And as a service provider, they can choose to degrade your experience. It goes both ways.
Comment on Google admits it's making YouTube worse for ad block users
Synthead@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Whatever happens on my browser is client side, which is hardware and software I own. I can make what I own do what I want. It’s a right. It’s like Google saying that I can’t skim a magazine in my home, and that I must read the ads.
Wrench@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Chickenstalker@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Except they want to send you videos. The power is with you, the viewer. Without you, advertisers will have no reason for buying ads. Google can’t collect your data either. Realise that you have this power. Youtube is not like electricity or clean water. We can live without it if push comes to the shove.
ElectroNeutrino@lemmy.world 6 months ago
To be fair, what they want is to make money off of you, be it through metadata or through advertising. It’s just that sending you videos happens to be the model which they use to get the metadata or advertising income.
gamermanh@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 months ago
If they wanted to make money off of me then they should have kept the Pixel Pass as a thing so I’d have a reason to have YT premium
Or make YT premium worth it
But nah, they’d rather ruin the product I was paying for, so now they get nothing. At least then I’m not paying for it to get worse
JohnEdwa@sopuli.xyz 6 months ago
They don’t want to send us videos, they want to serve us ads and annoy us into buying Youtube Premium, which someone using adblocker won’t see, or need. From their point of view they would win either way - if they successfully block adblockers it either converts us into ad watchers, premium subscribers, or we fuck off and stop using their bandwidth.
ObviouslyNotBanana@lemmy.world 6 months ago
It’s funny because I pay for premium and have noticed a worse experience since this was revealed. They don’t seem to check if a user has adblock and pays.
BraveSirZaphod@kbin.social 6 months ago
You have no value to advertisers if they can't serve you ads. By not doing so, they'll also cut down on bandwidth costs, so it's a double positive for them.
CosmicCleric@lemmy.world 6 months ago
By not doing so, they’ll also cut down on bandwidth costs, so it’s a double positive for them.
When you take your comment to its logical end though your comment makes no sense, as hence there’s now no one to watch the videos and earn money from them doing so.
You can’t force someone to consume your content, and if you earn money by people consuming your content, then the power is ultimately with them.
Synthead@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Yep, they can send me 500s if they want to, too
TheEntity@kbin.social 6 months ago
Technically 400s would be more appropriate here. :)
gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works 6 months ago
Response codes only matter to good-faith actors
SinningStromgald@lemmy.world 6 months ago
If the service degrades to far due to using ad blockers then I’ll just stop watching anything on YouTube. Easy.
Wrench@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Okay then. That was always allowed.
BradleyUffner@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Umm, ok. You were not making them any money before, when you were blocking their ads, why would they care if you left?
CrowAirbrush@lemm.ee 6 months ago
Because the big channels will get a significant drop in views which lowers their sponsor pay and willingness to work with them.
gian@lemmy.grys.it 6 months ago
A possible answer is because the creators that have their own sponsors in their videos want the view even if you don’t see the Google ads, so Google on one hand want you to watch their ads while on the other hand cannot afford to really lose you since that would reflects on the creators and then if a creator leave for another platform (a big if, I agree) Google lose all the traffic generated by said creator, both who use an adblocker and who don’t use an adblocker.
CrayonRosary@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Google can do what they want server-side
Sure, like not sending you videos. 🤔
deegeese@sopuli.xyz 6 months ago
Client side DRM is coming.
They’re mostly there on Android already.
BaroqueInMind@kbin.social 6 months ago
You forgot to mention it's also coming to all Chromium based browsers as well in the form of ManifestV3
Evilcoleslaw@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Manifest V3 doesn’t really have the real client side DRM. It just has the ad-blocker breaking API changes. The real DRM will be whatever comes of the abandoned Web Environment Integrity API. (It’s not really abandoned just shifted over to only Android WebView.)
billbasher@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Couldn’t they fork Brave and have both a current and a ManifestV3 version?
Engywuck@lemm.ee 6 months ago
Usually Brave strips away invasive/unfavolrable stuff from Google before releasing. OTOH, browsers with inbuilt adblockers won’t be affected by MV3, as the latter only applyes to extensions. Inbuilt adblocers are part of the browser itself and aren’t constrained by whatever rule Google may want to put in place.
CarbonatedPastaSauce@lemmy.world 6 months ago
That’s ok. Us nerds have been defeating DRM in its many forms for decades. This will be no different.
lastweakness@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Not really true for video games. Plenty of popular games still with uncracked denuvo…
jtk@lemmy.sdf.org 6 months ago
It’s called a “User Agent” for a reason.
1rre@discuss.tchncs.de 6 months ago
You can, but as a part of doing what they want serverside they can ask for sone kind of proof you don’t have an adblocker on the server-side, you can reverse engineer that and spoof the checks and it becomes an arms race just like we have now… You’re effectively just saying the status quo is a-ok with you
Synthead@lemmy.world 6 months ago
I don’t personally enjoy the status quo, but they’re not obligated to serve me any videos of they don’t want to. However, if they have given me media to consume on my devices, it’s up to me to decide how I consume the media that was already delivered.
gosling@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Let’s just hope they don’t start injecting their ads into the video stream itself
BraveSirZaphod@kbin.social 6 months ago
Google is also perfectly within their rights to decide to not serve their content to you.
FMT99@lemmy.world 6 months ago
They’re not saying you can’t have an adblocker. They’re saying their software will try not to serve you their data if you do, or at least make it inconvenient.
You have a right to your computer. You do not have a right to their service.
Synthead@lemmy.world 6 months ago
That’s exactly what I said, yeah
SendMePhotos@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Me after reading the 1st comment: “OK. True. Fair.” Me after reading the 2nd comment: “OK. True. Fair.” Me after reading the 3rd comment: “OK. Also true. Also fair.”
Rai@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 months ago
Me reading you:
Fourth gosh darn level of agree
I’ll never disable my PiHole or turn off ublock tho
Klear@sh.itjust.works 6 months ago
There was a rabbi arbitrating a dispute between neighbours. One of them complained that the other one gathers apples that fall off his apple tree and into the other neighbour’s garden. “Those are my apples grown on my tree. He’s stealing them!”
“You’re right,” says the rabbi. But the other neighbour counters.
“But the branches of the tree are above my property. If he doesn’t want them to fall on my garden, he can cut off the branch. But he lets them fall into my garden making them my apples.”
“You’re right,” says the rabbi and adjourns the diapute to be able to think about it. He’s at his wit’s end and tells the whole story to his wife when he gets home.
“That doesn’t make sense. They can’t both be right.”
“You’re right.”
vitamin@infosec.pub 6 months ago
No, you don’t have a right to it. If they want to they can put the entire site being a subscriber paywall. That’s their call. But until they do that i will continue to access the site with my adblocked browser.
Synthead@lemmy.world 6 months ago
You do have a right to your computer. After content is delivered to you, you have downloaded data, and your own hardware and software acts to consume said downloaded data. After it is downloaded, even if it is in a browser in a cache, it is considered offline content. This also applies to streaming media chunks, too: once it’s downloaded, you have acquired it locally.
Honytawk@lemmy.zip 6 months ago
They don’t have the right to disregard my right to privacy either, yet here we are.
SendMePhotos@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Well… They do because it’s their tos, no?
ferralcat@monyet.cc 6 months ago
But their software is just blocking based on browser. Their message to you is not “don’t use an ad blocker”. It’s “use chrome and you won’t have this problem”. Theyre literally just hoping to abuse their position as a monopoly in video to try and strengthen their monopoly on browsers.
Perhyte@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Is that why I haven’t had any problems? I thought it was either Google A/B testing again or uBlock updating often enough to keep up, but I do have a user-agent changer installed in Firefox that’s configured to tell YouTube I’m on Chrome…