No ads here!

Unless I'm mistaken, none of those will block server-side ads.
- Isn't there some law that you have to visually indicate whether a given piece of content is sponsored (ad) or not? Can't that just be detected by ad blockers to skip/hide ads?
  
  There isn't a law that I'm aware of, but typically the ad needs to be un-skippable/seek-able, which means there will always be some indication to the video player of what the user can skip or fast forward through.
  That doesn't mean Google couldn't just make fast forwarding/seeking a premium feature, but they'd lose a lot of user appeal if they did so they probably wouldn't do that
  
  I used to have a neat app on my phone that would play "Interdimensional Cable" bits, or just silence, over Spotify ads. It made it a lot more usable.
  Their ad gets played, I don't have to hear it screaming at me. Win/Win right?
  
  It depends on their implementation. If they decided to somehow serve the ad itself and serve the video only after the ad is done, I think that you won't be able to skip it, maybe only censor it to see a blank video screen or something.
  
  European law says you need to identify paid content, it's up to the channel to decide how, it's usually "AD" written in a moderately contrasty color in the top right of the screen
- I'm not sure about the mechanism, but isn't this the same thing as ancient early DVR's like TiVo that would record from the cable stream and omit the ads segments?
  
  That's the thing, I don't think the mechanism exists (or works) yet. I'm confident it will someday, but I didn't think it worked yet.
- IIRC, Twitch uses similar ad injection. Ad blockers get around it by opening new video streams until they find one that isn't running an ad. Could be wrong though, I'm parroting an uncited comment.
  
  Even then, the only fool proof way of getting around server side ads is using an adblocking proxy that pipes the video stream into a different country. And public proxies available are not foolproof because of excessive traffic or whatnot.
- They can block some kinds of server-side ads. And if google has those already, they have been quite successful against youtube.
  But yeah, they won't block all server-side ads.
- That's the point.
- I'd be satisfied with replacing the ad segment with some other video temporarily.
  
  Your browser just receives a single video file, there's no way to tell where in that video there's an ad, if there even is one
  You can't remove nor replace it if you don't know what to remove or replace
- Not yet

It's so weird that YouTube is their second most profitable venture after adsense. It's like they thought, we have a virtual monopoly on internet ads, Internet video, and web browsers. Let's combine their power to make people watch non stop ads while tracking them worse than the CIA. Then, let's be very surprised when people don't like us and we get hit with antitrust lawsuits. Fuck Google.
- Google went from don't be evil to fuck you all.
  
  To put it shortly: "Went public".
- And all they would need to do is offer a YouTube ad free plan that's at a sensible price without any of the YouTube music crap included.
  But no... They keep trying to shove the YouTube Premium bundle down our throats and no one wants it. We just want ad free.
- Then, let's be very surprised
  They're not the least bit surprised. They did the math. The profit is more than the penalty.
  
  Those fines are just the cost of doing business.
  Guess we should switch to incarcerating members of the board if we want them to really feel it.

What's funny to me is how they are in a fight for their company with the FTC, and they want to continue provoking people by increasing their revenue on the back of their users on a service they might have a technical monopoly on? Hmmmm...
- Provoking people and in dispute with FTC don’t relate but if the FTC broke them up then you would really regret not cashing in while you could
  
  Insofar as the FTC is in a legal case with google, American users do not have individual standing. But the court of public opinion is another venue without the need for such logic. As this is a political decision to enforce and proceed eight the case as much as an economic one, I would beg to disagree that provocation is in their best interest.
  Perhaps some would like to file a complaint? https://www.ftc.gov/enforcement/submit-merger-antitrust-comment
- Line must go up...
- YouTube isn't profitable. You want to talk antitrust in a meme about YouTube trying to make money on ads?
  
  Suuure it's not.

The mom should be Firefox and the kids the plugins.

The problem is when they start doing in stream ads, that will require something new. That said, people have been doing that with cable for a while, it'll be real interesting to see what clever stuff comes out to detect them in stream
- Audio is stupidly easy to fingerprint and identify. It would be glorious if we used the very same dumbass technology to identify ad segments as they use to robo-copyright-claim creators for including a 11 second snippet of a radio ad that's period authentic to the historical media they're reviewing. Just take that shit and turn it right against them.
- I assume something similar to sponsor block, some algorithm to identify ad segments and some user feedback to confirm. Unless I’m mistaken as to how sponsor block works?
  
  Sponser block works via user input
  People will watch the videos, report the segments that are sponser slots, and then when people watch the video they can upvote or downvote the accuracy of the report.
  In stream ads would be a hard one to tackle because YouTube would likely inject them randomly into the stream to boost engagement (readas, prevent people skipping them easily).
- This is something that would be a surprisingly good use case for machine learning. Fingerprint the ads by watching ahead in the stream, then skip that section.
  Actually, I think older algorithmic methods will work. I think that’s how TiVo worked. The annoying part is you’ll have to wait a bit at the start of the video.
- It'll require a new mother fucking video platform. We need to just collectively let YouTube die and move on.
  
  Haven't heard anything bad about Nebula
  
  There’s Rumble

The fact that I cant go to YT and select play all on a channel anymore makes its primary use, music, pointless to me.
Another issue is Pandora, they keep forcing mobile site on Desktop User Agent setting and I work too many hours to go in and change the identifiers needed to make it work. Their app is busted as well, it asks for permissions and will semi-frequently crash when I dont give them permissions.
The whole internets basically becoming shit because of corporate incompetence. Not even willful malice, just idiocy.
- That's because they want you to pay a subscription fee for YouTube music.
  For the Pandora app, they don't want you using it if you don't give them permission to do whatever it is they want to do.
  It is malicious. It's often incompetence too, but it's also malicious.
  
  Even if they benefit from me using YT Music, they make no sales pitch at any point leading up to me seeing the button is gone and leaving the platform. They are just missing out on tons of ad revenue from users that otherwise would have stayed and listened for hours.
  And Pandora also assuredly did not design their app to crash.
- I don’t know this for sure, but I feel like this is something you can do with freetube. Regardless, it’s worth looking into.
  
  I don't like using apps to start with tbh, 100% pass on that. Installing random software to phones should never have become so commonplace.
- Fun little piece of trivia: the primary use of YouTube is not, in fact, music.
  
  Fun little piece kf trivia: my primary use of YouTube was, in fact, music, you illiterate nimrod.

Newpipe ftw.
- Sadly, it's only for Android.
  
  Oh, that's unfortunate. I've never looked into it on other OSs.

not pictured: the pihole just out of frame, holding a shotgun
- ??? Pihole never blocked YouTube ads.
  
  It blocked YouTube ads when ads where served from other domains or subdomains. Now that they’re served from the same subdomains as videos, it’s not blocking anymore.
- How do you use Pihole to block YouTube ads?
  
  Block youtube.com. Quite effective, if you ask me.
  
  You can't. I have no idea what this person is talking about.

Peertube is holding the folded chair ready for action
- I have serious doubt's but it seems to be the best option right now
  
  I love how people will complain about ads on YouTube and then go on to complain that PeerTube sucks because "who's going to pay the hosting fees?" 🙄 For the record I like PeerTube but Android clients are ass right now

This is just wrong. None of those will prevent server side ads.

Is mom stabbing herself?
- That's something like a cleaver, so it's got a blunt tip that looks like it's going through her blouse.
  
  Cleaver is a bit more wide to be better at cutting through bone and stuff. I'd say its closer to a santoku knife though usually the tip is more tapered downwards
- Nah the blade edge is straight and the spine curves down. Great for chopping small and medium sized vegetables.

Grayjay ftw
- It works really well, I want to support them and donate but I'm afraid YouTube will find a way to block them like they did to others...

I am not for ads but what is so difficult about adding them to the video stream. This should make adblockers useless since they can't differentiate between the video and the ad. I could just imagine it would be difficult to track the view time of the user and this could make the view useless since they can't prove it to the ad customer. I have no in depth knowledge about hls but as I know it's an index file with urls to small fragments of the streamed file. The index file could be regenerated with inserted ad parts and randomized times to make blocking specific video segments useless.
- You would also have to make skipping to any point in the video impossible then as folks could just jump ahead until they are past the embedded ad.
  
  Out of order requesting of segments could be detected as well as faster requests. This would at least lead to a waiting time for the length of the ad.
  
  I was having some problems with playback on youtube with "buffering", random skips, the video reloading, etc. It turns out that those pauses and skips were for ads that uBlock stopped. Channels with more ad placements(new videos from large channels, large companies) would stop more often. Looking at the logs for Ublock showed me that yt does track how much of the video you have watched regardless of where you started. Say I load a video and skip to the middle. It will do a callout for time watched.
  I am not sure if I'm right but anyone else could correct or expand on this as I am no expert in how youtube does anything these days.
  
  What if all ads are 30seconds long, would it be impossible to lock skipping anywhere for the first 30seconds of every video?
- Twitch already does this for their livestreams and has been doing it for years. I'm just surprised that YouTube has taken this long to get around to injecting advertisements into the video stream. Although I think if YouTube decided to try ad injection the adblocking community would fire back with something novel to thwart their efforts and the eternal arms race would continue.
  
  I've read in that thread that there are already ad blockers for twitch too but I haven't looked up how they work or how twitch inserts the ads.
  
  The most likely situation is just having apps that watch the content, trim the ads off, then drop it off into a folder.
  You get home, watch your downloads, put it up for the night.
  
  If there's timed annotations (like say for closed captions or chapters/sections), then there will be some sort of mechanism to line them up with the modified stream. Then compare that with a stream without ads (which might require manually removing all ads or using a premium account where ads aren't inserted) and you'll be able to estimate regions of the stream where ads have been inserted. If the timed annotations are dense, you could see where the ad begins and ends just from that.
  Also if the ads themselves include timed annotations, there would be a difference in that meta data that would give it away immediately.
  Or if ads are supposed to be unskippable, the metadata will need to let the client know about that. Though they could also do that on the server side and just refuse to stream anything else while it's serving an ad.
  Given that, the solution might be to have a seperate program grab the steam and remove the ads for later playback. Or crowdsource that and set up torrents, though that would be exposing it to copyright implications.
- I worked at a video ad server that offered a stream stitched solution going back to 2013. It comes down to development work/cost that the companies need to take on. Ultimately they would benefit from the cost required, but they wanted to be cheap and do a client side solution instead.
  
  Ah yes that makes a lot of sense. Googles war on adblockers seems really expensive but we don't know the numbers maybe it's still cheaper.
- It already happens, videos contain sponsored segments added by the creator.
  But even those have a solution in the form of Sponsorblock, which crowdfunds the location in the video containing sponsored segments in order to skip them.
  Google should face the fact that they won't ever be able to win.
  
  Sponsorblock works with static timestamps provided by users. This would not work if the ads are inserted at randomized times.
- Cause you need to insert it every time for every viewer. People get different ads and those ads obviously change over time. So embedding one ad into the video permanently makes no sense. I'm pretty sure YouTube does it the way they do cause the alternative is not feasible.
  
  You can still do dynamic ad serving in a stream stitched integration. It's just that the content and the ads are being served by the same CDN, hence why you can't block the ads without also blocking the content. In the manifest file there are m3u8 chucks, the file is essentially broken up into 5/10 second chunks, and when the video segment chunk is coming to an ad break, it stitches in dynamically an ad m3u8 chunk that the ad server dynamically selects based on the ads they currently have trafficked in their system.
  
  That wouldn't make sense in the case of hls since the stream consists of multiple fragments of a video and you would just insert the ad fragments. This would only require changing the index file which could be done again and again with no effort and needs no reencoding of the video file.
  
  maybe ads should not be targeted.

I want the context of the original photo
- Source.

There is a whole topic in wasm called server side rendered DOM.
I hardly think there is a chance to block adds when they achieve it to render all the content on their side.
- I don't like to say this, but:
  AI
- But unless the page ends up as just a single canvas/image you'll still get all the HTML tags which can be stripped before your browser renders them?
  
  There's already SASE solutions that host a virtual browser boundary-side and present the user a painted canvas rather than the original DOM:
  Example - Prisma Access
  Example - Zscaler Cloud Browser
- Ads are not always the same, not for everyone. Ads are localized in time, space and per person sometimes.
  An advanced adblock would just need to download the video from two sources match the videos and eliminate the differences as those differences will surely be ads.
- There are twitch adblockers, it's just ublock origin that doesn't work on it anymore, people did find a way.
- Web devs busy at work making the internet more and more unusable each day. And they wonder why I despise them.

nothing to see here :)

Until Google demanded from its vassal (Mozilla) the removal of support for extensions. Mozilla doesn't have enough resources to do without Google
- When did this happen?
- I have no idea why you’re getting down voted. It’s essentially true.
  The arrangement is vital for Mozilla. According to the Mozilla Foundation’s 2021–2022 financial statement, which is the most recent one published, $510 million out of its $593 million in revenue came courtesy of Google’s search payments. https://fortune.com/2024/08/05/mozilla-firefox-biggest-potential-loser-google-antitrust-search-ruling/
  
  Unfortunately it happens more frequently than I'd like
- So open themselves up for more antitrust lawsuits? Telling another browser what to do.

The picture missed Google's hand of money paying Firefox
- They’re the one opening the door.
  
  With knives.... thought that meant they were planning on 'fighting' it.

If they put the ads in the stream, you can just fast-forward. I don’t think it’ll work out well for Google.
- This is something they are really good at, refining code until it does work well for Google.
- Oh, turns out each ad is 15 seconds long per an agreement to standardize playback.
  Oh, turns out you can't skip the first 30 seconds of a video.
  Oh, turns out if the first 15 seconds doesn't play, the playback disables entirely.
  ~Solutions a lowly forklift repair technician came up with in five seconds.
  Imagine what a Google developer might think of.

I really hate that picture. Imagine swapping the man and tho woman. He and their two kids waiting, knifes ready, for the spouse to come back from work, ready for stabbing an unsuspect. Wow, what an outcry this would have.
- bro it's a meme so whatever
- You really think there'd be an outcry? Rather than it just not being a popular meme format?
- murder is hot
- cry about it