Sadly this approach is very likely impossible to block. It's much more computationally intensive for google, which is why they haven't done this in the past, but it is essentially impossible to block if done well.

[–] Llituro@hexbear.net 21 points 4 months ago (2 children)

Yeah I'm super pessimistic about this. On the user end it will be damn near impossible to tell the difference between ad and video when it's all the same stream or data from the same server connection and URL.

[–] PaX@hexbear.net 31 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (2 children)

Ad content recognition system maybe - if you see an ad, click a button and it goes into a database or if your browser sees an ad in the database it skips it

Even if it can't be skipped I would prefer the stream be blacked out and muted rather than be subjected to psychological warfare

[–] tactical_trans_karen@hexbear.net 22 points 4 months ago

I would prefer the stream be blacked out and muted rather than be subjected to psychological warfare

I genuinely feel psychological distress from YouTube ads, wish I could sue for damages.

[–] Llituro@hexbear.net 18 points 4 months ago (1 children)

ok, i think that's probably the only kind of thing that could do it at all. that sort of user-reported database is how some ad skippers already work. agreed on preferring nothing to psychological warfare.

i look forward to the bizarro-world arms race where google gets more and more sophisticated techniques to make 100000 unrecognizably different versions of the same dog food commercial that the databases won't be able to recognize.

[–] Tom742@hexbear.net 7 points 4 months ago (1 children)

100000 unrecognizably different versions of the same dog food commercial that the databases won't be able to recognize

Sounds like a potential task for some generative algorithm

[–] Saeculum@hexbear.net 4 points 4 months ago

AGI will spawn out of adversarial networks for ad recognition and disguise, calling it now.

This is also why it will hate us.

[–] GladimirLenin@hexbear.net 4 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Would this make it so the ad is manually skippable just by clicking further ahead on the video?

[–] Llituro@hexbear.net 10 points 4 months ago

i would assume they've spent decades working around that one. there's a lot of ways they could potentially try to handle that, from locking down the video player controls to delaying your fast forward until after the ad to completely changing the embedded media player for the ad despite the video stream being continuous. if they still have the skip ads button like currently, i'd imagine that becomes literally just letting you jump ahead to the end. they already will have to account for the normal video playback stuff. all of this is the reason they tried to not do things this way until now. dealing with all of that is part of what makes it computationally intensive to shove in the ads on the fly.

[–] flan@hexbear.net 1 points 4 months ago

I kind of wonder though...server side ad injection would work well for Twitch because the video player cant buffer more than a few seconds. But youtube? The player could buffer the entire video.