Youtube General thread (formerly Youtube Censorship discussion thread)

[85CentSoda]

Why the fuck are they doing this? Why is Google waging total war on 1% (or whatever) of their users, who are either going to find a way around ads, or just leave?

I head someone say the following about video game piracy, and I think it makes some sense and applies. The actual portion of the userbase that pirates (or in this case blocks ads) is tiny, but it triggers some part of executives' brains that makes them get legitimately angry because the illegitimate users are STEALING from them personally (some kind of ape brain thing I think) and just think of all the hard work they put into that product/service! So more or less what goes through executive minds is the visceral reaction of getting stolen from, and often times they get even angrier because not only has the illegitimate user stolen from them by pirating/using adblock, but they get additionally angry because you broke the rules (an especially common feeling in women). You didn't play fair by the rules of the nanny state and that makes them feel uncomfortable because you're now going against every social more that they hold sacred.

 

[Celebrate Nite]

I head someone say the following about video game piracy, and I think it makes some sense and applies. The actual portion of the userbase that pirates (or in this case blocks ads) is tiny, but it triggers some part of executives' brains that makes them get legitimately angry because the illegitimate users are STEALING from them personally (some kind of ape brain thing I think) and just think of all the hard work they put into that product/service! So more or less what goes through executive minds is the visceral reaction of getting stolen from, and often times they get even angrier because not only has the illegitimate user stolen from them by pirating/using adblock, but they get additionally angry because you broke the rules (an especially common feeling in women). You didn't play fair by the rules of the nanny state and that makes them feel uncomfortable because you're now going against every social more that they hold sacred.

if true, that sounds really fucking petty

 

[ToroidalBoat]

the illegitimate users are STEALING from them personally (some kind of ape brain thing I think)

if true, that sounds really fucking petty

It's not even "stealing" either -- it is filtering out parts of a service you don't like, or not watching ads on TV. And in any case, there's no laws AFAIK that say you have to watch ads. At least for now. Also site TOS that demand no ad blockers aren't always valid.

 

[Osama Bin Laden]

It looks they are upping the faggotry. Link. Archive.

View attachment 6081646

i hate this company so fucking much

 

[TheHarbinger]

It's not even "stealing" either -- it is filtering out parts of a service you don't like, or not watching ads on TV. And in any case, there's no laws AFAIK that say you have to watch ads. At least for now. Also site TOS that demand no ad blockers aren't always valid.

Advertising is stealing. They are literally polluting every aspect of our lives with commercial for trash products. And the entire advertising industry is paid for by consumers because the marketing cost are built into the products. Wasting hundreds if not thousands of hours of your life every year with billboards and spam phone calls and video commercials for stuff that almost no one is interested in anyways. Using bandwidth that we are paying for as well.

 

[Gravityqueen4life]

companies using botting/AI to gain likes and positive comments are so obvious. hell, i think some of them are just pajeets that cant speak English, so they get a few lines what to type and spam the livestream and comment section.

 

[ToroidalBoat]

I don't think I'm imagining it: more and more embedded YT vids really are being disabled from playback on other sites.

Advertising is stealing.

I haven't thought of it that way before. Hopefully they never invent ads inserted into dreams via gamma radiation (like in Futurama).

 

[whogoesthere]

Niggercattle is as niggercattle does. I let everyone I know and meet be informed of Invidious and you would be surprised how just a simple pitch of "Youtube but with no ads or tracking" goes a long way. At this point, I stopped caring about those kinds of people you described, I would rather join in on the fun and try to sucker these morons out of their money as well. A fool and their dollar will soon be separated, nothing will ever change that.

Strangely, I have had more effect getting people to block ads by leaning heavily into the block tracking thing rather than the ads. People know the big bad news people said tracking is bad, so they are not at least willing to hear that.

Too many of them are A-OK with adverts and brainwashing their opinions to match state sponsored group think, so bring up security and tracking, they know those words.

Got to reprogram them back.

 

[One Quick Post]

I'm interested in what the end game is here because I find it hard to believe that server side re-encoding videos on demand to inject an ad in a way that has no insertion point that can be filtered for could even be profitable. Millions of views per day, each with a customized ad baked into the video on demand, at that point you've basically gotta be costing them more money than just watching the video normally with adblock, don't you? The compute time for thousands upon thousands of videos being opened every second, all having to go through re-encoding (then again transcoding into all the different quality options) has to be fucking enormous.

Like, any way other than that has something that can be filtered. Even then, if you can't avoid the ad being injected into the video then surely you can filter whatever's forcing you to watch it and not just skip it. Whatever method used, someone's gonna find a way, at some point there's something forcing you to sit there and watch that ad and that's something that can be manipulated. So it's all a big, expensive "fuck you" to anyone who uses an adblocker for a little while, just because they can. It really does feel personal to someone at Google because there's no way all this could even be worth it.

 

[Faceless Whore]

It or another service could be used to mark when the ads start and then either bookmark the time or just cut the ad out using ffmpeg.

As I said in my post this won't work if random ads of random lengths are injected at random places each time the video is viewed or downloaded, which is what's being described.

 

[Fcret]

Hopefully they never invent ads inserted into dreams via gamma radiation (like in Futurama).

The most unrealistic aspect of Futurama's dystopian ad shit was that the ads were actually interesting and made you want to buy products. In reality we'll just get AI jeetslop ads beamed directly into our brains.

 

[Faceless Whore]

Using Piped and Invidious always works.

That's interesting. I haven't encountered any yet myself, but I don't watch on YouTube's website anymore. I either download via yt-dlp or watch on FreeTube. I'll have to check my more recently downloaded videos and see if there's any ads.

Maybe they're only doing it for the website and official clients? The whole point of advertisements is for users to see them, and a video downloaded by tools like yt-dlp isn't guaranteed to be viewed, at least not right away. For example if it's being archived. (Invidious and YouTube.js APIs could also be used for archiving, so they don't guarantee views either.) Advertisers want to know with certainty their ads are being seen, and the only way YouTube can reasonably guarantee that is with their official players.
That's the only explanation I can think of for why it isn't happening outside YouTube's players. Hopefully YouTube considers forced ad views in its official apps good enough and won't try to fuck over alternatives. I imagine most people are lazy NPCniggers that won't bother switching to Invidious or something.

In fact people could protest by downloading videos in mass without watching them, just download and delete over and over again. If YouTube injects ads they won't be viewed, so if YouTube tries to count the injected ads in a downloaded video they will be false views, and that will piss advertisers off. My god this could be the solution.

 

[30+GameOvers]

I'm interested in what the end game is here because I find it hard to believe that server side re-encoding videos on demand to inject an ad in a way that has no insertion point that can be filtered for could even be profitable. Millions of views per day, each with a customized ad baked into the video on demand, at that point you've basically gotta be costing them more money than just watching the video normally with adblock, don't you? The compute time for thousands upon thousands of videos being opened every second, all having to go through re-encoding (then again transcoding into all the different quality options) has to be fucking enormous.

Like, any way other than that has something that can be filtered. Even then, if you can't avoid the ad being injected into the video then surely you can filter whatever's forcing you to watch it and not just skip it. Whatever method used, someone's gonna find a way, at some point there's something forcing you to sit there and watch that ad and that's something that can be manipulated. So it's all a big, expensive "fuck you" to anyone who uses an adblocker for a little while, just because they can. It really does feel personal to someone at Google because there's no way all this could even be worth it.

You're assuming they have a plan at all. Google/Youtube has no competition, so they can throw money at any potential problem they want and still walk away in the black. Them trying to force ads down everybody's throats is not that different from them trying to kill sites like Invidious, they don't like it when there are alternatives or people avoid their walled garden.
My bet is that they're able to seemingly focus so much on this issue because they have some sort of task force specifically aimed at killing invidious, adblockers and ect. so they're always a nuisance...until people make a few corrections or changes and it's back to square one, repeat.
If Youtube is able to inject ads directly into videos and that can't be easily be avoided or prevented by the likes of yt-dlp or online downloaders then I'm more worried about the implications this could have: What would stop somebody from injecting malicious code into the video files themselves or even illegal material? We've seen this with images before where a bad actor can embed CP or other nasty things into the very pixels of the image and they're very hard to spot even for those looking for them, I'm more worried about this technology becoming more mainstream and accessible than anything else.

 

[Faceless Whore]

The compute time for thousands upon thousands of videos being opened every second, all having to go through re-encoding (then again transcoding into all the different quality options) has to be fucking enormous.

I'm not an expert but I'm pretty sure it doesn't require re-encoding. I use LosslessCut to make clips and it can merge multiple clips together into a single video without encoding. I would assume as long as the ads are of the same codec, same resolution, etc. they can just be spliced in without much effort. Just stop sending video data at a keyframe, send ad video data, continue video from next keyframe.

I'm more worried about the implications this could have: What would stop somebody from injecting malicious code into the video files themselves or even illegal material? We've seen this with images before where a bad actor can embed CP or other nasty things into the very pixels of the image and they're very hard to spot even for those looking for them, I'm more worried about this technology becoming more mainstream and accessible than anything else.

Injecting things into video and other data formats is nothing new, that's been around forever. Videos uploaded to YouTube are re-encoded (the video you watch isn't the video that was uploaded) so I doubt anything malicious could make it through. Don't know if the same could be said for other sites like Odysee, Rumble, etc.

As for "embedding" CP I don't know exactly what you mean by that. I'm not sure any precise pixel data would survive re-encoding but I could be wrong.
Maybe not what you're referring to, but one guy did create a data encoder that allows arbitrary data to be stored as video that would survive encoding. CP could be stored in this fashion and YouTube would be none the wiser unless someone decoded it, and that's assuming they even know it was encoded using that specific tool. The data could also be encrypted first to prevent anyone else from knowing what it is.

 

[postfeetpls]

I'm not going to watch ads and I'm not going to pay for premium no matter what they do. Doesn't matter if premium is 50cents, it's the principle. I sometimes watch youtube videos on the shitter or for 30mins at night, will stop doing it in an instant if ads are forced. Can watch whatever random goyslop there is on rumble or odysee or whatever for a few minutes, or nothing at all.

Most of all I hate the normies who not only take it with a smile but are actively encouraging it. "of course adblocking is theft" "well it's so cheap, if you split it with a few friends is basically free" "I'm paying, why won't you?" "just pay for it it's nothing" NO NO NO NO FUCK YOU FUCK GOOGLE FUCK NORMALNIGGERS

If I won a billion dollars tomorrow I'd invest it all in adblock developers out of sheer spite. Still not buying youtube premium.

 

[Fireman Sam]

That's interesting. I haven't encountered any yet myself, but I don't watch on YouTube's website anymore. I either download via yt-dlp or watch on FreeTube. I'll have to check my more recently downloaded videos and see if there's any ads.

Youtube likes to try and break these sites from time to time, but when they work they're almost as fast (sometimes faster) than Youtube itself, there's sometimes buffering issues but generally the user experience on these alternative youtube sites are pretty decent.
I'd rather wait a little bit longer for a video to buffer than have that video be interrupted by FORCED ads.

In fact people could protest by downloading videos in mass without watching them, just download and delete over and over again. If YouTube injects ads they won't be viewed, so if YouTube tries to count the injected ads in a downloaded video they will be false views, and that will piss advertisers off. My god this could be the solution.

Could give it the Adnauseum treatment. If it was possible to do this through some sort of automated exploit or plugin and done en masse by many people, it could screw with them a bit. But it won't be enough to make Youtube NOT do this shit.

Also, speaking of downloaded videos, from what I've heard (can't confirm this) downloaded videos with injected ads possibly gets cut off by the duration of the ad. So basically you miss out on like 1 or 2 minutes of the end of the video or something because the ad will have added on to the run time without youtube saying so.

It's fucking disgusting behaviour from Youtube and I want to shit in the soy latte of whatever buck toothed donkey milker came up with this atrocious idea.
For the time being though, Freetube, Invidious, Piped, etc should all work. Brave is supposedly working on a solution. Once again the arms race between advertisers and adblocks continue. I just hope we'll still have a way to watch shit in peace, that's all I want.

 

[The Mass Shooter Ron Soye]

I don't think I'm imagining it: more and more embedded YT vids really are being disabled from playback on other sites.

Is that a protest thing or what? If YouTube's plan works it should affect off-site embeds too.

I'm interested in what the end game is here because I find it hard to believe that server side re-encoding videos on demand to inject an ad in a way that has no insertion point that can be filtered for could even be profitable.

Re-encoding shouldn't be required. Just as VLC and other programs can "stream" from a file, YouTube should be able to instantly cut in and insert other frames from some other source based on dynamic conditions. I think YouTube uses MPEG-DASH these days.

 

[sweater_supremacy]

KILL ADVERTISERS, BEHEAD ADVERTISERS, ROUNDHOUSE KICK AN ADVERTISER INTO THE CONCRETE

just pirate the videos and watch them off of your pc, thats what i started doing, most of the content creators i watch have some form of external payment setup like a tippee or something so i can give coin that way

 

[sweater_supremacy]

content creator who doesn't turn them off.

content creators do not get the option to until they enter the partnership program, in the meantime youtube will play them on someone's videos regardless and reap 100% of the profits, smaller creators dont have a choice, and this screw them over since ive heard an increasing amount of people saying they click off of someone's content if they get annoying ads.

 

[One Quick Post]

Re-encoding shouldn't be required. Just as VLC and other programs can "stream" from a file, YouTube should be able to instantly cut in and insert other frames from some other source based on dynamic conditions.

So the server load would be more similar to just playing the videos on their end then, that makes a lot more sense. I guess then theoretically even if the code preventing you from just skipping forward is client side, the server would just ignore the request to skip forward or even ban your account if they wanted to, since the angle they're pushing lately is that ad blocking is "against terms of service." Then they kill off access to YouTube if you're not logged in, require a phone number (and you know that's going to be a full on ID in the future,) and suddenly normies are scared to even touch an adblocker.

Still, there's probably ways around it. The war of Google's pajeet code farms vs the army of tranny NEET coders wages eternal, but only one side needs to be paid.