Even though it doesn't apply for me (praise Freetube and Grayjay!) I'd rather waste 5 second looking at black than any ad ever
Commercial breaks were when you muted the television and had about two minutes to go to the kitchen or use the bathroom. Even if it's forced, I'm not watching them.
It's funny they think 5 seconds of no content is worst of 10~30 seconds of ads.
I think the goal it to make the user wonder "hum, looks like it's broken" hoping they disable adblocker during troubleshooting. I am not convinced at all about the effectivness of this measure, but it seems they are just trying anything.
Yeah haha.. They really think we would hat it if there is not a ear busting sound which tells you to buy sth for at least 5 sec.
The 5s black screen is automatically becoming a video
I experience suboptimal viewing by having to watch ads. If I had to pick one or the other, I know which one I prefer.
It's crazy that Google thinks people would rather watch 15 seconds of ads than 5 seconds of nothing.
What’s even crazier, for some people, actually a lot of people, they are right. Some people can’t be left alone with silence for that long.
Not me, but they are out there.
suboptimal viewing [of the ads]
Jesus Christ, why can't they just leave it alone. At this point they are grasping at straws. More likely, people will stop using YouTube at all than turning off adblockers or switching browsers.
More likely, people will stop using YouTube at all
Hahaha, no.
I meant people who use Firefox+uBlock, not just any people.
This is part of a much larger plan. Google wants to establish a new standard that the rest of the internet will follow.
If Google is seen fighting an endless war against ad blockers, it will encourage other websites to do the same.
No longer will it be "Please disable your ad blocker, as advertising supports us and helps keep this content free"
It will start being "Ad blockers are not permitted."
Google wants the Internet to start thinking of allowing ads as requirement for entry, and (via Manifest v3 and web environment integrity checking (which you better believe will be brought back in another form)), they will provide websites the tools to enforce this.
And I want to personally blame all the tech savvy people that have helped chrome achieve monopoly status over the last decade. If you've used chrome as main browser, it's your fault.
Considering those are people who only cost them bandwidth and provide nothing in return, that might actually be a net positive for their bottom line.
'Those people' are still incredibly valuable for YouTube.
They watch content, and interact with creators which increases the health of the community and draws in more viewers - some of whom will watch ads.
They choose to spend their time on YouTube, increasing the chances they share videos, talk about videos, and otherwise increase the cultural mindshare of the platform.
Lastly, by removing themselves from the advertising pool, they boost the engagement rates on the ads themselves. This allows YouTube to charge more to serve ads.
Forcing everyone who currently uses an adblocker to watch ads wouldn't actually help YouTube make more money, it would just piss off advertisers as they would be paying to showore ads to an unengaged audience that wouldn't interact with those ads.
Yeah, people will just use YouTube's competitor.... uh... called... um...
Outdoors
Can we stop panicing every 5 seconds? Give adblockers 1-10 days and they will fix it. We have been through this a bunch of times.
I think it's less panicking and more informational. The enshittification of Google has commenced and this is just documentation.
Most of the articles writing about it seem to reference following reddit post: https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/17ywbjj/whenever_i_open_a_youtube_video_in_a_new_tab_its/k9w3ei4/
Following code is pointed out:
setTimeout(function() {
c();
a.resolve(1)
}, 5E3);
While this is a 5s timeout, the code itself does not check for the user agent. So wherever the code is the 5s timeout will occur. The code also does not seem to be injected server side. I spoofed my user agent and for good measure installed a fresh google chrome, both times the code was present. So this code cannot be used to make any browser slower without making the other browsers slow too.
There is a response to the reddit post, which most articles seem to take their intel from. IMO this response does a good job at exploring what the code could be used for and points out that it is more than likely not for slowing down Firefox users: https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/17ywbjj/whenever_i_open_a_youtube_video_in_a_new_tab_its/ka08uqj/
I am amused by thinking that many journalists seem to take this story from a post on reddit, without even reading the direct responses - or just copy from another article.
The user agent is in the request header, so it's known before any response is sent from YouTube.
I don't know if that's what they're doing, because it's not possible to know what their server code is doing, making it a far better place to hide sleazy code.
That's out of context. That snippet of code existing is not sufficient to understand when does that part of the code gets actually executed, right?
For all we know, that might have been taken from a piece of logic like this that adds the delay only for specific cases:
if ( complex_obfuscated_logic_to_discriminate_users ) {
setTimeout(function() {
c();
a.resolve(1)
}, 5E3);
} else {
c();
a.resolve(1)
}
It's possible that complex_obfuscated_logic_to_discriminate_users
has some logic that changes based on user agent.
And I expect it's likely more complex than just one if-else. I haven't had the time to check it myself, but there's probably a mess of extremely hard to read obfuscated code as result of some compilation steps purposefully designed to make it very hard to properly understand when are some paths actually being executed, as a way to make tampering more difficult.
Alternatively, it's funny that people write comments arguing that it wasn't targeted at Firefox users, on a post that already says that it wasn't targeted at Firefox users :P
It doesn't really matter whether it was "targeted" at Firefox specifically or not, what matters is whether the website has logic that discriminates against Firefox users. Those are 2 different things. "End" vs "means".
I wouldn't be surprised if the logic was written by some AI, without specifically targeting any browser, and from the training data the AI concluded that there's a high enough chance of adblocking to deserve handicapping the UX when the browser happens to be Firefox's. Given that all it's doing is slowing the website down (instead of straight out blocking them) it might be that this is just a lower level of protection they added for cases where there's some indicators even if there's not a 100% confidence an adblock is used.
Well, ads are usually quite a bit longer... So I really don't see what they would gain from that. Unless they lied, which is of course possible if not likely.
A mass migration to a federated YouTube alternative couldn't come sooner.
I keep seeing people throw this idea out there but I have yet to have received a reasonable answer to a simple question: How would content creators get paid on a federated video platform?
@I_Comment_On_EVERYTHING @CowsLookLikeMaps
Patreon?
Yes, content providers make money on YouTube, but considering that Google makes more than then they do as a percentage certainly begs for some other solution.
I have a bit over 60 YouTubers I'm subscribed to on YouTube. Am I supposed to pay $60+ every month to have access to them? The cheapest patreon I've ever seen was for $1 and that wasn't even for full access just a "buy me coffee, thanks" tier.
What about discoverability, how am I supposed to randomly stumble across niche content creators that don't have a huge following?
Not saying it isn't possible I just can't seem to wrap my head around how it would work.
I think Nebula aims to solve that.
The other big question is who's paying for the infrastructure? If payments are done through a third party like Patreon, the host can't take a cut. Serving lemmy text and image content from a home server is one thing. Being a 4k streaming host is an entirely different business. Way more computing load and bandwidth, which means higher hosting costs.
That will never work. It simply doesn't work at scale like that, and it's very confusing for the non technical. Creators shouldn't have to worry about anything except uploading and moderating.
I block ads and havent noticed that
What an asshole company Google is.
Google - Be Evil.
i too have a bridge to sell
The Enshittification* of everything continues
I haven't had that issue. I've heard that disabling adblockers resolves it. But people have said that spoofing their user agent to chrome also magically resolves it...
I highly recommend just downloading any videos you want to watch. Some guy made an extensions for firefox on linux that lets you click a button and it just automatically downloads and opens that video in mpv player. You can also use tube archivist, yt dlp, etc to auto download your subscriptions.
F**k you, YouTube/Google! F*******k you! 🖕🖕🖕
Firefox
A place to discuss the news and latest developments on the open-source browser Firefox