What took them so long?

Anyway. I'm sure the adblocking Industry will adapt.

Even if it comes down to a browser addon placing a black rectangle over the video and muting browser audio when an ad plays, I'll be choosing that over watching ads.

I wouldn't even mind the ads if they just played maybe one per three or four videos. That would still bring in a massive amount of money without pissing everyone off.
Instead we get up to two ads every couple of minutes.

It's all about blatant greed.

Honestly, I am surprised it took them this long. This technology has existed for a while, there is even a standard for it (see: SCTE-35).

The harsh truth of the matter is that YouTube is a victim of its own success. The sheer scale of what is needed to keep the platform running at its current level of activity is something that I think most people don't give a second thought to. It requires a truly astonishing amount of technical expertise, infrastructure, monitoring, throughput capacity, not to mention sheer compute and storage, to keep it running. And that is considering the technical side alone, never mind the business that has evolved around it

All of the above costs money. A lot of money. So much money that only a shitty mega corporation with no moral scruples would ever be able to afford to run the platform, let alone turn a profit. And so here we are.

There are niche alternatives like PeerTube, but in practice it is currently in no state to be a drop in replacement. If the fediverse had to deal with the amount of traffic and content from YouTube in its current state, it would collapse immediately. This won't change until the user base begins to increase, but to do so requires an incentive for people to jump over. And sadly, far too many people just don't care enough about avoiding ads to do so.

I think in the long term there will be a reckoning; no matter the size of your platform you are not invulnerable to change. Nobody back in the early 2010s could foresee Twitter falling from grace, and look how that turned out. YouTube will eventually die, the only question is who will be footing the bill for what replaces it.

In the meantime, if you're unable or unwilling to deal with YouTube's ads, or pay to skip them, then just don't engage with the platform at all. Read a book. Touch some grass. They haven't found a way to monetize that (yet).

All this enshittification might be good for me. I think i might start reading more books instead of watching youtube. Fuck you google, I'll never buy yt premium nor watch you ads.

If they do that and Adblock doesn’t work anymore, the solution is quite simple - stop watching YouTube. Sure, there will be some content creators that I will miss. Maybe it will be time to move to Nebula.

it hurts so much that it is VERY hard to replicate youtube given the insane upkeep costs. I would leave in a fucking heartbeat but so many good creators only post there

This is where we need to start harnessing AI for our advantage rather than corporations. Have it scan the videos as it buffers and automatically remove the ads.

I've decided I'm going to do freelance ads for free for exposure on a comment by comment basis while I drink this refreshing iced cold Coca Cola.

When I see an ad on the internet, I purposefully look away to not look at it.

It is deeply ingrained in my brain to never let ads win.

I don't know how my parents are doing it with cable TV.

It was about time, was always strange that Twitch did it first, and just like over there I'm hopeful some clever people will still make scripts capable of blocking ads.

Oh well.

This sucks but they need to keep turning up the dial so more people jump over to peertube.

1. Sorry.

2. They could have fucking paid me...

Creation of a derivative work without author's consent solely for the purpose of monetisation - sounds legally dubious to me as you couldn't claim fair use.

Damn! I wonder if yt-dlp will get a workaround for this.