts. They did so successfully and became an even more robust ad blocker than before. If they had not, we all would have been seeing ads break through months back.

          My point is that it is an arms race and so far ublock (and other ad blockers, though ublock consistently proves the best) has been able to keep ahead for the most part. I don’t know for sure if this is the moment when youtube starts to pull in front, obviously I hope not. But even if they do, that doesn’t mean ublock will be permanently broken. Even if ads got through for you today, it doesn’t necessarily mean they will tomorrow. We’ll see.

      • Hexagons [e/em/eir]@hexbear.netEnglish
        6·
        5 months ago

        Oh yeah? I should probably check it out again then. It most certainly didn’t work several years ago when I quit twitch (Ublock origin is still the adblocker I use) (I don’t remember exactly when I stopped using twitch, time is a fuck)

        Edit: oh you seem to be correct! I just went on twitch for the first time in years, and, uh, no ads? That actually might be pretty bad for me. Because I will watch streams all day if I’m not stopped from doing so somehow. Well, damn, but also, it’s objectively good, so I’m torn

        Edit again: oh wait no, just saw an ad, and I’m unwilling to figure out exactly why or what I could do to mitigate it, since twitch is bad for me anyway. Ah well, no twitch for me, it’s ok!

    • Justice@lemmygrad.mlEnglish
      7·
      5 months ago

      Just as a protip or whatever for people, if you split tunnel VPN traffic specific domains that twitch uses for ads, you will get no ads. You just gotta VPN to countries which don’t serve ads. An easy one included with most cheap, commercial VPNs is Ukraine. They don’t have ads. Neither does Russia, although proxies and VPNs to Russia are less common I guess due to sanctions. Poland has ads but less to my knowledge. You can google like Twitch ad domains and find the domains Twitch uses. I have several domains automatically routed through different VPNs in my home network and all my Twitch traffic is included in that. Never get ads except if the VPN stops working.