- cross-posted to:
- piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
- cross-posted to:
- piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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So many corporate bootlickers here, damn.
It’s like they think the only way to make money is to drown us in ads based off the telemetry they scoop up and we’re entitled brats for wanting to have a say in how our data is harvested/used against us.
There’s a paid service though.
Like I get the sentiment, and I use YouTube with uBlock Origin to avoid paying, but if you’re not willing to pay and you’re not willing to watch ads what are you proposing?
I didn’t say they can’t serve any ads. I said they’re drowning us in them - which even then I could tolerate except all the data they mine from us is ridiculous. Then they use opaque terms to weaponize it back at us to make us into little addicts who can’t look away and/or sell it to third parties. I do not agree with that so I do everything I can to make my telemetry worthless or otherwise inaccessible.
This is a distinction that some defenders miss. A lot of people who use ad-blockers would be fine with ads if they were restrained and not too obtrusive. But the amount and frequency of ads only seem to increase. Something that would be difficult to justify, because time does not suffer inflation.
We went from 1 skippable 5 second ad per video to multiple ads every 10 minutes or so, sometimes even unskippable 15+ second ads or even more ads in a row. When is it going to be enough? Are we supposed to take them on their word that this is necessary, simply assuming that they need it because they don’t even share financial numbers? Is our only other option to pay up, once again, the amount that they decided is a fair compensation and also keep increasing?
Seems that at the very least some way for the users to negotiate what they believe is fair is lacking in this matter. On the lack of that, no wonder some people just decide they refuse to be squeezed forever.
And let’s be honest about who this is paying: Alphabet’s 2023 Annual Meeting of Stockholders.
Adversarial tech, like adblockers, is good. We should use it. If people want users to not want to use it, they should change the product so that we don’t want to use it.
It’s not illegal for me to use an ad blocker and it should never become illegal.
But the amount and frequency of ads only seem to increase. Something that would be difficult to justify, because time does not suffer inflation.
I mean time doesn’t, but cost of ads can be cheaper due to competition and then because lots of people use adblockers they need to push more ads on those who don’t block it, really not hard to justify, plus they are a publicly owned company which means they will always suffer from the same problems every other publicly traded company does under capitalism, having to keep growing forever with ever increasing quarterly profits.
Seems that at the very least some way for the users to negotiate what they believe is fair is lacking in this matter. On the lack of that, no wonder some people just decide they refuse to be squeezed forever.
I mean, you can literally just not use the platform, that’s your negotiating power, but you don’t want that, nor ads, nor paying for it, you want it for free, I mean, I don’t blame you for it, I want shit for free too, who doesn’t, just not how the world works at the moment.
If you want to be this cynical about it I can only tell you one thing: the world does work like that, because people can get away with it and they do.
Yeah corporations can decide to sell our time, eyeballs and data for smaller and smaller fractions of a penny without asking us. Because clearly it isn’t about what is fair and equitable, it’s not about making sure every party gets what they deserve, it’s about what they can get away with.
Considering how much tech companies get away with, if anyone wants to moralize over not giving them what they demand, I can only laugh.
I mean they asked you, they told you the exact amount they won’t do that for, you don’t want to pay it, so they engaged you in a weapons race of adblockers vs adblocker detectors.
the world works like that because that’s how the world works currently, because that’s the point of evolution we are at, we haven’t yet moved past the capitalist system.
Because clearly it isn’t about what is fair and equitable, it’s not about making sure every party gets what they deserve, it’s about what they can get away with.
are we still talking about fucking youtube videos or did the conversation somehow changed to be about access to drinking water? damn bro, it’s youtube, a time-sink platform, you don’t need it to live
I paid for paid for premium for a while. Then it showed me an ad for paramount + anyways. So I said fuck you google and installed an ad blocker.
Point being I was willing and did pay for the premium service. But even “ad free with premium” still wasn’t ad free. It was “ad reduced”
There are stil ads with the paid service as i understand it.
Well, there are no YouTube-served ads but a lot of vloggers are using sponsored segments to better monetize their channels. So that’s where sponsor block comes in.
there are not
I’ve never seen an ad and I’ve had yt premium for 6+ years
I’ve recently been downvoted to oblivion for writing this exact thing, talking about online newspapers.
People don’t want ads and they don’t want to pay. They just expect to get stuff for free and I can’t decide if that’s because Lemmy is either filled with spoiled brats, or people who genuinely do not know how the world works, or both.
In their partial defence, I must say that the way companies have used the Internet up until a few years ago may have led them to believe that free content is a thing.
And, before someone comes along and tries to tear me a new one, YES, I do use uBlock on sites that harvest too many data (e.g. anything by Google) or sites that are too aggressive with ads. But at least I know that I’m either a freeloader or, in the best case scenario, a protester. And I know that, if everyone did the same, so much of the internet would just shut down or go behind paywalls.
I provide financial support to the services I believe in, Washington Post, NYT, Nebula, previously HBO, a few others.
But it’s absolutely on my terms. If I were a broke college student. I’d have no issues pirating literally everything. As it is, I’ll find ways to get the stuff from companies that get too greedy. “Public secrets for sale” isn’t a thing, and that’s all data of any form really is. The difference between someone telling you the basic plot of a movie and telling you every pixel of the movie isn’t all that far apart, just the amount of data they’re repeating.
Yes, thank you! I’ve been downvoted previously in a topic similar to this one. I know change can be hard for some people but we always knew this would come sooner or later. A huge company wants to make money off their service and people here act as if it’s their right to find a way around it. It’s not. You were just lucky that there was one. Either find other entertainment or accept that you will get ads.
I cannot get ad-free experience with YT Premium. I can only get ad-free videos bundled with a whole bunch of other useless shit I will never use like YT Music. And the simple reason why I cannot get only ad-free videos is because then I would pay them less, so they don’t give me the option.
lol you got downvoted for a perfectly reasonable question, it’s like Reddit all over again
In the second quarter of 2023, Google’s revenue amounted to over 74.3 billion U.S. dollars, up from the 69.1 billion U.S. dollars registered in the same quarter a year prior.
But man if we don’t pay for youtube premium how will they survive?
that’s google not youtube though, is it? i think youtube is running at a loss still + in a normal country that shit should have been blasted apart already way too many shit is under google.
I think they have pretty recently finally become profitable thanks to the increased amount of ads. Although you could always make the argument before that the data YouTube provides to Google that allowed their ad and data empire to thrive is invaluable whether YouTube directly profits or not.
why would it be invaluable? I am guessing it’s valuable amd is valued at a very close estimate at least.
Why are people down voting you? Damn there’s an infestation of corp simps here
I’ll say it again: Google pays 5-year-old “influencers” millions of dollars. They have always harvested your data to provide these free services - selling ads was just icing. They still harvest your data and sell ads and they still make the same money they’ve always made - only now they are insisting that everyone watch ads or pay for it as well. And of course, eventually YouTube will insist that you watch ads and pay for it. This is the equivalent of “network decay” for streaming services. This is unreasonable and while there are exceptions to the rule, most people have the same reaction to what Google is doing here: surprise, and dismay, if not outright anger and disgust.
Yet every single thread about it on the Internet is utterly overflowing with people lecturing us about how we shouldn’t expect something for nothing, as if we aren’t fully aware that this is the most transparent of straw men. These people insist that we are the problem for daring to block ads - and further - that we should be thrilled to pay Google for this content, as they are. And they are! They just can’t get enough of paying Google for YouTube! It’s morally upright, it’s the best experience available and money flows so freely for everyone these days, we should all be so lucky to be able to enjoy paying Google the way they do. And of course it’s all so organic, these comments.
Suggest that Google pays people to engage this narrative, however, and you will be derided and downvoted into oblivion as if you were a tin-foil-hat wearing maniac. This comment itself is virtually guaranteed to be responded to with a patronizing sarcastic and 100% organic comment about how lol bruh everyone who disagrees with you must be a shill.
Ok, I’ll bite. Let’s assume Youtube follows your advice, and stops showing ads on YouTube. Data collection is the only source of revenue. How does YouTube make money on that data? Be specific please. Who is buying the data, and what is the buyer going to do the data besides show you a targeted ad?
selling ads was just icing
You’re talking about these as if they’re separate things. Literally no company in existence harvests your data for any reason other than to serve better ads or to drive business decisions internally. Nobody gives a shit about your data otherwise. Ads are literally the only reason.
Suggest that Google pays people to engage this narrative, however, and you will be derided and downvoted into oblivion as if you were a tin-foil-hat wearing maniac. This comment itself is virtually guaranteed to be responded to with a patronizing sarcastic and 100% organic comment about how lol bruh everyone who disagrees with you must be a shill.
Oh hey you put this part in before being downvoted this time lmao. If you think it’s worth googles time to be astroturfing on fucking lemmy, you have a couple screws loose lmfao.
Everyone I don’t agree with == bootlicker 🙄
Then stop making stupid arguments, it only serves to make you look stupid
I honestly don’t really care if people adblock or not but I think people need to acknowledge that adblock is essentially piracy. That doesn’t make it inherently bad or good but it has the same impacts as piracy at the end of the day. It’s a useful tool to use when companies start to get unreasonable but especially in the case of YouTube it impacts the amount of money the people who make the content earn.
But piracy has no impact at all. Pirates never wanted to buy your stuff.
that only applies to p2p torrents where there aren’t infrastructure costs, youtube has infrastructure costs.
grabbing a torrent from the net and downloading it doesn’t cost anyone anything, it’s all volunteers providing their bandwidth for it.
youtube’s bandwidth isn’t free.
Every tech article I read nowadays I feel like has the appendix, “which is illegal in the EU.” Lol
The only thing still preventing mayhem along with California
Seriously. Everything causes cancer which has the unfortunate effect of dulling the fear response but it is good to know. If you want to sell your product in California, which is where silicon valley is, you need to observe their safety standards.
And thank the EU we might actually get right to repair.
Elon can block EU for Twitter if he wants to but it’s probably going to cost him even more.
This whole thread is a whole lot of hullabaloo about complaining about legality about the way YouTube is running ad block detection, and framing it as though it makes the entire concept of ad block detection illegal.
As much as you may hate YouTube and/or their ad block policies, this whole take is a dead end. Even if by the weird stretch he’s making, the current system is illegal, there are plenty of ways for Google to detect and act on this without going anywhere remotely near that law. The best case scenario here is Google rewrites the way they’re doing it and redeploys the same thing.
This might cost them like weeks of development time. But it doesn’t stop Google from refusing to serve you video until you watch ads. This whole argument is receiving way more weight than it deserves because he’s repeatedly flaunting credentials that don’t change the reality of what Google could do here even if this argument held water.
Ah yeah the kind of hullabaloo that makes everyone accept cookies on every single website ;)
shoutout to Consent-O-Matic! https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/consent-o-matic/
Also exists on chromium for the chrome/opera/… lovers here
Yay for ublocks annoyance pop up blocker. No more cookie pop ups
The guy really exudes “don’t you know who I am?” energy. Which is a shame since it detracts from the discussion.
This whole thread is a whole lot of hullabaloo about complaining about legality about the way YouTube is running ad block detection, and framing it as though it makes the entire concept of ad block detection illegal.
Nope, the point is that, at the moment, Google seems to look where it should not look to know if a user has an adblocker and they don’t ask for permission.
Let put it in another way: Google need to have my permission to look into my device.
But it doesn’t stop Google from refusing to serve you video until you watch ads.
Which is fine as long as Google can decide that I am using an adblocker without violating any law, which is pretty hard.
Of course Google could decide that it is better to leave EU and it law that protect the users, but is it a smart move from a company point of view ?
You’re missing the point/s
- What they’re doing is illegal. It has to stop immediately and they have to be held accountable
- What they’re doing is immoral and every barrier we can put up against it is a valid pursuit
- Restricting Google to data held remotely is a good barrier. They shouldn’t be able to help themselves to users local data, and it’s something that most people can understand: the data that is physically within your system is yours alone. They would have to get permission from each user to transfer that data, which is right.
- This legal route commits to personal permissions and is a step to maintaining user data within the country of origin. Far from being a “dead end”, it’s the foundation and beginnings of a sensible policy on data ownership. This far, no further.
How is it immoral? Is Google morally obligated to provide you with a way to use their service for free? Google wants YouTube to start making money, and I’d guess the alternative is no more YouTube.
Why is everyone so worked up about a huge company wanting to earn even more money, we know this is how it works, and we always knew this was coming. You tried to cheat the system and they’ve had enough.
I think it’s a question of drawing a line between “commercial right” and “public good”.
Mathematical theorems automatically come under public good (because apparently they count as discoveries, which is nonsense - they are constructions), but an artist’s sketch comes under commercial right.
YouTube as a platform is so ubiquitously large, I suspect a lot of people consider it a public good rather than a commercial right. Given there is a large body of educational content, as well as some essential lifesaving content, there is an argument to be made for it. Indeed, even the creative content deserves a platform.
A company that harvests the data of billions, has sold that data without permission for decades, and evades tax like a champion certainly owes a debt of public good.
The actions of Google are not those of a company “seeking their due”, for their due has long since been harvested by their monopolisation of searches, their walked garden appstore, and their use of our data to train their paid AI product.
Unrecognized entitlement on their part, lol.
Immoral? For making you watch ads? How are ads immoral? You’re using the service, you watch ads, it’s not rocket surgery
Its immoral for the way its being done, not what was done.
deleted by creator
Won’t cost them anything near weeks of dev time. They can just write it into their terms of service and prompt you to re-accept those next time you access the site.
Afaik you can’t bypass laws and regulations with ToS
Ha ha no. Google needs you more than you need google.
> but but but the ads moneh
If google made so much money from ads, they wouldn’t care if you watched it at all. They want your consumerist data and they can’t get it with adblock.
> but but but muh creators
Most major creators have complained about google shafting them with schizo rules about monetization. The biggers ones have started to sell merch and use other platforms as insurance. You watching those ads gives google more benefits than the creators.
Youtube is NOT essential. You can live without youtube. Simply follow the creators you like on other platforms. If you’re a creator, time to diversify your platform. The iceberg is sighted and it’s time to jump ship.
Google DOES make money from ads. A metric tuckton of it. Why the fuck else would they need your data other than to serve better ads???
I feel like they’re eventually just going to embed the adverts directly into the video streams. No more automated blocking, even downloading will make you see ads. Sure, you can fast forward the video a bit, but it will be annoying enough that you’ll see and hear a few seconds of ads each time, and you won’t be able to just leave it running while you do other things.
Have you met my friend SponsorBlock?
That only works by users crowdsourcing and flagging the advert sections.
By doing it on the fly, each user could get different ads in different places.
You could have an app running in the background that detects ads based on the audio (like Shazam for music) and skips it for you. You could probably analyse all the video slices YT sends you and detect ads that way. I think as long as we are still in control of the playback devices we can find ways to make them skip ads.
There even is a project that uses machine learning to detect sponsor segments. https://github.com/xenova/sponsorblock-ml
MythTV has a broadcast television ad detection module and it works pretty damn well.
This goes into a bit of detail on it’s methods:
https://www.mythtv.org/wiki/Commercial_detection
A lot of what it does could be applied to a video stream, although adapting it to useful real-time could be tricky.
unless it is strictly necessary for the provisions of the requested service.
YouTube could quite easily argue that ads fund their service and therefore an adblock detector would be necessary.
that’s not how it is to be interpreted.
it means something like in order for google maps to show you your position they NEED to access your device’s gps service, otherwise maps by design can not display your position.Correct. Youtube can still play videos on your screen on a technical level without the need for adblocker detection. Their financial situation is not relevant in that respect.
Correct. Youtube can still play videos on your screen on a technical level without the need for adblocker detection. Their financial situation is not relevant in that respect.
This is why I’ve never had an issue blocking ads. Pick a couple creators you like, join their patreon or buy some merch. You owe YT nothing.
Feel however you want to feel about ads, but that’s a brain dead take. Storage of all that content and delivering it to anywhere in the world is not free. Very few creators would be able to build that kind of CDN on their own and be profitable, probably impossible without a large established following first.
Sure, but Google has created a monopoly where no one else can even compete.
If Google wasn’t so shady with their practices including playing extremely fast and loose with our data and trust, I MIGHT have the goodwill to sit through 50% of the commercials they inject suddenly with no respect for the place they’re added in the content. 100% though? I’m honestly shocked anyone can sit through it.
I’d disagree here. To me it seems like YouTube isn’t a monopoly because Google is being monopolistic with it (if you do have any examples of this, please show me) but rather because of the ridiculous scale and expense of such a project. The infrastructure to support something like YouTube at the scale of YouTube is insane, and I doubt many organisations or companies have the ability to even dream of it, not to mention the extreme network effect with something like YouTube. Google doesn’t have to be monopolistic (I’m sure they would be if there were viable competitors, sure, not saying that Google’s a saint) because it’s almost impossible to compete just in sheer complexity and cost.
It’s kind of like how the entire semiconductor industry is dependent on lithography machines from one company: ASML. But that’s not because they’re being anti-competetive, it’s because their products are insanely, extremely complex, precise and advanced. Decades upon decades and billions and billions of RnD.
Don’t put all the financial costs on one single company. Spread the financial costs out among lots of people and run small peertube servers. If a creator becomes popular, then the people watching their videos at the same time will be sharing the video with anybody else who loads it afterwards and take load off the server so it does not crash.
Back when it was unintrusive banner ads and the like? Sure, you might have had a point then. But now, with multiple unskippable 2 minute ads, before, during, and after the video? Fuck no.
Don’t get me wrong I use an adblocker, and if I’m on a device that can’t run one, I stop watching videos if a mid roll ad shows up. If their ads were less intrusive, I wouldn’t block them. I’m only saying that the claim that YT/google deserve nothing is a pretty big stretch.
The thing is, YouTube has no value to me. The only reason I use it is because of the creators on there. They make the content and they deserve my money but if I could, I would use a different platform. YouTube has created a Monopoly, which makes it impossible to watch the videos anywhere but on their platform tho.
The reason I don’t like YouTube is because they remove features everyone wanted to keep, then add stuff nobody ever wanted. They demonetize creators for no reason all the time and a lot of the rules they have for staying monetized are stupid and actively make the content worse, like not being allowed to swear. The DMCA takedown system is also extremely flawed, you can literally file a takedown for any video and they’ll instantly remove it and give the creators channel a strike without checking anything about the takedown request. This has led to channels being removed (3 strikes and your channel gets removed), eventhough they didn’t even do anything wrong. And even if the DMCA takedown is actually justified, you get a strike even when the video is years old, which is stupid because you can’t remember every single video, so you shouldn’t get a strike if it’s that old already. Communication with YouTube, when they’ve once again made a mistake, is also very difficult because the only way to reach them is though Twitter and also only if your tweet gets popular enough that they actually see it or care about it.
AdBlockers are the only way to vote with your wallet. A service with this many huge flaws is nothing I want to support or even use.
which makes it impossible to watch the videos anywhere but on their platform tho
The creators are free to upload content anywhere they want without restrictions. It’s not YouTube’s fault that they don’t.
I don’t disagree with what you are saying, but its really not my problem and I don’t feel obliged to help them make money.
Its not my problem if their service is costly and not profitable. They don’t have to do it. I have no moral obligation to them being profitable.
That’s valid. Honest question, do you think that the content creators that you enjoy would be able to exist as profitable businesses in their own right without a platform like YT to get them started? I guess my point is that if not YT, it would be some one else, and they might start out with roots the same way YT did, but eventually as they grow wouldn’t they end up in the exact same position? I guess the way I see it is that this enshitification happening everywhere is two tiered, for one, it’s plain corporate greed driven by the pressure of needing to grow forever, and for that part of it, I’ll keep blocking ads, or if it’s a platform level thing like Reddit, I’ll take my ball and find somewhere else to play, like here! But I do think that another factor is the sheer economy of getting so popular and being crushed under your own weight, like the Tyranny of the Rocket. It’s inevitable unless the fundamental way the majority of people use the internet changes, and that ship probably sailed decades ago.
do you think that the content creators that you enjoy would be able to exist as profitable businesses
I’m probably showing my age, but there was a time in human history, where people created things not because it was or could be a profitable business, but because they were inspired to share their vision, or humor, or art with the world. In the years before 2008, and in this mythical time on the internet, we did and were and created simply “for the lulz”. If anything, I think that focusing on the idea that your job on the internet is to “generate content” is a toxic leak from neoliberalism/ VC culture. Its the commoditization of the self.
No one joined SA’s or Farks photoshop contests because it made them money. We did it because it allowed us to be funny, to one another, for one another. We pitched in together to cover the server costs and that was that. In fact, that’s how Reddit stayed alive. We pitched in together to cover server costs so that we could do things for ourselves (memes, nudes, music, whatever…). I learned to code making crappy flash games for new grounds not because it was profitable, but because it was fun, and cool to be a part of a community who loved to make thing and then give them away.
The enshitification of all things is a symptom of a broader issue, which is the commoditization of the process of self actualization, which happens through lived experience. The human desire to build, to create, to make art, to talk, chat and communicate; its part of a process where we find out who we are.
There are plenty of things in life that are worth doing that aren’t profitable. The ideal that we should allow a neo-liberal doctrine to determine how we find out about ourselves via our creative expression, for me, is worth resisting.
It’s Google. They can afford it.
Just replying to confirm that “strictly necessary” has never meant, “makes us money.” It means technically necessary.
Adblock detection has literally already been ruled on though (it needs consent). I’m sure there are nuances above my understanding, but it’s not that simple.
Do you have a link to the EU requiring consent to detect ad blocking?
Most of what I can find is from the late 2010s but specifically says that consent is not required for adblock detection. https://adguard.com/en/blog/eu-defines-its-stance-on-ad-blockers.html
https://iabeurope.eu/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/20160516-IABEU_Guidance_AdBlockerDetection.pdf
But also: I assume consent can be obtained with a mandatory TOS update.
Blargerer is probably saying that because the Mastodon post OP linked to says “In 2016 the EU Commission confirmed in writing that adblock detection requires consent.”
That, in turn, is probably referring to a letter received from the European Commission by the same person, which you can see here: https://twitter.com/alexanderhanff/status/722861362607747072
It’s not exactly a “ruling”, but it’s still pretty convincing.
You consent to their terms of service and privacy policy when you access their website by your continued use. They disclose the collection of browser behavior and more in the privacy policy. I suspect they are covered here but I don’t specialize in EU policy.
Their terms of service have to be compliant with local laws though. You can’t just put whatever you want in there and expect it to stand up in court.
This is true. And I’ll disclaim again that I’m not an expert on EU law or policy. But I’m not familiar with a US policy or law that would preclude that consent to collection from being a condition of use. I’ve written these policies for organizations, and I think it will be a difficult argument to make. I’d love to read an analysis by a lawyer or policy writer who specializes in the EU.
Not an expert either, but from what I’ve seen, the EU actually has some amount of consumer protection. The USA on the other hand mostly lets big corporations get away with whatever they want, as long as they make some “donations”.
I haven’t agreed to any new terms and the adblocker appears for me
Assuming it didn’t exist for months or years before this. As far as I know, blocking ads has always been against ToS.
Also required should be YouTube accepting liability for damage done by malicious ads or hacks injecting malware onto user systems via ad infrastructure.
Their precedent is that they sold our data for 20 years before this and are now the biggest company in the world, so they can go pound sand.
In the interest of making criticisms factually correct, they don’t “sell” user data, they make money through targeted advertising using user data. They actually benefit by being the only ones with your data, it’s not in their interest to sell it.
That’s a very good point. I’m not very aware of EU regulations, I wonder if there has been established precedent in court
Call me naive, but doing something illegal is never OK in the eyes of the law, whether I deem it necessary or not. I would have to receive a legal exception to the rule, as it were. As it stands, it’s illegal.
doing something illegal is never OK in the eyes of the law
yeah, doing something illegal is illegal, hard to argue with that tautology.
but you seem to be living under the impression that immoral = illegal, which is not the case.
So is this basically saying youtube isn’t allowed to detect an adblocker?
I’m not sure I really follow why that specifically is something they’re policing.
It about device detection and privacy. Websites in the EU aren’t allowed to scan your hardware or software without your permission, to protect the users privacy. Adblockers fall under this.
If thats how it works, they could very easily just check if the ad ever got loaded and refuse to serve you content until it does. Going after the way they prevent people from abusing their services doesn’t stop them from preventing them - it just gives them a new hurdle and that’s not a very big one.
Well many adblockers can be clever enough to load the asset, but then just drop it. As in yeah the ad image got downloaded to browser, but then the page content got edited to drop the display of the add or turn it to not shown asset in css.
This is age old battle. Site owners go you must do X or no media. However then ad blocker just goes “sure we do that, but then we just ghost the ad to the user”.
Some script needs to be loaded, that would display the ad? All the parts of the script get executed and… then CSS intervention just ghosts the ad that should be playing and so on.
Since the browser and extension are in ultimate control. As said the actual add video might be technically “playing” in the background going through motions, but it’s a no show, no audio player… ergo in practice the ad was blocked, while technically completely executed.
Hence why they want to scan for the software, since only way they can be sure ad will be shown is by verifying a known adhering to showing the ad software stack.
Well EU says that is not allowed, because privacy. Ergo the adblocker prevention is playing a losing battle. Whatever they do on the “make sure ad is shown” side, adblocker maker will just implement counter move.
Twitch seems to have figured out adblock blocking. Any idea what they’re doing that’s different?
From my understanding, they embed the ad in the video stream itself so that it’s indistinguishable from the actual content. I imagine Google could serve ads from the same servers that serve videos and integrate them in a way that would be hard to detect, just like Twitch.
I guess the one difference is that I don’t think twitch ads are skippable while youtube’s ads are. I assume embedding the ad into the video would prohibit that. Hopefully youtube doesn’t do that because while the current ad situation is annoying, having only unskippable ads would be pretty unbearable.
There are ways to get Twitch adblock as well. I use PurpleTV
Your car comment makes me think of Googles new DRM protocol, and then about Ken Thompsons compiler hack, combined with most DRM get hacked eventually.
This gives me hope that even if Googles DRM becomes standard, it will be hacked and YouTube thinks it’s showing ads on a unmodified signed page, but I am not seeing any ads.
So then Google just refuses to play the video until the appropriate time expires. Or they embed it in the video feed itself. There are more ways around this than you’re making there out to be.
It can load into my pihole and they can shove it up a different hole.
Good, make them jump through that hoop and respect user privacy.
It’s not even a hoop. It’s a slight side step. And they wouldn’t be breaking anymore of your privacy. They’d still know you’re not loading ads.
But they wouldn’t know how, or with what software. That is indeed protecting one’s privacy.
As I understand it, detecting an adblocker is a form of fingerprinting. Fingerprinting like this is a privacy violation unless there is first a consent process.
The outcome of this will be that consent for the detecting will be added to the TOS or as a modal and failing to consent will give up access to the service. It won’t change Youtube’s behavior, I don’t think. But it could result in users being able to opt out of the anti-adblock… just that it also might be opting out of all of YouTube when they do it.
I’m all for this protection but for the sake of argument isn’t use of the service consent to begin with? Or is that the American argument around these types of regulation?
I’m a pihole, vpn, adblock and invidious user ftr… 😂
That’s how the corporate-written laws in the USA handle it most likely. The EU actually has some amount of consumer protection. Burying it in a 100 page terms of service document doesn’t count as consent either.
It depends on the context, but generally you require explicit permission for data-related stuff which means something like a checkbox or a signature.
This isn’t the solution people think it is. The only thing Google needs to do now to make it legal is to force a prompt asking for your consent where if you disagree you are completely blocked off from the site. That is, assuming Alexander Hanff, the one carrying on this narrative since 2016, is correct and interpreted the response correctly. In Article 5 of the 2002/58/EC there is a second paragraph that states the following:
Paragraph 1 shall not affect any legally authorised recording of communications and the related traffic data when carried out in the course of lawful business practice for the purpose of providing evidence of a commercial transaction or of any other business communication.
I’m no lawyer, but I tell you who has them in droves, Google and YouTube, whom I’m sure have already discussed whether their primary means of business revenue, ads, could be construed as a commercial transaction for which evidence is needed. I’m not sure how a two page reply from the EU commission to his request telling him Article 5 applies really helps the guy out if Article 5 also includes the means by which YouTube is allowed to run scripts that provide evidence that ads have been able to be properly reproduced.
Still, assuming Alexander Hanff is right, Google just needs to add a consent form and begin blocking access to all content if users disagree, so it seems to me his claim is damned if he is right, and damned if he isn’t right.
The only thing Google needs to do now to make it legal is to force a prompt asking for your consent where if you disagree you are completely blocked off from the site.
GDPR does not allow this.
How is YouTube detecting adblockers? Wouldn’t it be with the information the user’s browser is already passing to them?
It could check if the ad is present in Dom maybe?
Or they just check the machine to see if the malware served in the ad is present.
Using javascript ofc.It checks if ads successfully loaded and showed to user if not showing banner to u.
… We’re gonna get another cookie click-through, aren’t we?
I’m all about sailing the seven seas, yar har, but at some point the time spent trying to circumvent ads exceeds the $15. Support the people you watch. Hell, I pirate games and if I like it I’ll buy it later. There’s a difference between not getting taken advantage of by corporations and just straight screwing over people trying to make a living.
I’d still rather give directly to the creators than indirectly through Youtube. Youtube can change how much money those creators get, and I can… as well, I guess, but at least that’s an individual choice, rather than a choice made for me.
I can tolerate sponsored content, but the youtube ads feel like they are trying to lobotomize me or give me a seizure. I remember the time when google tried to fight obnoxious ads on the web but it seems they’ve made a complete u turn, not just on Youtubu but on Android too
And not to sound like a shill, it’s why I paid them to fuck off. The added benefit of the people I watch getting kickback was a nice bonus. I’d do the same on Pornhub if they started adblock blocking.
Pornhub is not exactly a monopoly like Youtube, you can go elsewhere for your porn addiction
Yeah and it’s about as appealing as going to Vimeo or Dailymotion. Sure, head on down to Xhamster but that UI hasn’t been updated in about 8 years, mind the watermark, good luck.
Yeah that’s alright, not what I’d do myself but it’s something. I personally get exhausted when so many people get entitled to thinking they should have the undisputed right to slink through every website, take all the content they want, and not pay in attention, data, or their wallet. Shit costs money and people either forget or don’t care. Even Lemmy, someone’s fronting the cost for this instance.
I’m all for personal freedoms but you’re getting a service you pay no money for and then get pissed that they are getting the money out of you another way. Sound like people being petty.
It is a service, but you aren’t the consumer, you’re the product.
The way the guy was flexing about being an “expert”, while it may or may not be true (I haven’t independently verified his credentials), is extremely offputting. Refusing to engage with hecklers is a better policy than flexing with your education, credentials, and experience.
How is it offputting to say “listen to me because I’m an expert, here’s my credentials”? Everybody’s so fast to claim “fake news” nowadays that demonstrating your credibility has become a requirement.
The person he was responding to was asking for some specific clarification. Instead of offering it, he appealed to his own authority, essentially listing his credentials in a pompous way and then saying “You don’t need to understand. I’m the expert, I’ll understand it for you.”
He’s answering to a person saying “IANAL” asking whether this really is illegal with “I am an expert on this particular law, helped to write its replacement and already had confirmation from DG Just (EU Commission) that the law applies in the way I have stated”. Seems perfectly apropos to me.
But he didn’t cite policy, law, or legal analysis. I work as a technology policy writer/interpreter in the US so I can’t address the EU issues. But I’ve never responded to someone who asked for the basis of my conclusion by listing my credentials. When I publish a policy position paper, I cite chapter and verse all relevant laws, policies, statutes, and explanation for interpretation. I’ve written entire pages offering justification for the interpretation of a single sentence a particular way. He didn’t do that. He might be right, but he didn’t justify it in any meaningful way.
Yikes that reply was way out of proportion to the question, holy moly. Listing off his degrees just dripped with insecurity…
IANAL, but since without adblocker site works, but with adblocker youtube breaks it, which means this information somehow is collected, which probably is violation of EU law no matter how exactly Google gets this information. And Google can’t say “we accidentaly are making totally different thing, that just so happens to break adblock” because they just wrote in text that they detected adblock.
Yep. He took a massive ego trip early on and immediately came across as someone I don’t particularly want to side with.
I’m a web developer and fundamentally disagree with his take on what JavaScript can do on the client side. I see what he’s getting at but I think he’s wrong. JavaScript can certainly detect access to resources (ads in this instance) without violating any enforceable policies. Half the internet does error handling with JS for things that won’t load - how can this be construed as violating eprivacy? Nonsense.
That being said I’d love for this feature to go away and would be happy to see YouTube and Google go pound sand… but this feels like a stretch. It was inevitable enshittification imo.
While I kinda sympathise, I won’t be filing a complaint. I want Youtube to become so shit that even the average user will start looking for alternatives. I want ads plastered everywhere on that site and adblockers to fail miserably at blocking them. I want the average user to be so bothered by the ads that when they stumble upon an alternative they try and convince people to switch. I want content creators to be so bothered by it that they make videos promoting the use of another service.
Make this a competition for alternatives. Don’t make it easy for users to stay on Youtube.
Since every person can become a piece of shit, it is useless to constantly change services, so only rules can teach us to live differently from other beasts.
I’m sure content creators will be pissed that more ads are served on their videos haha. Oh no! More money! Whatever will they do? The conversation about ads has two sides where consumers are on one and content creators and youtube are on the other.
While I’d absolutely love for there to be a youtube alternative, they have a pretty much complete monopoly on online video distribution. Hosting all that data is expensive so competitors would need some serious financial backing which would likely put the competitor service in the hands of a large corporation.
two sides where consumers are on one and content creators and youtube are on the other.
Youtube and content creators are not on the same side. This woefully reduces a complex problem with many different actors down to a Right Side and a Wrong Side, and anyone whose not on My Side, must be on the Wrong Side.
I’m sure content creators will be pissed that more ads are served on their videos haha. Oh no! More money! Whatever will they do?
The problem I see, is that it wouldn’t actually be more money for the creators despite there being more ads as the user base actually seeing the ads is reduced and the difference has to be made up in volume.
I think the internet is turning to shit and that Google/Youtube is greedy like every other conglomerate.
But… they have to get something from people using there services. I personally use YouTube like an iPad kid so I have premium. I like the EUs tech laws but I don’t think they should rule that a computer can’t push ads (assuming the ads are not malicious)
They’re not ruling that YT can’t push ads, though. They’re ruling that they’re sniffing around the user’s computer for things that aren’t preventing them provide the service.
In the end, Google has options. One would be, and I’m not saying this is the best one, that they charge everyone to access their site. You know… they way some newspapers do. I’m sure there are other options.
As a free user they get engagement, which may or may not offset what they get out of those that do provide them income. It seems like that was good enough for a couple decades.
I…really don’t think it was ever about engagement. I think most free users just didn’t have an adblocker.
I think ublock orgin’s adoption just picked up over the years, and it’s not as if Youtube gets cheaper (I’d imagine it just gets more expensive)
I mean engagement is great, they make the algorithm work (well, “work”) but I’m pretty sure the ads were the selling point (for google) before premium was even an option.
Google is an advertising company. That’s how they make money. Everything else they do – search, youtube, apps, phones – is just an ancillary sideshow that’s a vehicle to showing people ads, or gathering data on them to use in showing them ads. So you are 100% correct.
I like the EUs tech laws but I don’t think they should rule that a computer can’t push ads (assuming the ads are not malicious)
EU techs law don’t ban to push ads, they say that you cannot look into my device to check it I (could) see them without asking for my permission for something that you don’t need to provide a service.
assuming the ads are not malicious
All ads are malicious.
they have to get something from people using there services
If the ads weren’t absolutely overwhelming (easily around 50% of all watch time, last time I watched without blockers) and if they weren’t so poorly implemented (starting ads at random times and not even caring if they’re cutting someone off mid-sentence, making 2min+ ads unskippable, accepting ads from very questionable advertisers) it might feel a bit less onerous.
I was fine paying the premium light subscription price and now they’re killing it and forcing me off that plan and to pay 50% more to add features I 100% don’t use and don’t want to use. And of course they’ll just jack up the price again in 6-12 months because it’s never enough.
Fine. We all agree ads sucks. But I struggle to understand why you people keep fighting against a company while simultaneously being apparently so addicted to their products. Just do yourself a favor and stop using it altogether.
Because they have a monopoly.
Quasi-monopoly.
There are alternatives. Daily motion is still quite big, for example.
Get real, dude. YouTube is all about mass broadcasting to the widest audience available, not reliable playback and a lack of advertisement, not that Dailymotion has either.
YouTube has lots of competitors in the field of video content: Netflix et al, Twitch, TikTok, DailyMotion, Vimeo, PeerTube etc.
But they have a monopoly on specific content. If you search for a tutorial on how to take apart your specific toaster model, you’ll probably only find that on YouTube. Or if you’ve watched a specific video creator for years and they only upload to YouTube. Or even if your colleague sends you a link to some dumb YouTube video, then you’re not going to ask them for the title, so you can throw it into SepiaSearch.
If you’re part of a younger generation, it’s just not really an option to not use YouTube…
The “products” are not entirely YouTube’s. They are more like a giant mall than a store. You can’t just stop going to the mall because you don’t like a policy they have because everyone else has set up shop in that mall. Unlike stores, if a mall didn’t exist, most of the stores in the mall would just exist elsewhere. YouTube is not the product, they are the gatekeepers.
yeah but if the giant mall didn’t exist than lots of those shops simply wouldn’t have the foot traffic to keep open or exist in the first place.
lots of content creators are also uploading their stuff to paid services like Floatplane, Patreon, CuriosityStream or whatever, do you pay for those?
if not why don’t we just stop pretending what this is about and be honest that you want a service of millions of videos for free and without ads and someone will pay for it? I guess?
I didn’t really care about blocking ads until I started seeing midroll and unskippable ads. If that mall didn’t exist, another one could’ve popped up with less aggressive policies. Sure, there are other malls now, but all my favorite stores are in this one.
and my favorite Ice-cream is ben and jerry’s but only one store carries it now in my town, Guess I will have to go to that store to get it if I really want it, or just not get it, because you know, I am not exactly entitled to have ben and jerry’s ice cream.
Just do yourself a favor and stop using it altogether.
I would, if the people that make the videos would fucking move to another platform. Problem is Youtube has a monopoly, 99% of the viewerbase is on that website, it’s borderline impossible to get any real traction outside of it.
too late, I already use Freetube, I don’t even use a Google account anymore to subscribe to channels. It’s FOSS and entirely out of the browser as a seperate client so they can’t even store cookies. Haven’t seen an ad or even a sponsored chapter in weeks now (native feature). Get wrekt Google.
I used Ublock to block the anti-adblock message, and it worked… so…
uBlock Origin tried that briefly. Google maneuvered around it pretty quickly.
I haven’t seen an ad or Adblock notification on YouTube in years. Methods abound.
They are rolling it out in the same iterative way they roll out all their stuff. It’s not going to everyone at once. Are you just hearing about this recently? Because it’s been tested in larger and larger groups over time.
As I understood it, this rolled out to 100% of users a short while ago. Aside from those with unique blocking mechanisms.
No. They just increased the size of the beta group.
I need to look into this. Gotta try and get away from gmail also.
check it out. Linux client available, or build from source, since it’s entirely free and open source on GitHub. so glad I discovered it (from another lemmy user).
Watching a Youtube video here and there is not an addiction. Google has a monopoly in the area. I’ve switched from Chrome to Firefox, and use both Google and Yandex search, but I can’t really switch away from Gmail, and if I want to watch e.g. a music video or some educational clip or interview, etc. etc. 99.9% of the time Youtube is the only place where I can do that.
I guess where you’re coming from is the annoyance with the endless complaining about Twitter and reddit. But those two, while definitely unhealthily large and living off an addicted userbase, are still not in a position as monopolistic and as unavoidable as Youtube’s.
We’re not on YouTube because of the companie or its service, but for the people who create content on that platform. The problem is there isn’t a viable alternative for either creator or consumer, which basically makes YouTube a monopoly.
Floatplane, CuriosityStream or Nebula or whaever, lots of channels have the same videos on their Patreon. why don’t you use those?
oh right because they are paid services and you don’t want that
As much as I disagree with idea people are entitled to use youtube without compensation, you’re strawmanning them. This isn’t productive.
What i mean that there a lot of interesting alternative on the internet, not necessarily in video format (which is often very time consuming/inefficient with respect to the actual content/time ratio).
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