this post was submitted on 10 Nov 2023
158 points (95.4% liked)

Technology

59020 readers
3005 users here now

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

Our Rules

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

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
158
Youtube Adblock Reckoning as a service problem? (startrek.website)
submitted 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
73 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

At the end of the day, its pretty clear to me that Youtube is going to lose the war on adblocking. Either by hook or by crook those that want to use Adblockers are going to keep doing it no matter what.

And to be clear, I am not trying to equate Adblocking to video piracy. To me, the fact that I choose to go to the bathroom during a commercial of a tv show doesn't constitute piracy and Adblocks just automate that process for me on Youtube. I would also never click on an ad purposefully, no matter what it is for.

With all that being said, I am a hopeless cause and I don't think that anything will convince me to buy YouTube premium, but I also used to think that about MP3s.

My real question to anyone reading this is, as the devil's advocate, what could YouTube do with ads or otherwise that would solve the "service problem" of "YouTube piracy"? And furthermore, is there any situaton where you would do anything other than block all Youtube Ads immdediately and with extreme prejudice?

This is an old article but this is Gabe Newell describing video game piracy as a service problem and why he believes that in case anyone is unfamiliar with it.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago

encode ads as part of the video file

I suspect that an AI could be trained to be able to recognize ads, or at least the most annoying, ads.

Also, a community driven project, like SponsorBlock, where users identify ads to build up a database could be created.

These are just a couple of ideas to defeat embedded ads, and I'm not a genius programmer by any means. This is just another front in a war that has been going on since at least the 90's and as long as blocking ads is less annoying than watching them, we're winning.