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Comment by Zuiii | Hacker News Reader

Youtube is entitled to the technical shenanigans it uses to force people to watch ads and I am entitled to the technical shenanigans I use to avoid them on my own device.

If youtube blocks off access completely, people will stop considering it a reliable video host and another "default" website will take its place.

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I'm also kinda amazed that in order to avoid YT's anti-adblocker you just have to logout from Google's account and you're golden. Basically, Google is indirectly destroying their own userbase that way. "Oh Google, you're blocking me now? lol what am I needin ya for anyway?" What genius came up with the idea anti-adblock flagging Google accounts?

i think they track you just as easily logged out as they do logged in.

Good luck for that "default" website to survive financially :)

There are many reasons why youtube reigns supreme but I wonder if newer, extremely efficient video codecs designed with AI inference (as shown in some demos for the last 2 years) would help in breaking up youtube's moat. It's very clear to me that the cost of hosting video content is one of the main things keeping alternatives from popping up, and maybe a codec 50x more efficient than what we have now will finally help us break free from google...

I didn't do the calculations, but it sounds like trading hosting cost for GPU cost.

Or you can decode on client side, but what if the client device is not powerful enough? Maybe decode on server or client depending on if the user has better internet connection or GPU...?

But anyway it's not my point at all. My point is that if your "killing feature" to attract existing YouTube users to your platform is "No ads", then, well, good luck to survive financially.

Arguably having a more efficient video codec lowers the financial burden on those types of sites, tough probably not enough. Going a bit further, I'm also not just thinking of content aggregation "tube" sites but such advances could allow content creators to self host video in their own websites, just like we do with images on a blog post for the last 25 years. But of curse, hosting your own site is a bit out of fashion nowadays :(

I think you overestimate how many people use AdBlock.

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