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Cake day: June 1st, 2023

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  • Which in turn means that it’s (almost) futile for the user to do that. If I have to wait 2 minutes to watch, I might as well leave the ad running.

    I would still guess people would rather block it and context switch for those 5-10 seconds or it could be preloaded for every video on the timeline which in turn just hurt Youtube’s ad system. The reality is that adblock people are tech savy minority and it’s not worth bending the whole ad pipeline out of shape just for that.

    I guess we’ll see how Google handles this but I don’t think they can pull it off tbh.





  • The clever check is impossible. The server can’t know the client is showing the video even when playing DRM content. I could literally mute the sound and put a black box over the ad until it’s over. The problem is as old as the internet itself.

    That’s why Apple and Meta pushing eye tracking so hard. It’s the only solution to the ad blocking problem.

    I think YT is doing well with YT premium and that’s the way to go for them. It’s one of my favorite subscriptions and I’d probably stick around even if they raise the price unless they hurt the creators so badly they bounce and I’d bounce with them.





  • Because it’s impossible to block adblocking. The server can’t know whether the client plays the video. The best they could do is have you wait the ad-time even if the ad is blocked but that would just mess with their analytics - they want to be sure the ad is being watched.

    The only reason adblock blocking works for smaller websites is because adblockers need to catch up with each implementation. People will easily catch up with Youtube as there are thousands of people working on Youtube programming.


  • It’s impossible to tell how much of the posts are bots but if you look at the default subreddits I’d say that it’s definitely noticable.

    Reddit is a popular grey marketing area - be it shilling products or political propaganda. Lemmy/Federation hasn’t reached enough mass for this to be a real problem yet but it’ll happen eventually and Lemmy is an easy target right now. I used to work in bot detection area and modern, well made bots (the ones you should worry about) are essentially indisguishable from real users but script kiddies can be an issue too.

    The only real way to fight bots is to reduce the incentive which is more of a cultural thing - people have to call out shills and a more transparent platform definitely helps.

    Sorry for the rant but I think bots/spam will play a big role if federation ever reaches the point where there’s enough eye-balls for shilling to be valuable.