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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 1st, 2023

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  • In the end, someone has to pay for all the traffic though.

    Everyone does already, though. The end-user pays for their internet access (which includes the data that can flow over the bandwidth they purchased; sometimes also limited to a certain maximum amount per month) and the content provider already pays for their internet access as well - which is part of their datacenter costs. And providers pay for the peering between them as well. So the whole chain from content provider to enduser is already fully paid. There is no “unfair” onesided disadvantage or advantage here.


  • The sad truth is that non-techy types will never want to host something themselves unless there’s a reason why doing so is better.

    Not even techy types want it. It’s not a coincidence that SaaS offerings are viable in enterprise contexts. Why build a shit ton of knowledge and drag yourself through the mud of learning tons of different tools if you can as well pay someone who already has all that knowledge. Then you can use the free mental capacity to solve your actual problems.

    The only reasons to self host are “paranoia” (no matter if warranted or not) and - which is the important thing for us self-hosters here - curiosity (or rather the drive to learn shit). We basically do it for the sake of doing it.


  • I was more answering to the last part

    People will easily catch up with Youtube as there are thousands of people working on Youtube programming.

    You can’t circumvent something clientside that is done on the server. When I grab a stream from Twitch, the first 10 seconds or so are always a “placeholder” image instead of the stream. There is nothing I can do while watching. I can of course remove it later, but not while watching.

    I am not saying that Youtube has any chance of forcing you to watch ads. But there are technical means to prevent you from skipping ads as if they were never there. The question is simply when this becomes feasible to do. At the moment it’s apparently not feasible. But this could change.





  • 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.

    They also can’t force you to look and listen to the current ads. So the “clever tracking” doesn’t need to be better than the status quo. What it could avoid is completely skipping ads as if they are not there. The server could reject giving you further frames until the time the ad runs is over. If you suppressed the ad, you still had to sit it out. 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 think the commenters intention was that YouTube could stream you the video with embedded ads. They would have to stream the content though and skipping ahead would have to be guarded serverside by some clever checks on if you received (and therefore likely seen) the section of the video with the ads.

    What probably speaks against this is that it would significantly increase their costs, since they couldn’t cache as easily anymore and always need “clever” services/servers along the way. A dumb CDN wouldn’t cut it anymore.

    I fear it’s still just a question of when it’s either cheap enough for Google to do it or when the expected returns are high enough to offset the increased costs.



  • I played Oblivion and Skyrim right at release and had a good time with both (more with Oblivion though).

    I played Gothic 1, 2 and 3 though, so I am used to games with really ugly bugs. The ones where your saved stage can get corrupted in a way that you have to load one from several hours back to correct a mistake to be able to proceed. So my threshold might be higher.








  • Quicktime events. Please make up your mind if you show me a sequence or if you want me to play. I can enjoy watching, but I don’t want to feel like I am being tested for paying attention.

    The beginning of the Tomb Raider remake pissed me off especially. You played a few minutes, then watched a minute of sequence, then play, watch, play, watch. One of the sequences took like 5 minutes, so I leaned back to enjoy when suddenly it flashes a heavy PRESS X in my face. I tried to quickly grab the controller but failed… too slow. I almost rage quit.

    I am not playing games to get stressed out…