Well, I can tell you that the whole damn site is so slow in SeaMonkey, with no adblocker but minimal javascript, that it enforces using Chrome (at least for me) ... tho videos aren't affected, just everything else. (Just had reason to fight with it on not-the-usual-PC, so was reminded... it was faster to hie myself to the usual-PC, root up the link I wanted, and email it to myself from there.)

But yeah, interacting bugs are a thing.

Yeah, all problems. The djinn is out of the bottle.

Who cares, if you're the marketing department, and the person you need to convince to pay for the advertising is the manager who approves the new campaign?

There is the trouble with most ads nowadays. They're no longer aimed at selling product, only at selling ads.

Okay, that's good to know. I was wondering if something could be done with a hash and a server that would not have touched the image, so anyone could confirm it; same principle.

You're not the customer. The customer is the manager who buys the ad campaign from the marketing department.

Is there a reason it can't be both? or that AdBlock is just more sensitive to whatever fuckery Youtube is doing?

[No idea, I use UBlock.]

Well, so far the competition ain't doing so good either. A couple weeks ago I happened to look at a Rumble video in a browser without an adblocker, and seldom have I been so assaulted by such obnoxiously-shit advertising.

Marketing isn't about selling product. It's about selling ad campaigns to managers.

Considering what I've noticed about the proliferation of bot-generated content, that may well be the case. (See my comment above about that)

And lately, even with creators I like, I find myself going, "Same old, same old..." and in the entire long list of daily updates (I have about a thousand subs) I find one or two things I want to watch.

Being stuck on a shit connection, I never watch above 720p and often below. I wonder if that's why I haven't noticed any slowdown... I'm already close to rock bottom.

That's nothing. I was convinced to install an adblocker when I was served a 30 minute unskippable crapomercial before I could watch 5 minutes of fluff.

And I'm being recommended more and more obviously bot-generated content with obvious repetition designed around multiple ads (like, every minute or two for the duration, yet such channels somehow have 12 million subs??) which makes me think that there's a big con game going on that Google isn't privy to, and is probably where most of the revenue-to-creators actually winds up.

And if it did exist, is there some reason AI couldn't incorporate this watermarking into its generated images?

Once upon a time I actually queried the Library of Congress about whether copyright was available on something that was NOT available for distribution.

I was told flat out NO COPYRIGHT.

Hmmmm.

Dealers used to be where you got the best service, and were least likely to be ripped off. They hired all the best mechanics, and it was steady work without the huge investment in tools and facility and inventory.

This changed sometime in the 1980s... some dealerships were (and are) still good, but service stopped being service and became revenue stream. And the better mechanics began migrating to being independent shops.

This seems to have happened throughout the service industries, perhaps as a side effect of acquisitions and consolidation (and concomitant cost-cutting). Frex, was a time the competent plumber worked for the big outfit; now the big outfit is a ripoff and the only good ones are the independents.

Side thought: every industry that depends on sales commissions becomes cancerous, because that's a direct conflict with the customer's interests.