Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

YouTube's Anti-Adblock and uBlock Origin

andadinosaur.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

731–740 of 781 posts

Re: YouTube's Anti-Adblock and uBlock Origin

#731

Post by snapplebobapple »

jampekka wrote: post #718
snapplebobapple wrote: post #671

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not really. Communism is just the super monopoly on everything by one firm (plus a bunch of kooky religious like beliefs). This subset of VC funding uses is basically abusing external funding to gain market dominance so that one can abuse your customers with product changes that make the product more profitable for you. It's very equivalent to how an oligopolist/monopolist enters new markets using money from the…

Private VCs using their money to control the economy doesn't really sound much like a "system of social organization in which all property is owned by the community and each person contributes and receives according to their ability and needs". Private capitalists controlling the economy is practically the definition of capitalism. And it's bad for society indeed.

Yah, so you are really buying into the kooky religious like beliefs I see. Communism says what you have in quotations above, but it has never, ever worked that way for any serious amount of time. It always devolves into a system where the government owns everything or nearly everything and apportions things base don how it sees fit and that is a monopoly and a monopsony since the government is the sole provider of goods and services and the sole employer. It's a monopoly and it exercises power for the benefit of the bureaucracy that controls said monopoly with lip service to some idealized utopian BS.

That is not the definition of capitalism. The definition of capitalism is a system in which owners of capital control their capital in accord with their interests, which translates into competition because everyone else is also controlling their own capital and labor for their own interests. The natural outcome of this system is monopoly, which does closely resemble all the harms and dead weight loss of communism but, unlike under communism, the government is supposed to be there to stop total control, bust up the monopolies, and restore competition. It did a passable job of this until the Rehnquist supreme court in the 70s and it's time to start back in that pre-rehnquist direction. It's never time for communism.

Re: YouTube's Anti-Adblock and uBlock Origin

#732

Post by kikokikokiko »

HDThoreaun wrote: post #729
kikokikokiko wrote: post #659

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that the amount of free services we got in the last decade is the strongest argument IN FAVOR of dumping. They got there through subsidized services, now they want to fleece everyone, let's see how it goes. My guess is that competitors will arise and gain market share. It's happening to Uber down here in Brazil. The prices are getting too high, Brazilians are migrating to other apps, especially InDrive, a rus…

I strongly believe that, at least for youtube, there are no forthcoming competitors to gain market share. Network effect is too strong, and if even an inkling of that happens the policies that lead to people leaving will be rolled back just enough.

Policies being rolled back are just the market forces adjusting itself in real time. I'm pretty sure the current trend of forcing ads on everyone will not be feasible, and I reaaaaally hope Google keeps pushing people until a peertube-like option can become a reasonable alternative to the current monopoly. I can even see "torrents for YouTube videos" becoming a thing if they keep enshitificating it.

Re: YouTube's Anti-Adblock and uBlock Origin

#733

Post by brnt »

HDThoreaun wrote: post #730
brnt wrote: post #520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the morality of thinking anyone is allowed to fully control my machine? I guess I'm showing my age, but browsers were _user_ agents, once.

No one is forcing you to use youtube. I think the situation is more like the opposite, adblockers are trying to gain control of youtube servers in order to obtain the product without paying.

YouTube isn't forced to serve me anything. If they don't want to, sure, they can go ahead. What _is_ served, I will parse however I see fit.

Re: YouTube's Anti-Adblock and uBlock Origin

#734

Post by HDThoreaun »

brnt wrote: post #733
HDThoreaun wrote: post #730

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one is forcing you to use youtube. I think the situation is more like the opposite, adblockers are trying to gain control of youtube servers in order to obtain the product without paying.

YouTube isn't forced to serve me anything. If they don't want to, sure, they can go ahead. What _is_ served, I will parse however I see fit.

I mean that's exactly what they're doing here... Refusing to serve the video until the ad is watched.

Re: YouTube's Anti-Adblock and uBlock Origin

#735

Post by hellojesus »

sweeter wrote: post #728
hellojesus wrote: post #710

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In every single example up to the parent comment, the end result is a market inequlabrium. Left unchanged, the market can have new entrants that undercut the major player. In this case, any new video playform that has fewer ads could steal market share from youtube. Rumble has entered the market to do just that. Network effects do make this challenging, but that is for the market to decide. The more creators that dua…

I'm sorry to tell you this, but this is a complete fantasy that completely ignores the point that was made a couple of comments above. No one is undercutting Google. Period.and that is the point. They have a death grip on the user base. Just look at Twitter, it completely spit in everyone's faces and even still people cannot get out of its grips on them. The only platforms that have even remotely survived are platfor…

> Just look at Twitter, it completely spit in everyone's faces and even still people cannot get out of its grips on them.

People can get out of them. People refuse to get out of them. Likely this is because YouTube and Twitter are still the most efficient platforms regardless of their regressions.

I used to have FB. Now I don't. I used to have Twitter. Now I don't. I used to have Android. Now I have Grapheneos. I used to use gmail. Now I use Fastmail, Mailcow, and shared hosting. I used to have Instagram. Now I don't.

You can decide to not be a user of a service. You can build your own! Or more easily, you can migrate to a competitor.

All of this clamoring for more regulation is nonsense. We have a market that can solve these problems. But markets work by votes. The path is harder if you take the road less traveled.

Re: YouTube's Anti-Adblock and uBlock Origin

#736

Post by tornato7 »

Aerbil313 wrote: post #632
seydor wrote: post #571

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the platforms that were free and distributed, i.e. torrents became illegal. Youtube started with a ton of illegal stuff (and still contains tons of illegal stuff, but mostly in languages/regions that "don't matter"). Internet speeds are maturing, and maybe it is time to try again a self-hosted or distributed model. The hard part is to put ads in it, because ad-supported is traditionally the best medium for videos…

Wait a minute… What about a distributed model, but with a distributed ad network which pays people and/or the project? Would it be enough to cover internet service provider costs of average folks?

I serve about 60TB/mo from my house (100K+ YouTube videos equivalent) and pay $100/mo for internet. So $0.001 per video would cover my ISP costs (not including server and storage infra).

My biggest issue with running a service like this would be the possibility that I'm all of a sudden serving CP from my house because the distributed model doesn't have a good moderation scheme.

Moderation tends to be the bottleneck with distributed services right now. The infrastructure is there.

Re: YouTube's Anti-Adblock and uBlock Origin

#737

Post by rstuart4133 »

chii wrote: post #587
buggeryorkshire wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not Twitch, video is encoded in advance in various formats for different devices. Embedding the ads into the stream is pretty difficult.

It's not uncharted territory. It's just more expensive comput-wise, and I expect google to make that calculation to conclude it's not worth the cost yet. But compute costs could drop, and change the equation.

It's not just compute. It's storage, and network costs too. Right now they can cache the ads and video next to the user. But Google likes to target ads at particular users, in fact they formalised this in FLoC. In FLoC (since renamed to Topics API and now shipping in Chrome) groupings of users are called cohorts. There are lots of cohorts, eg: male / female, baby boomer / gen-Y / gen-Z / millennial, parents / single, religious / secular, conservative / liberal, income range. An ad might be targeted at a specific combination, such as conservative male parent. But there are a lot of possible combinations. Not 10's but 100's. This means you have to produce version of the video that targets each possible combination, and that in turn means your storage, network and computer costs balloon by 100's.

It's a big number. They avoid it by having the browser doing the mixing. I can't see that changing.

Re: YouTube's Anti-Adblock and uBlock Origin

#738

Post by duttonw »

crote wrote: post #662
philistine wrote: post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And no, I won't pay for YouTube Premium — because that wasn't part of the deal either. There's also the ridiculous fact it is literally impossible to pay to remove the ads without also getting the horrible Youtube Music service.

Heck, it won't even remove all ads. A significant number of creators have sponsor segments, and YT Premium won't get rid of that. Why would I pay the Premium tax to get rid of some of the ads?

the plugin "SponsorBlock for youtube" does a good job of using user submitting skipping of said content, people can even mark certain parts as 'filler' and you can also skip those also.

Re: YouTube's Anti-Adblock and uBlock Origin

#739

Post by firexcy »

JohnTHaller wrote: post #337
crop_rotation wrote: post #9

Apart from the Youtube stuff, the post also highlights something else, entitlement towards free services like uBlock origin. > It’s one thing to play cat and mouse with YouTube. It’s quite another to deal with a wave of angry users. > And then one of the moderators actually deleted their Reddit account. “The ID in the post wasn’t updated because my mother was hospitalized,” they said. It’s sad to see them leave becau…

It's unfortunately been this way for a long, long time. Though it does seem to have gotten more frequent in recent years. I've been running PortableApps.com for nearly 2 decades and, in that time, I've been sworn at, harassed, doxxed, received death and rape threats, etc. My personal favorite was a user who accused me of donating a kidney to my father because I thought I was better than everyone else and to try to ga…

Thank you for your work at PortableApps. Windows isn’t my daily OS but when I get my hands on it from time to time, the apps you pack are what keep me sane.
Post reply on HN