this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2024
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There are already sponsorship-skipping add-ons. YouTube lost before they began.
I’m not sure if a sponsorblock like solution will work. Sponsorblock is entirely reliant on timestamps provided by users.
A similar solution for YouTube’s ads will only work if the ads always happen at the same timestamps and have the same length. This is not necessarily the case, as ads can happen at any point.
There will have to be designated points where midroll ads can happen, just like the current system has, so the ads aren't inserted mid-sentence or destroy an important sequence in the video. Nobody would accept it otherwise.
It's a matter of detecting those points, mapping them to specific frames in the video, then automatically detecting when an ad is inserted on that basis.
It's slightly harder to do, but not impossible.
Unfortunately I think there's been a good bit of evidence recently that people WILL accept it. As a prime example lemmy hasn't exactly replaced reddit despite the relative uproar that the API changes caused. Netflix & co just keep hiking prices and people just keep buying it.
And then on the technical side, if the ads are coming from the server it's possible youtube might just refuse to serve the rest of the video stream until all or most the ad's runtime has passed. It depends on how serious they want to get about capturing the revenue lost to adblock users.
Sure, but then that's an even worse enshittification if they do make it random.
The mandatory wait-time will stop people from seeking through videos organically. Yet another thing that makes it worse for everyone.
And even then, it should still be possible to detect which frames are part of the original video and which are not, either by detecting original video frames, or building a database of ads and detecting them within videos.
The fact that lots of people still use reddit is just due to inertia. Platforms don't die immediately overnight. Digg still exists. It still calls itself "The homepage of the internet." The process of transitioning to a federated internet is going to take many years.
Reddit is still dying however. There's been a marked drop in the quality of posts over there, and they're harder to access, now they're doing an exclusivity thing with google which is also enshittifying massively. That is making it less and less appealling over time. It won't last forever as a culturally relevant site.