this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2024
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Enshittification
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What is enshittification?
The phenomenon of online platforms gradually degrading the quality of their services, often by promoting advertisements and sponsored content, in order to increase profits. (Cory Doctorow, 2022, extracted from Wikitionary) source
The lifecycle of Big Internet
We discuss how predatory big tech platforms live and die by luring people in and then decaying for profit.
Embrace, extend and extinguish
We also discuss how naturally open technologies like the Fediverse can be susceptible to corporate takeovers, rugpulls and subsequent enshittification.
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If they're predictable with the timing and length then sponsorblock will still work.
And if they're not, the client can download the video twice and diff the copies.
The most pernicious thing they could do is randomize the ads across users, but serve each user the same ads each time. In that case, you'd need a peer-to-peer client to compare hashes of chunks with other users to detect the ad segments.
Dear Satan,
Your application for the Alphabet engineering position has been acce--[your message will continue after a word from our sponsors]
Honestly, I'd be happy to take the job and sabotage them from the inside.
We could use audio fingerprinting to detect ads in the buffer
Yeah that could work... What about creating some sort of *arr for YouTube videos that downloads them and processes them with some sort of AI audio/video processing to remove the ads and recombine the video.
Youtubarr it could be called. If we really want we can also remove the ads from the creator in the video too. It would still count as a view to the video too so creator won't lose out on money.
Anyone with objections to this?
It's a neat idea, but computer vision stuff can get quite computationally expensive when done locally and is prone to input poisoning attacks (especially if the models used are open source).
Not saying it wouldn't be possible, but I think some of the other ideas posed here would be better starting places.
Or get the video once with a YouTube premium account and cut out anything that doesn't match from the free version.
Oh, the diffing thing is clever!
There's no such thing as "download the video". It's a stream of small chunks, which can be re-arranged by back-end in any way, shape and form.