Technology

Google seems bound and determined to destroy itself trying to escalate it's profits from "staggering" to "colossal." The search is so bad AI is actually better, and that's saying something. And now they want to enshittify YouTube? Okay. I'm sure it won't die right away, but this will be one of the thousands cuts.

I don't understand why this needs AI. I'm guessing this is just more marketing nonsense. You can already see the "most engaged moments" by simply hovering over the timeline.

Once they finally lock down the player so it's impossible to block or skip ads, I look forward to coding a script which screen records each video on my sub list, feeds each video with ads into a purpose made classifier model which labels the ads, stitches out of ads with FFmpeg, and then uploads them to my jellyfin server.

I think it's funny that Google thinks putting an ad in when someone is most engaged with a video will be an effective advertising technique. So someone's going to be absorbed in the video, be presented with an ad while engaging with it and be happy that they were interrupted to be served an ad? Sounds like a great formula for pissing off your users.

Willing to bet uBlock Origin will make it so I never see a single one of these ads.

Firefox forever.

Youtube has ads?

Shit like this is honestly why the FCC needs authority to regulate things on the US internet.

There was a time in the long past where television networks were forced to normalize audio so that commercials weren't so much louder than the shows, which was happening for a while.

The internet just continues to be a fucking free-for-all of all the worst and most anti-user-centric ideas that exist. Just plying every bad idea that makes the internet difficult to use.

Wow. Fuuuuuuuuck YouTube.

Also, Firefox plus Ublock Origin makes ads on YouTube go away.

Why use Gemini and AI when they already have a feature in youtube where they show the "most watched moments"..?

Firefox X UBlock Origin X Sponsorblock X Bring Back Youtube Dislike. Thank fuck for those Devs.

I see the contest to find the world's biggest cunt continues unabated.

What will they think of next week?

I would argue that this will be far more obnoxious than television commercials. YouTube already places ads directly in the midst of sentences or even words. At least television usually cut to commercial after the line was finished.

This will annoy me to the point of dropping YouTube altogether.

I used to waste a lot of time on YouTube Shorts, which is the absolute worst way to waste time. I finally deleted the YouTube app completely, and aside from a couple days of withdrawals, it’s been all positive.

I mean, I don’t know anything about the latest video games or movies anymore. And I have to rely on my family to send me Ryan George skits. But that stuff wasn’t actually making my life better, it was just filling it up.

If I want to watch something interesting on my phone, I’ve got Nebula. It doesn’t have all the same content, but it turns out that doesn’t matter a lot when you just want to be entertained/educated for a couple minutes. (It also doesn’t have a comment section. Or Shorts. So yeah, unequivocally better.)

How to ensure huge swathes of the population will never ever buy your product out of sheer spite

That's definitely a different ML classifier than what Gemini is currently doing. Is Google just using the brand Gemini to mean "any ML system provided by Google"?

Because nothing endears your platform to users like throwing ads in their face during the high points of whatever they are watching.

We might need a few reforms to our economic model where the stupidest sociopaths alive get lots of money and teachers and nurses do not.

Advertisers are invasive like zebra mussels.

Enshittification

Because advertisers want viewers to associate their products and brand with feelings of annoyance, aggravation, and frustration?

Adguard blocks YouTube ads on my laptop.

Smarttube blocks YT ads on my TV.

Revanced allows me to block YT ads on my phone.

But yeah, keep pushing adverts /s