631–640 of 659 posts
I've been MITM'ing my traffic to, among other things, strip ads and rewrite pages with things like custom CSS, ever since I discovered The Proxomitron over 2 decades ago. It does tend to get me profiled as a "bot" by CloudFlare and such, but there are not-so-trivial ways around that too. It also shows why things like remote attestation are hazardous for user freedom.
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If you struggle with 2MB payload, how do you expect to stream video, which is usually hundreds of megabytes? You’re right about 2MB being a large payload in some network configurations, but I think it isn’t that big in Youtube’s context.
If I were to keep my insurance policy number in my car in the form of 9 bricks with a number on each one, I honestly wouldn't notice. The car would seem to drive exactly the same. There are even plenty of dead spaces to hide them where they wouldn't even noticeably consume cargo space. Yet for some reason I will not place 9 unneccessary bricks in my car, nor tolerate them if I discovered them already there. Is the "s…
Makes it kind of hard to digest, impressive as the material is
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Enjoy the tiny hole in your wallet? Weird flex. I enjoy the same benefits using uBlock origin and yt-dl. And it didn't take any tinfoil :)
Thank you for reminding me that yt-dlp also works with youtube music (didn't think of that). I just tried to list all the available formats of a song there: ID EXT RESOLUTION FPS CH │ FILESIZE TBR PROTO │ VCODEC VBR ACODEC ABR ASR MORE INFO ──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── 233 mp4 audio only │ m3u8 │ audio only unknown Default 234 mp4 aud…
Both AAC and Opus fix some of MP3's inherent design problems (like imperfect handling of short sharp transients no matter how much bitrate you throw at it), so the only reason to continue using MP3 is for compatibility with old devices.
Since downloads aren't an official part of Youtube's offering, they don't have to care about old offline-only hardware players only supporting MP3, either and anything that's modern enough to still support either a Youtube app or the website will also support either AAC or Opus.
> the bit rate is not very high
There's also a high bitrate available, but only for subscribers.
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The price they pay per impression is based on ad revenue, not pie in the sky...
Do not confuse Google's revenue with market rate of an impression on YouTube. More revenue for Google does not equal higher pay for content creators. Google pays them the minimum to keep them on the platform. And that minimum is tiny since their platform is essentially a monopoly.
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And many of us don't care all that much about ads, we're mostly opposed to tracking.
I’m honestly not asking to be obtuse, but what difference does this “tracking” actually make? I block ads on the web because they’re so obnoxious and usually so utterly stupid (One weird trick to blast belly fat!!”), but I couldn’t care less if an ad profile exists on me or on some GUID tied to a browser I use[1]. What’s your pitch to someone who doesn’t care, that they should care? [1] also, if tracking can help to…
They still haven't appeared. When I consider what I trade for the ads I'm getting now, it's no where near good enough. My data is valuable and Google et al just aren't offering enough in return. The only place I ever see decent ads is on Google's search page.
I think the reason we see shitty ads like the belly fat ones, is because Google isn't actually trying to serve us first. Their main concern is ad dollars. So even though Google knows you watched a video on changing guitar strings an hour ago and now you are standing in a Guitar Center, instead of showing you an ad for guitar strings, you're going to see an ad for belly fat because that advertiser is willing to pay a fraction of a penny more.
So to answer your question about why you should care - it's because you are greatly overpaying for the service you are getting. Of course there are other reasons too - avoiding ads containing malware is one. Protecting yourself from tyrants is another. If you are socially or politically active, you may not trust that the government now or in the future can resist grabbing the data that shows you support abortion rights or attended a BLM or LGBTQ march or were part of the crowd on Jan 6.
Let me ask you this - if you learned the tracking is actually a person on the other side of the planet watching in real time, everything you do online, every conversation you have, every site you visit, and mix it with the data they can get from your phone (location, phone calls, music preferences, who you are spending time with, etc...) and they manually log it into a database, would that change how you feel about it?
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"megacorps have bad customer support" is a wildly different assertion than "megacorps are indistinguishable from government"
Ask the next person who comes on here begging for someone to unlock their account or restore their data so that they can make payroll.
"Does entity X have a monopoly on violence?" If yes, they are a government. If no, they are not.
Whether X is nice or mean, important or unimportant, is irrelevant.
I've been MITM'ing my traffic to, among other things, strip ads and rewrite pages with things like custom CSS, ever since I discovered The Proxomitron over 2 decades ago. It does tend to get me profiled as a "bot" by CloudFlare and such, but there are not-so-trivial ways around that too. It also shows why things like remote attestation are hazardous for user freedom.
Network level ad-blocking like Privoxy and pi-hole have so many downsides like they can't handle inline adverts. My pi4 pi-hole is unplugged right now because it just didn't work well. After hours wasted trying to make it work with all the services, I've thrown in the towel. The time involved is just not worth it for a home network. What works are browser based ad-blockers and app patchers like ReVanced. As my saving…
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By the same logic, it's irresponsible to watch ads and not buy the products. That's after all what keeps the wheels turning. I remember I had this discussion after a school political debate in the 90s, with (adult) actual politicians. Textbooks at the time were not publicly funded, and naturally the textbook companies jacked up prices for their captive audience forced to buy their books. This one party had the "brill…
None. The textbooks would then be subsidized by McDonalds' advertising budget, reducing their profit margin. It's the same as blocking YouTube ads; Google still pays the creator as if you had watched the ads, so your video playback is being subsidized by Google's ad business profits. When you choose not to block ads, you aren't "supporting creators", you are supporting Google shareholders.
Google's shareholders might, for a while, for the sake of "control". But either way, it's not sustainable. The anti-adblockers are right about that part. They're just wrong that watching ads without spending a ton of money on the products help matters.