Google has a lot more money

It is more like the data could make money in the future but is not making money right now so they don’t have infinite money for storage. If they had I am sure they would be happy to increase free storage limits.

These companies hoard data they might have an use for but not even know how yet. Training AI and shit. Deleting stuff ain’t in their dictionary.

Goodness gracious they must have great balls of fire to have done this.

But what if it was trained on covers?

I use Linux and only install software from the official distro repository + verified flatpaks. No av, no worries.

Nah, computer vision for standalone image processing (I mean, not batch processing dozens to thousands of files at the same time) today is pretty lightweight and can be done easily on consumer laptops and smartphones. It is just a different technique and takes people with different skills to do it, but completely doable. Gor example, even face detection AI models can run on your laptop, if AI can learn to classify faces, objects and animals it can learn to classify ads.

Edgy

At this point you can just replace the video with the same video using a timestamped link from just before the ad started. Under IPv4 they can’t tell if it is the same person/device requesting the same video. So unless they put the ad at exactly the same timestamp (which they won’t) you can just blank out the video when an ad starts and replace the stream with the same video using the timestamp to start the video where you left off.

I guess saying the difference wasn’t quite specific. It works by deleting everything which is not the same between the two versions of the video, all the parts that are the same in the 2 videos are kept, everything else must be an ad. It breaks down if there is the same ad at the same time on both videos.

They probably had this ready to go a long time ago. It is just heavier on their servers so it costs more. Likely they had a number in mind about how many users would have to be using ad-blockers before rolling this out, to balance costs.

I think Google created a model that is unsustainable from the get go, because they have infinite money glitches and used this to monopolize the market and lure in creators.

It could be sustainable for non-premium users if the amount of ads was similar to what it was, idk, 10 years ago, 14 years ago. However back then they were not making nearly enough to cover their costs and pay creators handsomely.

I like to support creators but I also liked youtube better when it was mostly common people doing their thing however the fuck they wanted, instead of this hyper-profissionalized tv-wannabe corporate channels that grow to be mammoths.

Problem is, we accepted the weird assumption that successful content creators on the internet are entitled to be millionaires, or to make a lot more money per month than say, a successful person in a common profession. If content creators got into youtube with the mindset that at best they’d live a life that is middle class instead of trying to become rich, then youtube would need a lot less money than it needs today, and content would go back to being more relaxed not mega professional and extremely polished videos from channels that employ dozens of people.

But alas, I guess successful video creators on youtube are supposed to be rich and deserve to earn more money than a doctor, and youtube is supposed to be a viable source of income for mega corporations that used to be mainly TV and other traditional media but then freaked out about losing people to the internet.

That’s what I thought at first but who am I kidding, if content creators got paid less youtube would still be very popular and google would still do whatever the fuck they want and shove more ads in it anyways. And also, paying top creators so much money is another way to prevent competition, creators won’t choose another platform if they can’t match the pay.

A solution would be for an extension to download the entire video 2x and delete the difference. But if you want to watch on 4k you’d need a connection that is pretty fast (although still in the range of what many people already have). However if they find a way to throttle the max speed on the server side for each client based on the quality they are watching, that would kill this possibility. You could block their cookies and throttling by IP on IPv4 would not be a possibility for them, but when everyone is on IPv6 idk.

But also processing the video on the fly to delete the difference in real time would be heavy, though at least I think it is possible to access the GPU with browser extensions via webGL but I am not sure if for HD and 4k that would be realistic for most people.

Some people said that skipping is blocked during the ad. But if that is the case I am sure either the timestamp is predictable or somewhere on the client side you could find the information about the timestamp.

Is there a loophole where they could delay the ad marking like 5 seconds into a longer ad so you’d have to watch at least 5 seconds before an extension can detect it? Is the law specific about it having to be marked as an ad for the entire duration?

Last time I checked it only made the extension temporary if the extension wasn’t signed by the developer. If you made your own extension you need to use the developer signing tool on it before installing.

It is a good stand from google but…

In the end it was all censored, since google wasn’t even there anymore, and China was left with a huge market opportunity for their own internal companies to serve their internal market instead of a foreign company. The Chinese people ended up worse off, Google ended up worse off, Chinese censorship won, Chinese tech companies won.

So still sucks either way. With firefox not being banned Russians can still load up the extensions, just have to get them from other sources.

If you bought photoshop back when it was not subscription and Adobe did not inform you that your license had an expiration date you can in fact do whatever the duck you want to it because you purchased it, you did not rent it, you did not subscribe. You purchased it and it is yours for life.

Matter of fact you have no idea if what you are suggesting would fly in court because I am pretty sure you don’t know about any previous case like this that has been even tried in court.

People online sometimes get mad at me when I say I don’t want windows users to move to Linux, I don’t want Linux to be popular at all. I enjoy being a Linux home user who knows the community is small enough to not draw the wrong kind of attention from bad actors and corporations.

Anyway, I enjoy seeing windows users get shit shoved down their throats like this, it is amusing and I can’t wait to see what Microsoft is gonna do next while most of their user base just accepts it or cries online only to continue on windows.

This is happening to me, on a minority of videos I click on, sometimes the video will start at random places midway through and even close to the end. Most times it doesn’t happen tho (I am aware the videos start playing on the home/search page now, this isn’t it).

I am using youtube premium tho, no adblock just their official app with premium on my phone. This problem started like one or two weeks ago max.

I’ll copy and paste my reply to someone else here:

Any huge server that is impossible to moderate for admins is detrimental to the network and failure to properly moderate is the number one reason we should be looking at to defederate from instances.

Automatic “spam” protection is the exact thing which co-opted e-mail. Big corps with the largest e-mail user base use algorithms that automatically assume the worst about any small e-mail server. If you spin up a small server you are assumed to be spam unless unless unless, which ended up with e-mail being centralized in the hands of Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Apple, despite being theoretically decentralized too.

Is that what we want for the Fediverse? 4 or 5 huge instances automatically defederating from all small instances unless they fit some criteria defined by the big corps, which they can change anytime?

To summarize, how big Threads is and how they decide to moderate the content matters for anyone who doesn’t want the Fedi to end up like e-mail.