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Hehe, +1 year ago I actually made a (half-serious, half-assed) project alluding to this possible future: https://butter.sonnet.io https://butter.sonnet.io The

Hehe, +1 year ago I actually made a (half-serious, half-assed) project alluding to this possible future: https://butter.sonnet.io https://butter.sonnet.io The way this works: use LLMs to detect sponsored content in transcripts, then skip that during playback. I can see an approach, let's call it "universal adblocker", where there's an app running in background, detecting ads (using a11y APIs or just screenshots) and skipping / masking them with a full awareness of how to control a given app. It could block different sections of the screen or just control the UI to skip past the crap.

judge2020 2y ago
Interesting; I do wonder if transcripts, or at least subtitles, will contain info from the inline ads. If they don't, it hurts accessibility and thus reach of the ads, and if they do it can then be detected by software.
- rpastuszak 2y ago
  I think by the time the tech is performant/energy efficient enough to make what I described actually useful, we should be able to rely on more content formats than text.
mook 2y ago
I've noticed a channel that consistently omits the ads (in their case, Patreon plugs) on the transcript, presumably for similar reasons. (I just let the video play because it's usually short enough that manually skipping is enough of a hassle.)
supriyo-biswas 2y ago
Should this be implemented, the cat and mouse game would likely continue. The circumvention would be to for the server to some kind of proof of work of the “ad view” — use a service worker to check downloaded segments, and occasionally issue challenges that require sending a salted hash of the ad segments back to the server, along with a proof of elapsed time, without which the server simply refuses to serve the next video segment.
- megadal 2y ago
  I can't see that actually working for YouTube in the end though. You can just download content and not play it, but in some background thread complete all the challenges. You would need a way to prove audio/video on the end device/UA to the server and that's impossible AFAIK

judge2020 2y ago

Interesting; I do wonder if transcripts, or at least subtitles, will contain info from the inline ads. If they don't, it hurts accessibility and thus reach of the ads, and if they do it can then be detected by software.

rpastuszak 2y ago
I think by the time the tech is performant/energy efficient enough to make what I described actually useful, we should be able to rely on more content formats than text.

mook 2y ago

I've noticed a channel that consistently omits the ads (in their case, Patreon plugs) on the transcript, presumably for similar reasons. (I just let the video play because it's usually short enough that manually skipping is enough of a hassle.)

supriyo-biswas 2y ago

Should this be implemented, the cat and mouse game would likely continue. The circumvention would be to for the server to some kind of proof of work of the “ad view” — use a service worker to check downloaded segments, and occasionally issue challenges that require sending a salted hash of the ad segments back to the server, along with a proof of elapsed time, without which the server simply refuses to serve the next video segment.

megadal 2y ago
I can't see that actually working for YouTube in the end though. You can just download content and not play it, but in some background thread complete all the challenges. You would need a way to prove audio/video on the end device/UA to the server and that's impossible AFAIK