One endgame is ad-blockers just blank the video and mute the sound in an undetectable way. Given the negative spiral that modern Internet usage often is, a moment of quiet to breathe and maybe break the cycle I would welcome.
Speaking of enshittification, whatever happened to imgur? That image does not load directly despite being a deep link. Plus it’s so low resolution the text is unreadable! I guess they are one step away from just taking down the http server altogether and just forcing everyone into their app which will connect via some proprietary protocol.
That's interesting. It loads directly for me and the quality seems fine. I have experienced the issue you're describing when attempting to direct link to Reddit images lately, though. I wonder why we're experiencing differences?
I dunno.. I open the link I posted in a private Chrome browser instance as well as Edge and in both cases it opens directly to it without showing the imgur branding around it
There's a bunch of hypothetical takes on this, but currently youtube already has ads that won't get away without interaction.
In particular, ads can get stacked if the user doesn't skip, and they get two or three ads where they would only have gotten one if they skipped the first. Then some of the ads will stop at the last frame (I think I saw that on mobile game ads that have a store button ? didn't pay attention so might be mistaken though) until the skip button is pressed.
I think the only question for Google is how much advertiser will pay to annoy their users and when will a user just give up and do something else (I'm with you on the moment of quiet: having ads show up is a good sign to close youtube and go do something else)
