1273
Google admits it's making YouTube worse for ad block users
(www.theregister.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 12 Dec 2023
1273 points (96.0% liked)
Technology
59708 readers
1473 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
However bad they may make it, it can't possibly be worse than it is for non-adblock users.
But hey, if they want to torpedo their own services, have at it. It's not like they have a reputation for it or anything....
i am more worried about the old videos wipe thats coming soon
Sooo many peoples uploaded memories and documentaries are going to becone lost forever
Wait, what?
I wonder why they would kill old videos instead of just removing those 10-hour plus loops of the same song over and over again that nobody watches. You'd think those giant loop videos would be taking up far more space.
Someone above posted an article saying they aren't actually. But you'd be surprised at how little space those 10 hour videos can actually take. They're highly compressible since they're just the same still image and the same audio on repeat. A good compression algorithm (which Google certainly is using) would basically compress it into one instance of the song and how many times to repeat it (more complex than that, but that's the idea)
Sometimes they are, if it's just audio and a static image. Some of them definitely are not that though. The ones with visualizers or full music videos or the like are not nearly as compressible.
I tend to fall asleep to one of those videos of being on the beach with ocean sounds, so /shrug.
So to combat use cases like this, why not just add a repeat option? There would be no break if it cached the beginning again.
Also just download the audio you want and loop it yourself. It would take roughly 2 minutes and use way less bandwidth.
The first two minutes are an ad, and having a loud voice talking to you all of a sudden in your bedroom while you are asleep tends to wake you up.
With compression techniques being as they are today, I truly don't even worry about the bandwidth.
But manually looping any part of it inside the video which you can do past the first 2 minutes would still not be an ad. Also, who doesn't use an ad blocker on YouTube? All of those problems that you listed have incredibly easy solutions that you can execute with zero training.
And realistically if they are looking for profit (and they absolutely are) I still see no reason why they would keep these up. The benefits are absolutely minimal at best and the drawbacks are quite large.
My YouTube app on my phone, which doesn't have an ad blocker. And as far as I know, there's no way to restart a video at a certain timestamp, it just restarts from the very beginning. I'd be glad to hear otherwise though?
Ah! A few ways to do things:
If you have questions, ask away!
Thanks for the info, much appreciated!
Not the same as 10hr nyan cat or bacon pancakes
Definately not the same. Also, what "nobody watches" is in the eye of the beholder.
They aren't wiping videos.
From a literal 5 second Google search: https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/is-youtube-deleting-old-videos-1234737099/
Wait what?
Who's going to wipe the old videos?
Google’s going to delete inactive google accounts. So if you see a channel whose last upload was six years ago, there’s a good chance it’s about to be deleted
Thanks. I looked it up and read that Google decided according to the latest news they're not deleting YouTube accounts with video uploads. We'll see.
Oh I suppose my diseased father's small channel with a few of his live music performances will be deleted. Lovely.
By the look of it they won't be but I would make an offline copy just to be safe. Maybe re-upload it on a newer account/website.
Grab those vids.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youtube-dl
It’s just my go to for a “this is a thing” comments.
Has an explanation and links to the site.
Save it bro to your cloud
Goddamnit, I didn't even think about this when I saw they were doing the mass delete. Here's to hoping that they'll at least keep the videos up. Waaaay too much stuff on YT to lose it all. Anyone know if archive.org is backing them up?
At this point you got to imagine that archives hardware infrastructure has to be as big or bigger than Google's.
Man this stuff should not be left to the hands of random corporations.
I was just speaking towards server hardware and infrastructure, and their costs, and not making a value judgement on corps vs. not-corps.