Google seems bound and determined to destroy itself trying to escalate it's profits from "staggering" to "colossal." The search is so bad AI is actually better, and that's saying something. And now they want to enshittify YouTube? Okay. I'm sure it won't die right away, but this will be one of the thousands cuts.

I don't understand why this needs AI. I'm guessing this is just more marketing nonsense. You can already see the "most engaged moments" by simply hovering over the timeline.

I swear to god, one of these days the update will be "Today Youtube has announced that they will be removing the annoying videos from their ads".

Once they finally lock down the player so it's impossible to block or skip ads, I look forward to coding a script which screen records each video on my sub list, feeds each video with ads into a purpose made classifier model which labels the ads, stitches out of ads with FFmpeg, and then uploads them to my jellyfin server.

Shit like this is honestly why the FCC needs authority to regulate things on the US internet.

There was a time in the long past where television networks were forced to normalize audio so that commercials weren't so much louder than the shows, which was happening for a while.

The internet just continues to be a fucking free-for-all of all the worst and most anti-user-centric ideas that exist. Just plying every bad idea that makes the internet difficult to use.

Wow. Fuuuuuuuuck YouTube.

Also, Firefox plus Ublock Origin makes ads on YouTube go away.

Willing to bet uBlock Origin will make it so I never see a single one of these ads.

Firefox forever.

Youtube has ads?

I used to waste a lot of time on YouTube Shorts, which is the absolute worst way to waste time. I finally deleted the YouTube app completely, and aside from a couple days of withdrawals, it’s been all positive.

I mean, I don’t know anything about the latest video games or movies anymore. And I have to rely on my family to send me Ryan George skits. But that stuff wasn’t actually making my life better, it was just filling it up.

If I want to watch something interesting on my phone, I’ve got Nebula. It doesn’t have all the same content, but it turns out that doesn’t matter a lot when you just want to be entertained/educated for a couple minutes. (It also doesn’t have a comment section. Or Shorts. So yeah, unequivocally better.)

We might need a few reforms to our economic model where the stupidest sociopaths alive get lots of money and teachers and nurses do not.

Because advertisers want viewers to associate their products and brand with feelings of annoyance, aggravation, and frustration?

Migrated away from Google because they're just genuinely useless.

Search results are infested with AI bullshit and SEO slop, can't actually search for anything useful unless you know the website you're looking for, in which case I just go to the website directly.

Youtube curates a selection of completely irrelevant videos to try to shove ads down your throat, I still have to change my user agent string every time because YouTube throws a hissy fit at firefox with ublock.

Gmail is pretty much the same as any other email provider but comes at the expense of your data being sold for advertising purposes.

Don't even get me started on the shit show that is Android.

I run GrapheneOS, Fedora and debian, self host what I can and use decent providers for what I can't. I'm the furthest away from the big tech corps than I've ever been and it feels great to have computers that actually compute and not serve me useless fucking ad drivel.

Because nothing endears your platform to users like throwing ads in their face during the high points of whatever they are watching.

That's definitely a different ML classifier than what Gemini is currently doing. Is Google just using the brand Gemini to mean "any ML system provided by Google"?

OK let's all skip to the middle of sponsor segments so the ads cover the sponsor segment. Win win