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Comment by Ancalagon | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how long it takes for the ad-blockers to get around this.

Given how a Google account or IP address ban or punishment on any of their services can basically annihilate your ability to use any of their services forevermore, including never being able to touch your emails or files ever again, I can see YouTube being very effective with this crackdown.

Especially since they can/do also target any of your secondary accounts, and can also hit family members depending on various backend circumstances that users can't really know about.

And you know what? There is life without google, too.

It is a major inconvenience for users of Google to lose access to Google services, especially if you have years and years of stuff in Gmail or drive or photos or YouTube.

Regardless of the fact that you can find some sort of replacement for any of those things individually, it would be a major stumbling block and disruption for most users to suddenly no longer have access to their email/history.

The average person does not have forwarding or mirroring of all that stuff set up. I posit that that disruption is enough of a deterrent to get users to stop using ad blocking on Google services once the consequences start being applied.

Though that reminds me, I don't quite know what happens to your chrome bookmarks and settings if Google obliterates your profile's account. I assume that merely syncing will stop working, but perhaps more might be disrupted.

It really doesn't take long to "take out" all your Google content and continue life elsewhere -- highly recommended for future-proofing.

And after that, I wonder how long it will take google to get around that.

This is going to lead us to a terrible place IMHO, where the ads are just encoded directly into the video stream so everything comes from the same origin making it very difficult for ad blockers by not giving them a different origin to block. Plus maybe rolling out widevine (DRM) for good measure. God I hate these races to the bottom.

I already use sponsorblock, for the ads encoded in the video stream.

Yeah but presumably they won’t let you fast forward ads. AFAIK Twitch already does this, I’m surprised YouTube hasn’t.

Twitch has a timer in the corner for when the ads will be over. Seems like it’d be pretty easy to create an adblocker that looks for that and just blanks the screen out during ads.

Also seems like it would be pretty easy for twitch to remove the timer.

Well, absence of a fastforward option should then be a pretty solid indication there’s an ad running, which means… mute the audio and blank the video for a few secs

Honestly unsure what is taking them so long to try this; it’s difficult but totally possible technically, especially for YouTube. Is it because of something like the ad network can’t verify the creative separately from the hosting site?

Eventually this will require smarter and smarter neural networks to decide if something is an add or not. This technological warfare might lead to a simulation of the universe. Ar we an adblocker?

There was that web demo that auto detected ads on live radio using this. (It just switched to another station)

The same technology can be used to build undetectable ads.

Sponsorblock does this well for sponsored segments, it even works on yt-dlp and you can download a video without the sponsored parts.

whoa amazing, thanks! It does make me mad that I pay for youtube premium and still have to see those sponsored segments.

Pirating was always a big part about convinience (and accesibility), not just money. Cracked games running without needing to scavenge for CD-rom etc.

You know you fail when you gimp your free service and allow users to ungimp it for cash, while someone else ungimps it better for free.

Big corps never understood this, with Valve being the only counterexample I can think of.

Already exists: every content creator nowadays has a “sponsor” with sponsored segments (usually SquareSpace or NordVPN)

Blocked by: SponsorBlock

Next?: YouTube making it harder to skip around video

Blocked by?: Zoomers just alternating between videos, cutting in and out while the ads “play” silently, because they can never get enough dopamine

The result will eventually be a mixture of trusted hardware and software, from server to client to GPU to display, that will not display the content if any of that locked down blobby chain is not perfectly as it should be.

Even the concept of "changing the channel" is something to eventually lock down in this way; don't let the users change tabs or modify the window or display state at all until trusted ad content has verifiably finished.

The saving grace is that you'll probably be able to just get up and walk away until it's done, at least for some time.

> ... the ads are just encoded directly into the video stream

There has to be a reason why they haven't done that already. Perhaps they haven't worked out a reliable way to track ad impressions in the continuous stream. Perhaps they got it working but it's too resource intensive at scale.

Given the magnitude of revenue at stake, the other shoe should have dropped by now.

I wonder how long it takes until a different platform becomes more popular because of all this.

And I wonder who's in a position to pay for it.

Seems like a platform base comprised of users who neither want to watch ads nor pay for an ad-free experience is not primed for success

It was never 1 or 0.

It's just the market pressure to generate even more every quarter.

There are ways around this and ways to still generate profits.

It's not like nobody was watching ads. It's not ever ENOUGH people to watch ads because you have to deliver more for the shareholder horde.

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