Twitch: "Hey, come back! This commercial break can't play while you're away."
twitter.com
twitter.com
I get it too I'm a bad person for not accepting articles where every other paragraph is an ad.
Of course it depends on what kind of videos you watch. But videos themselves are becoming more ad filled and lower effort for me.
I mainly consume software, gaming, cooking and hardware news videos.
Huge portion of human effort going to ads is really sad
It's funny being a developer you don't watch much developer content like Primogen though I'm jealous these guys can just talk into a camera and make money. It is a skill to be likeable/mass appeal, being entertaining.
I already know the ad anyway, "this video is sponsored by SquareSpace". Bro I'm not going to use square space alright, I'm going to go into VS Code, make a SPA, host it on S3, buy a domain, connect the DNS, setup up ALB, CDN, setup RDS, cognito and then I'll have a website. Oh I also need github actions to do the build and push out the new changes.
Will throw this random comment in. Competition with the masses is hard. I paid a friend of mine $100 per song he produced for me (which were bad). But then I can go on Epidemic Sound and for $10/mo pick from a shit ton of good songs... how does a single creator compete with that.
Also, it’s actually easier to bypass the DRM crap than not, so they’ll continue to play in full resolution moving forward.
I want to point out I'm still an apt dweller unfortunately
You can also get discs from most libraries, book stores, many garage sails, ebay, for super cheap.
Alternatively, be like me, and have a $100 budget for N ~= 20 BluRays/40 DVDs. 2-3 can be new purchases if used isn't in stock.
It rapid rolls through video streams showing a second or two of each ad.
Presumably this is so Google can charge advertisers for impressions that don’t actually exist.
Children sample harder than Public Enemy.
But, the ad wasn't rendering in the page. So the user didnt need to suffer them, but the website owners still profited.
The only losers where ad buyers, who IMHO are exactly the ones that should be affected.until they realize that ads are not effective.
Someone should bring something like that for current platforms. Even for video like, a placeholder video with a tip, interesting fact or whatever, playing while the page load the real video.
Adnauseam actually clicks on every ad in the background, otherwise it's just a wrapper on uBlock Origin.
Ads are an evil that must be removed from the internet, and draining the wallets of companies using ads, without upside, would make them place less value on them.
Honest question, what do you envision will keep the free-internet free in lou of ads? Do you think a pay-walled internet, $3 for this site, $5 for this....would ever take off?
I too block ads, but feel like i'm slowly contributing to the death spiral of the internet
People born in 2000+ have no idea about that time
For websites that aren't costly to host (blogs, tutorials, ...), there's often no need to monetize at all. Non-commercial sites on some topic ran by passionate hobbyists are already typically higher quality than sites designed for profiting through adspam/SEO.
Donations and volunteer work (like Wikipedia) can be viable where there are non-negligible costs to cover. Grants and public funding can also help if it's a worthwhile cause.
Some institutions/people benefit indirectly in recognition from putting information online - like universities, product support forums, or a security researcher writing up an investigation into a malware campaign. Could consider this a form of advertising, but the resources are being used in a productive way rather than just intentionally wasting time.
Non-wasteful use of your time and computing resources are also fine by me, like torrent trackers that require you to maintain a minimum seed ratio. Google's CAPTCHAs are already sneakily giving you annotation work, just not paying for it.
I'd claim federation also helps, in that services that ostensibly benefit from being one massive site (due to network effect) can actually be split up into smaller more feasible nodes. I use SDF's Mastodon/Lemmy instances for example, and host a Matrix server.
Google accumulated untold riches from those primitive ads yet they and Meta have tightened the screw a little bit more in each passing year.
Obviously, this isn't sustainable in itself.
> Google accumulated untold riches from those primitive ads yet they and Meta have tightened the screw a little bit more in each passing year.
Google doesn't have to actually make any content, they just link to it. This is relatively cheap.
If you're actually producing content (that isn't AI slop), you don't get the benefit of that sort of scale. There's no way to automate it.
Point being, the fact that google ads currently don't yield much revenue per click/view for most people isn't necessarily just because they are ads.
Even so, corporations will never voluntarily conclude that they're making enough ad money. Line must go up, forever, because reasons.
https://www.gov.ca.gov/2025/10/06/no-more-loud-commercials-g...
13 years ago. For those not in the loop:
(This never happened though. The MPAA did a lot of shady things with DRM, but not this.)
Brave use to block it for a while by default (it does great on YouTube ads).
There also use to be a ping pong between Twitch and some chrome extensions which worked temporarily and then Twitch broke a week later.
The best I've been able to find is Alternate Player for Twitch.tv which does hide the ads (essentially freezing the stream while they play), but I have been unable to keep the stream playing ad free for quite some time.
This is not my experience. Alternate Player for Twitch.tv essentially ignores twitch ads for me. Using Brave, not sure if this is relevant.
Felt like Twitch was always teetering on the edge and really nobody with any power cared to avoid the inevitable.
Twitch is owned by Amazon. AWS sells the streaming tech Twitch uses to Kick.
Amazon would probably rather sell IVS to Kick than try and figure out how to make Twitch profitable. Or the just don't care enough to notice the people at Twitch are just LARPing at business.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm under the impression that it's not possible for javascript to detect that you've muted the browser tab itself, at least. Doesn't solve the problem of them checking whether you have the tab focused, of course, but it should be mutable.
<insert obvious ways in which this will be misused here>
this means that advertisers must constantly move the "we won't cross this" line further and further into absurdity. it will never stop. not ever, not so long as people have things to sell.
i hope i'm dead when ad viewing only counts when you buy the advertised product.
"Thank you for your Twitch subscription. You've used all of your paid time, and can no longer view streams. But, good news, buy 1 product advertised to you in the next 15 minutes and you'll get another 24 hours of streaming!"
then watch as they increase the number of products you must buy while decreasing the number of hours you get from it.
it will never ever stop.
advertising should be illegal or be highly regulated. the arms race between viewer and advertiser will never stop until one or both of those things happen.
Many, many telemetry metrics have been added in the name of power and efficiency. If a page refreshes every 30 seconds, is it still worthwhile doing it when the tab isn’t active? It would be better to wait until the tab is active again, then refresh immediately.
That being said, all of these capabilities are a privacy nightmare, only increasing the precision of browser fingerprinting and user monitoring. Firefox could have taken a stance on refusing to implement them, but I don’t think it has an easy opt out.
That YouTube is much better technically (e.g. immediate rewinding) is also a nice bonus.
Edit: I'm seeing now that there's something called Twitch Turbo for $12/month to avoid ads, though YT premium family still seems like a better deal as long as you have 2+ people for it, since you also get a YouTube music sub and, y'know, no ads on the rest of YouTube proper.
Twitch Turbo is site wide.
IIRC other Twitch Prime benefits (free games, DLC, etc.) were rolled in to the Amazon Gaming brand, and more recently Luna.
It'll only be a matter of time until you can't do anything but watch whatever content Google has curated for you, with no chance to adjust anything at all.
Youtube isn't some life or death resource - if they go too far, users will switch off.
You can still scrub the video manually, that's just a separate "Jump ahead" button that skips past the most skipped section.
I don't have a problem with it because they didn't take anything away from me.
This is Google's euphemism for building a SponsorBlock equivlient into youtube. It just sounds terrible if they come out and tell you that in addition to removing their ads, they're selling an adblocker. They don't want you adblocking their ads, but they'll gladly charge you to do it to someone else.
Do people writing this type of copy actually believe this?
And really, this isn't a big deal. It's a bold lie everyone can see through, but it's not nearly as consequential as other bold lies society tolerates or is complicit in. Many of these lies make modern society function in the first place - they're necessary fictions everyone participates in.
This lie is... laughably irrelevant, which is why calling it out won't make you a pariah. People are jumping at the chance to point and laugh when doing so carries no consequence.
Other examples of inconsequential bullshit: "Your call is very important to us", "We value your privacy", "We're like family here", and "It's not about the money".
tl;dr: "whatever."
:)
In Firefox you can drag'n'drop a tab "out" of the tab bar, which will move it to a new window. Might work in other browsers too.
The passkey stuff is a step in this direction.
Some might argue that it allows for better web apps, but the delta between how much better in can make web apps and how much poorer it can make the overall web experience is too great to be worth it, and that's before one gets into the privacy implications of browsers being so eager to share all these little nuggets of info.
Yeah, I'm sure this won't drive massive adoption of ad blockers or anything.