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As others have said, Twitch adblocking still works just fine. There are multiple plugins which block their ads, and you can even paste in a few custom filters to uBlock Origin and bypass them.
In other words, it's not inevitable.
Think of it this way: YouTube has to pay people to work on anti-adblocking tech, whereas pissed off nerds with a permanent "fuck you I do what I want" energy will figure out how to defeat those measures for free.
Sometimes, those same engineers that put the anti-adblocking in 9-5 come home and share how to disable it.
Job security right there.
Love it lol. "Ah, this one sold weapons to the bad guys...and the good guys."
Ad blocking will never die!
However, for many years now, Twitch has entirely eliminated adblocking on desktop web.
No they haven't.
However, for many years now, Twitch has entirely eliminated adblocking on desktop web
Me, having not seen an ad on Twitch in ~forever: π€·ββοΈ
Just like the movie industry is bound to win thewar against media piracy.
Twitch has entirely eliminated adblocking on desktop web
Nope, ive not watched an ad on twitch for years.
Twitch has entirely eliminated adblocking.
Lmao, no they haven't. For example.
I'm not OP and I don't understand a thing but ironically Ublock blocked me from opening that link
As another commenter said, that's because it's not the official site!
The most significant thing they can do is to force login to watch content, DRM all video, stream the commercials in line as an indistinguishable (to the client) part of the video feed, and stagger the start and stop of each video block randomized to the individual user.
If the client gets absolutely no identification that the stream has changed, and they do a good job with the DRM, It will make it very hard for an individual user to block or skip commercials. People will still be able to screen record entire shows and use commercial skipping technology on it. It might even end up where popular channels end up getting distributed as pirated material through torrent
Realistically though, this is a losing move on their side. The people that are using ads skipping arent about to buy premium, and many if not most are not going to watch ads. They'll lose what tracking data they get from those people and they'll lose those people's engagement boosts and shares. They'll also introduce a lot of non-paying ad viewers into the pool, making their ads worth even less.
Theyβll lose what tracking data they get from those people and theyβll lose those peopleβs engagement boosts and shares.
enspezzification
If the ads are unavailable to be skipped through with the progress bar normally, then the computer playing the video necessarily has to be told where they are in some way even if indirectly, because it can skip parts of the regular video but not parts of the ads, so an adblocker client could buffer the video a bit and then play it with those parts removed. Unless they got rid of the ability to skip or fast forward parts of video entirely, or let you do that to ads (in which case you'd probably just manually skip so seems unlikely), but even in that case, if ads are in different parts of the video for different users, then some program could periodically take compressed screenshots or other identifying information about a frame and send them to some shared database, and compare what parts each user has in common, so that a program could cut out sections of the video that don't fit.
For that matter, something that I've wondered about of late with all this AI development is if an AI could be trained to distinguish ads from non-ad content, and used to power some kind of adblocker to cut ads out when they're integrated seamlessly into a video or stream.
What're you talking about? I use a Firefox plugin that blocks ads on Twitch. I haven't seen one since I started using it.
Youtube (like Reddit) has forgotten that they only exist in the first place because of the uploads of their users. They produce no content themselves. They need us a LOT more than we need them.
Never forget the YouTube rewind video they produced themselves which beacme the most disliked video ever! Lol
The issue with YouTube is that while they don't produce their own content, they're currently hosting a wealth of information and there is no competitor at this moment who can come close to consolidating all that archival information.
I don't mean react videos or mrbeast. If those ever disappeared from the face, nothing of value would have been lost.
I mean science, history and engineering channels. Tutorials and full blown college or university lectures. Documentaries. Archival videos and audio recordings. There is a great wealth of information currently hosted on YouTube and they're holding it hostage.
Those will have to find a new home and it will likely be spread out over different hosting services so we will lose the convenience of having all this great information under one roof. Look at how dispersed lemmy is at the moment. I have no doubt that Lemmy will eventually match reddit, but lets be honest. We lose a great centralized location for information, tech support and memes.
I think video platforms should be hosted by the government, like public libraries. They are very difficult to run at a profitable rate, and YouTube is basically a monopoly in this space. But it has an incredible value to society.
The problem is that we have tried this, there was a period of time when during the Great depression, in order to keep the Arts alive, the Government tried hosting stages for performers to enact plays on.
This did not work because the government kept trying to encourage that the plays promote a piece of propaganda that made the US look good or would punish plays that were accused of showing anti-American sentiment.
Imagine if government did Run YouTube, what would happen the second a Donald Trump got in office?
Suddenly only the alt right are allowed to make videos.
What we need is something like fediverse, but for online videos. Something where the host is an entirely neutral party that does not moderate the videos unless required to in order to comply with law enforcement or in instances where action against the video is obvious, such as a call to arms or if someone starts hosting Kiddie porn
To that they will immediately answer - but do you want all your youtube habits to be in the hands of the government?
Nope.
Piracy/adtech evasion is actually a very similar paradigm to infosec/security: you have to succeed all the time, always; the attackers/exploiters only have to succeed once, and thereβs a lot more attackers than your company has employees, let alone security specialists.
Twitch has what now? That's the first (and will be last) time I hear that
The European Union is about to ban anti-adblockers since they run scripts on your computer without your consent, thus violating GDPR.
How is that any different from any other javascript on a website?
Youtube don't need to eliminate adblocks; they just need the barrier of entry to be large enough to discourage the general population from blocking ads.
I think the whole reason YouTube started this crackdown is because adblocking has become a lot more mainstream and easily accessible.
Once they make blocking ads more difficult 95% of users will go back to watching ads, and it's simply not worth the time & money to fight against the remaining 5%.
If you're tech-literate enough to be on the fediverse, and willing to spend a half hour on adblocking, you're not who YouTube's targeting. You're part of the stubborn 5% who will find a workaround for whatever YT throws at us.
Before this even started I basically fought tooth and nail to "force" my coworkers to install adblockers because just seeing them sit through ads hurt. They still refused to do it... Firefox and an adblock... Basically 2 clicks was too much lol
A big difference is that Twitch livestreams are creating content as reality happens. You can't skip ahead, you can't pre-load into a buffer. YouTube would need to take those features away to allow for similarly effective ad enforcement, which would eliminate a significant advantage of VODs.
YouTube can always win the war, at any time, they can turn off their servers
Everything else is just an arms race until YouTube decides it's not worth participating anymore.
The war isnt about viewing YouTube, the war is YouTube as an exclusive video platform globally. As long as there's no serious federated competitors to YouTube, we're stuck with them, and we're losing the war.
Napoleon can always win the war, he can just stop invading and then shoot himself
Weird definition of victory
If its possible to watch the video, then it's possible to watch the video without ads.
Worst case scenario: videos can be downloaded and adverts stripped from them. (If you can watch it, you can copy it.) Would you be prepared to trade, say, a 20 minute timeshift delay on your YouTube videos' initial publish time for no adverts? I would.
The enemy has cappucinos and ivy grads, but we have monster and FOSS enthusiasts. Monster and FOSS Enthusiasts will always beat cappucinos and ivy grads.
Mao Zedong
I unfortunately can't speak to this directly as I don't have direct knowledge of ad blockers.
However, in these systems, it will always be a cat and mouse game. And there are more of us than them, so to speak. There always will be.
So they embed the ads. Then someone does some clever coding to watch for ads and auto skip. YouTube finds a way around that, the community circumvents their fix. It always has and always will work that way. The technology works for all of us.
Streamlink+Twitch GUI
Blocks ads and performs better (at lest for me).
There will always be a way.
I'm using Stream Cleaner on Twitch, still works. The cat has not won yet.
Short-term, absolutely.
Long-term? Bad product experience is why people bought those eye patches, or straight up moved to another platform.
Man I'd happily pay for YouTube if every video didn't spend half of it banging on about their sponsor
Recommending Sponsorblock Add-on if you are not familiar with it already.
Kind Regards!
Twitch ads are pre-booked for a set price. Youtube ads are auctioned per viewer. Youtube would stand to lose quite a bit of money(and, more importantly, perceived share value) moving back to broad advertising.
Hard embedding ads works for live streams since you can't know when exactly any given ad will start or end. If Youtube were to do this, it would be very trivial for sponsorblock to simply take on the role of adblocker since the community would be able to report the location of the ads.