I wonder if anyone in the industry has any insights in how a regular developer can help improve ad blockers? Where to get started?
As a huge fan of blocking ads, this makes me feel inspired to join the fight against Google. How can I help?
As a huge fan of blocking ads, this makes me feel inspired to join the fight against Google. How can I help?
This would be a god tier level development, and would seriously cripple Google's core business (serving ads) and youtube as well (serve ads or subscription).
One can imagine a different structure, where a wealthy philanthropist or organization funds the site, but that's just shifting the costs around. The other option is the government runs it, out of our tax dollars, which could work, if there wasn't a powerful vocal contingent of politicians that still buys the line that government can't do anything right.
Been feeling inspired by the SBF case lately.
Jokes aside, distributing compute to users is one way to avoid having expensive servers, which tend to be powered by ads, if not direct payments. There is the fediverse. Not sure how well that would work here, but there’s probably some potential. And before that there has been e.g. torrenting communities that require certain seed ratios. Basically: the product is “free” but you need to participate in some form that adds value rather than just leeching. The distributed model is established, I just don’t think it will ever outcompete a centralized one, if for no other reason than distributed communities have strategy and cash flow problems. As in, they don’t really have any functional mechanism to build, fund, and execute on a competitive strategy like YouTube can. All they can really do is make a product and hope people like it. But competing on merit is never enough.
Youtube, OTOH, used, and currently uses a number of marketing strategies to drive traffic to their site, and paid out ~$10B++ annually for content creators. GP's comment on "Given that things cost money" is not governed by compute, rather, cost of customer acquisition for the platform, and cost of content creation by creatives. Somebody, somewhere, has to pay for these. That is the merit of this battleground.
There are many! The problem is that the ads model supports the "winners take all" strategy that permeates Silicon Valley and all its copycats. There is no room for peaceful coexistence.
Though if youtube is really going to end up blocking ad-blockers, this one may stop working too, of course.
Also note that so far, most streaming services have succeeded in protecting their high res codecs. KodiTV can play a big variety of services but usually only at 540p (widevine L2?).
Tim Berners-Lee overriding the standards bodies and approving Encrypted Media Extensions had the desired effect of keeping the web relevant, of letting all these streaming services spring up, all accessible on the web. Because it afforda the companies enough security to feel like they can do so.
It's unclear to me how we build DVRs anew. Do we disassemble a monitor scan-out & record the embedded-Display-Port or lvds or whatever signal, and play that back? The infernalizarion of computing has proceeded apace against humanity.
The big fish are Ublock Origin and AdBlock Plus, as well as YT front ends like yt-dl, Invidious and Newpipe, but by favorite project is https://github.com/uazo/cromite
Bromite already almost died before uazo took over.
I think YouTube is eventually going to assert control through Chrome, and the community is going to be caught flat footed with everyone still relying on Chrome extensions.
The entire adblock industry feels like https://xkcd.com/2347/
Why spend so much energy bypassing compensation for an otherwise free service? It just pushes more ads in front of less sophisticated users or encourages producers to lock all content behind paywalls.
Instead I pay other services like Nebula to watch creators I first discovered on YouTube. Unfortunately, most creators don't have an alternative like this in place.
That said, some other reasons that work in Nebula's favor are that the creators seem to be involved in the ownership and they can publish material without the fear of YouTube's demonetization. The value proposition isn't exactly one to one and goes beyond the advertising/funding.