YouTube is currently experimenting with server-side ad injection. This means that the ad is being added directly into the video stream.

This breaks sponsorblock since now all timestamps are offset by the ad times.

For now, I set up the server to detect when someone is submitting from a browser with this happening and rejecting the submission to prevent the database from getting filled with incorrect submissions.

  • Björn Tantau@swg-empire.de
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    1 year ago

    I wonder how that will interoperate with timestamps provided by users in comments or by the video creator themselves. Maybe those can be used to detect inserted ads.

    • ayaya@lemdro.id
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      1 year ago

      I have actually been seeing some timestamps that are completely wrong lately, maybe this is why.

    • Baggins [he/him]@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      The server must have to send some metadata to the client telling when it’s running an ad because there are other things that need to happen client side during that like adjusting of the time or making the ad clickable

  • I Cast Fist@programming.dev
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    1 year ago

    I miss the times when ads were just annoying gifs on the left or right side of a web page. Then they evolved, abusing javascript, to become pop ups that hid the URL bar and opened 3 dozen different pop ups while you didn’t close the mother popup. Then they started clickjacking: that close ad button? Just opens another ad. Ad infinitum.

    Now, effectively editing the video to add an ad somewhere instead of serving it as a side file. The advertising industry as a whole feels like the absolute worst villains at a personal level, because they want to target you individually.

    • ssj2marx@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      Google ads were originally a panacea for really bad popups of the early 2000s. Google had a strict list of dos and don’ts, and ad revenues were high enough that most websites only ran one or two.

  • jesterkun@midwest.social
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    1 year ago

    Genuinely I’d be fine if someone made a thing that when an ad started a black overlay would go up and the spund would be muted.

  • d-RLY?@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    At least it should still work with the hard coded sponsor spots that are actually part of the videos (like the “brought to you by Manscaped” or whatever).

    • Darkassassin07@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      Only if the ads are a fixed length and always in the same place for each playback of the same video.

      Inserting ads of various lengths in varying places throughout the video will alter all the time stamps for every playback.

      The 5th minute of the video might happen 5min after starting playback, or it could be 5min+a 2min ad break after starting. This could change from playback to playback; so basing ad/sponsor blocking on timestamps becomes entirely useless.

  • robber@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    Step by step, it seems, YouTube is evolving into something that has previously been called TV.

    • Ibuthyr@discuss.tchncs.de
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      1 year ago

      If they carry on with this bullshit I’ll be dropping them entirely for Nebula. I quite enjoy Nebula so far.

      • Muffi@programming.dev
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        1 year ago

        I really like the idea of Nebula, but the way they market themselves as “creator owned” without being an actual workers cooperative seems deceitful (still much better than YouTube, though!)

      • ssm@lemmy.sdf.org
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        1 year ago

        Support a federated open source peertube instance instead of proprietary centralized paywalled garbage like Nebula. Just because the shittification isn’t there yet doesn’t mean it won’t be as soon as it gets a bit more popular.

        • Ibuthyr@discuss.tchncs.de
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          1 year ago

          I firmly believe that quality content needs to be paid somehow. And I’d rather not have that ad based. But I’m open to other platforms too. I’m just giving this a go and there’s some good content on Nebula.

      • WallEx@feddit.de
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        1 year ago

        There is quite a variety of services like that, curiosity stream is another one.

        • Ibuthyr@discuss.tchncs.de
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          1 year ago

          I guess NotJustBikes did a good job on advertising Nebula. Thanks for the recommendation, I’m in the mood for trying alternatives. I’m even in the mood to give Linux another go because of all the bullshit MS is pulling off again.

          • WallEx@feddit.de
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            1 year ago

            Same Herr. Notjustbikes is amazing. Also on track to try Linux again, since gaming is becoming more and more of a thing

  • recursive_recursion [they/them]@programming.dev
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    1 year ago

    I wonder if this is where AI might be useful where it’s used to filter out all of the megacorp ads, popups, and other random garbage?

    • train LLMs on megacorp content and use it to filter out results
      • sponsorblock adds this as a toggleable option just like the “skip segment” UI video overlay button
    • ReveredOxygen@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      They should still have to indicate that it’s an ad, the problem is that they’ll probably block you from seeking past an ad

      • navordar@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        Even when you don’t know the language, you can judge if something is an ad just by an overly excited tone of voice. I wonder if someone has tried writing an ad detection algorithm already. It would still be a lot heavier on resources than SponsorBlock.

        • PlexSheep@infosec.pub
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          1 year ago

          Often times that’s the case but some ads also use other tones. Trying to make a super emotional and sad story or something.

    • FrostyCaveman@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      That would be cool.

      I guess my AMD Bulldozer TV PC is gonna have to go in the ewaste bin though. Its already stretched to its limit running Linux Mint, Firefox, uBlock Origin and Sponsorblock as it is

  • casmael@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    Wow that’s very annoying. What does this mean for the future of adblocking?

    • Hana@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      Sponsorblock “just” needs to transition from timestamps to timestamps + image hash. Not easy, but not impossible.

      • elxeno@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        This one might be harder, if YT just sends the ad like it was part of the video file, generating it on the fly, it’s a lot harder to detect, and probably not too hard for them to do, but breaking timestamps is pretty bad for some types of videos, like tutorials.

      • bountygiver [any]@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        it would require government intervention. Where a regulation must declare that ads must clearly be labelled as ads, so that adjustments can be made by detecting when is the ad segment happening.

        • ssj2marx@lemmy.ml
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          1 year ago

          Sometime before the end of this decade I think we’re going to see the opposite - regulation that makes blocking ads illegal in the same way the DMCA makes cracking copyright protection illegal. They’ll package it with some kind of anti-CP thing and then call all the people who oppose the bill pedos.

      • Lianodel@ttrpg.network
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        1 year ago

        The last time Google pulled out all the stops to fight ad blockers, I had to update uBlock Origin every now and then until the whole thing passed. That’s all.

        So I’m not worried. But I am amused that they keep making ads more obnoxious, which pushes more people to use ad blockers. I didn’t even use sponsorblock until a particularly egregious bit of native advertising. They could probably gain ground by just making ads less irritating, but they absolutely will not.

        • gjghkk@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          1 year ago

          Capitalism is in the end, fighting for monopoly. They rather lose money in foreseeable future, and probably ever, than allow adblockers do their thing for small user-base. Because they want max. control. I can only assume companies that do not go to arms race with their consumers are thee ones that aren’t public traded companies.

          • Lianodel@ttrpg.network
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            1 year ago

            It might even be simpler than that. Capitalism just doesn’t care past the next quarter. And when ownership is disconnected from labor or even from customer, than it’s just a really rudimentary collective intelligence. The shareholders just want the line to go up, and everyone in the corporate structure is accountable to the shareholders, so they all do their part, big or little, to make that happen. It completely dispenses with personal responsibility, whether for negative externalities, direct harm, or even the future as close as months from now.

  • LimeWire@lemmy.cafe
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    1 year ago

    I’m kinda surprised they haven’t done this already. Twitch has been doing this for a while now, and the only reliable way around it is to use a proxy in a country that Twitch doesn’t run ads in.

    • gjghkk@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      1 year ago

      I think Twitch has gone to shit lately, because of their decisions, but I don’t know the numbers. Do you have any info about this?

      • LimeWire@lemmy.cafe
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        1 year ago

        Oh, it’s been pretty crap for a while now. I constantly see viewers complain about AIDS ads and even content creators feel poorly about them.

        Looking at https://twitchtracker.com/statistics shows a relatively flat viewership base. Since January, they’ve seen a decrease of close to 15% viewers and concurrent channels. It appears that they had a large increase in viewers and channels in 2020, probably due to Covid, and since then they have been in decline.

    • NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip
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      1 year ago

      Video length is incredibly important to The Algorithm and a LOT of content creators time their videos to the second. Taking away control of that (even if the end result ins the exact same length) is going to ruffle a lot of feathers and lead to a lot of people who want to “be a champion for the viewers who should like, comment, and subscribe and use my referral code for war thunder” as a result.

  • FreudianCafe@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    If they are part of the video you cant just skip them like any other part of the video, right?

    • aCosmicWave@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      Different users would see unique ads. So your ad could be 12 seconds long while my ad is 30 seconds long. A timestamp based skip would no longer work universally.

    • Thorny_Insight@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      That’s what SponsorBlock already does. It however doesn’t detect the sponsor but instead it jumps over a part of the video marked with timestamp but with different people seeing different lenght ads, these timestamps no-longer match.

  • ssm@lemmy.sdf.org
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    1 year ago

    Switch to 3rd party clients like pipe-viewer (doesn’t need api key), it’s less likely (though I suppose not impossible) google would roll this out against 3rd party clients as they can’t track you for targeted ads.

    To people thinking of joining Nebula because their marketing team/shills are currently spamming this thread, see peertube (federated like lemmy, open source)

    • refalo@programming.dev
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      1 year ago

      While I think federated services are a good idea in theory, the unfortunate reality is that they’re also privacy and GDPR minefields that nobody has figured out how to make legal yet.

    • Bongles@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      To people thinking of joining Nebula because their marketing team/shills are currently spamming this thread, see peertube (federated like lemmy, open source)

      Peertube is fine, but like lemmy (but worse), there’s barely anything there. Nebula at least got creators from YouTube to make ad-free versions for Nebula. If the channels that a person are subscribed to don’t exist in Peertube, that’s not an appealing alternative for them.

    • Darkassassin07@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      If they are injecting ads into the actual video stream; it won’t matter what client you use. You request the next video chunk for playback and get served a chunk filled with advertising video instead. The clients won’t be able to tell the difference unless they start analyzing the actual video frames. That’s an entirely server-side decision that clients can’t bypass.

    • ssj2marx@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      People will say, “but then how could a website like YouTube exit at all?”

      To which I say that we should retvrn to sharing funny videos via long email chains.

      • mindbleach@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        See Flash websites ripping each other off for five years on either side of Youtube’s introduction.

        See Bittorrent moving more video than Netflix until like 2012.

        See twenty years of web-based P2P experiments. Weirdos with fat hard drives (hi) will always be happy to seed.

        Or - crazy thought - services could cost money. It would not take much. Youtube’s not getting ten bucks each time you watch a video. Bandwidth and storage keep getting cheaper. Nor are they paying for content, unlike Netflix and so on, and those fuckers are also considering ads.

        • ssj2marx@lemmy.ml
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          1 year ago

          I’ve got no problem paying money for a service that’s worth it. I still buy games on Steam even though I know how to pirate them because Valve’s service is so goddamn convenient it beats piracy in many ways.

          Netflix used to be that good, and when YouTube Red rolled out I bought a year of it. But things have deteriorated significantly since then and the price has only gone up.

    • empireOfLove2@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      1 year ago

      Do you use Firefox?
      because Google intentionally nerfs loading performance on any non-Chrome browsers.

      I usually find if startup buffering takes more than 2-3 seconds on my home Internet, just refreshing the page magically makes it go away.

      • brb@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        Yeah Firefox + Ublock Origin. It buffers for me indefinitely and the only way to fix it is to skip ahead 10 or so seconds. If I then go back 10 seconds it starts buffering again.

  • matto@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    Also, if the ads where in different parts of the video every time, it would not be possible to use SponsorBlock for them :(

    • circasurvivor@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      How does a client know when to block the user from fast forwarding to prevent them from skipping over the ad? Could something like sponsorblock detect that to know where the ads are placed?