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
this post was submitted on 21 Nov 2023
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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.
Most of the time, the commercial's volume is much louder than whatever content you are watching. So ya, I'd rather have nothing...
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.
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.
I use Firefox+uBO, and I would stop using it, but I'm not convinced that most users would. Too many people fear the slightest bit inconvenience or change.
I'm just gonna use whatever workaround someone develops for it. It'll always be possible to spoof whatever bullshit they require, except:
I want to force them to actually make YouTube a paid service to get rid of "freeloaders". That's the only way to actually "solve" this for YouTube.
And when they do this, it'll collapse, and I, along with many others, will be forced to stop using it. And that's when real change will happen, because then the masses will be behind it.
If you actually stop using it, then YouTube won, in my opinion. They got rid of the freeloaders but can keep their shitty business model.
I've thought about this before. If YouTube collapsed, it would be a good thing because someone would develop something to fill the void, or we'd all start using Peertube or something
That's okay. My argument is not against this, it's against the "hahaha" part, as if it was such a ridiculous fantasy to stop using YouTube if you already are trying so hard to avoid the inconveniences of their current ad system.
That doesn't change my reaction one bit.
I don't want to change your reaction, that's in the past anyway. You do you, I guess.
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.
Pointing fingers now after the fact is not productive. We need to educate people and lead them to alternatives like Firefox. Blaming people is not going to do that.
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I've been thinking about this a lot recently. In a lot of your more famous cyberpunk stories, like Snow Crash, the world itself is a violent dystopia, and the internet is depicted as evolving into something both intensely interesting, but also very chaotic and filled with hostile people looking to scam or exploit you. The contemporary internet is moving towards an extreme degree of corporate regulation and control. Its not chaotic - it's intensely ordered. It's not interesting - the content is boiled down to the lowest common denominator and recycled ad-nauseam. Companies like Google are now trying to take the current internet, which has tragically become like a gated community with billboards, into something even worse than that. I imagine the next step will be all out war on the only non-Chromium based browser of note left: Firefox. After Firefox is gone, Google will own the internet as we know it.
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.
In other words (as I agree with you): they don't generate direct profit for YouTube, but they generate value, or the long-term ability to generate profit.
And a long-term stable business should focus first and foremost on its value, because predatory profiting (i.e. profit obtained in a way that reduces the platform's value) doesn't last very long.
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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.
Yeah, as long as it is a big enough problem on the internet, you will have at least one nerd trying to find a way to circumvent it.
Give them time.
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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.
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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.
I said that i found different articles blindly copying. But i did not say 404 did so ;)
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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.
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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.
i too have a bridge to sell
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...
The Enshittification* of everything continues
F**k you, YouTube/Google! F*******k you! 🖕🖕🖕
Oh let me splain that, it's not what you think silly!
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