Honestly, I do not understand why one should use this. I have recently seen some high quality YT videos, each of a length of 30-60 minutes. In those videos where some sponsors mentioned which took only one or two minutes. Seems perfectly OK for me to support the creators. I guess if many people block sponsor content, this kind of vids will die.
People want content without any inconvenience, it’s that simple.
If they use ads they will block.
If they ask for payment they will pirate.
Luckily these people are the minority or there would be no content to begin with
> If they ask for payment they will pirate.
If the price & convenience is right, a significant chunk (enough to offset the impact of freeloaders) will pay.
Movie piracy used to be the norm before Netflix came along, yet movies were still made.
Music piracy was the same until Spotify came along, yet there's more music than ever being produced.
> Luckily these people are the minority or there would be no content to begin with
The vast majority of people do not pirate, and most people who pay would probably find piracy unethical to begin with.
> The vast majority of people do not pirate
I would be happy to see a serious study about this. What you call piracy has been the norm for centuries and millenia for spreading culture and reinterpreting music/shows produced by other people.
In the vast majority of the world (including in the global north), the budget you have for culture is low (if any) and when you have people with a computer, copying stuff is very common. For example El Paquete in Cuba was well documented, but even growing up in France i remember so many examples of just sharing with friends (before the Internet but still).
Even for the newer generations, Youtube & Spotify started as pirate services hosting a myriad of copyrighted content. I don't know about Spotify, but i still see people watching whole movies/shows pirated on Youtube rather often when going to places with shared computers.
Sharing is the norm. Restricting sharing is delusional desire for control. Still, it's important that people making art & science make a living, although it's not just them who need to make a living in this crazy world and we'd be all better off with UBI or abolition of private property (one can dream). So you may find it interesting that HADOPI, the law that criminalized non-profit file-sharing in France actually ordered a study on piracy and media consumption back in the early 2010s, and their own study acknowledged that there was no economic loss from piracy (as people don't reduce their budget due to pirating) and the bigger pirates were also the bigger buyers.
I dare you to find a single person who "does not pirate" in any sense of the world and actively respects copyright laws. If only, someone who doesn't sing "happy birthday" song because that's actually copyright infringement. Or doesn't watch music videos on Youtube because they might be pirated. I bet that person doesn't exist, or at least that they are not the "vast majority".
this is a misleading reply because you ignore the speed and scale at which the internet allows sharing to happen. In the past, the speed of sharing was limited by communication at the time, either word of mouth, the speed of printing books etc.
If what you describe truly was the norm, then creating any sort of content for any reason would generate negative returns. This was and is rarely the case. I do not see it as unfair for content creators to be paid and to demand that you consume their content on their terms, within reason.
> If what you describe truly was the norm, then creating any sort of content for any reason would generate negative returns.
Piracy doesn't always hurt creators, and often it helps them make money. The people who pirate the most, also spend the most money on the things they pirate (https://torrentfreak.com/pirates-are-valuable-customers-not-...). Just because something is pirated that does not mean there was a loss of income for the creator. I've pirated things and enjoyed them enough that I purchased them later, and I've purchased physical copies of things and later pirated digital copies. I've also pirated things I'd never have purchased at all which means there was never any chance of any of my money going to the creator.
The vast majority of people today pirate all the time. Posting a meme that contains a copyrighted character or image, or listening to a song on youtube from anything other than an official channel, sharing a webcomic over social media, creating a GIF from a movie or TV show, streaming a video game playthrough, and downloading a youtube video to edit into a reaction video are all technically violations of copyright law. Copyright law is so draconian that what most people consider totally normal activities online are violations.
> I do not see it as unfair for content creators to be paid and to demand that you consume their content on their terms, within reason.
I agree that creators have a right for a chance at payment for their work. I disagree that I have no right to choose how to consume that content. Most of the restrictions on how media is intended to be consumed comes from the corporations who own the copyright and not the creators themselves.
When creators make it known that they want their content consumed in a certain way I'll take it into consideration. Musicians who ask that you only ever listen to their albums in their entirety and never listen to a single track I ignore. When Dave Chappelle asked fans to not watch Chappelle's Show I agreed and didn't.
Total nonsense. Before all this advertising nonsense, the web used to be literally full of people who had enough intrinsic motivation to create without compensation. People used to literally pay to have their own website in order to get their ideas out there.
Open source is literally proof of this. I make software in my free time simply because I enjoy it. I publish it out there in a variety of licenses with zero expectations. I got a GitHub Sponsors profile with zero sponsors and I'm not even mad about it.
When your job depends on it you tend to work really hard at believing that advertising is necessary and actually it's good, actually actually relevant ads are helpful! After all, if it wasn't then what am I doing with my life?
In the case of advertisers that'd be mostly lying and manipulating people while hurting them by enabling a dangerous system of surveillance that threatens themselves and their families along with the rest of us. If I were an advertiser I'd probably want to lie to myself too.
> Luckily these people are the minority or there would be no content to begin with
There is a whole galaxy of content creators who make great stuff but clearly aren’t making a living directly off content.
People like making content for tons of reasons.
>People like making content for tons of reasons.
Pretty much yeah. Just remember back to the first few years of youtube. Nobody was making any money from that but they were still doing it out of passion/hobby.
> Luckily these people are the minority or there would be no content to begin with
Most authors write books without making any money for years. They write because they enjoy writing. Not because they need it to make a living. So your statement is easily invalidated by reality
They write because they enjoy writing, but they also need to make a living. Those things are not exclusive.
If you watch YouTube enough you'll basically become aware of all the sponsors pretty quickly (and may even be a customer of some already!), so any exposure beyond that is a waste of time for all involved - if I didn't buy the product after seeing it 10 times, I won't buy it after seeing it the 11th either.
>if I didn't buy the product after seeing it 10 times, I won't buy it after seeing it the 11th either.
There is still value to the sponser in keeping a brand fresh in your mind
People forget that over-advertising can be more damaging than no- or under-advertising. Take Ryan Reynolds and Mint Mobile. I genuinely love his acting (to each their own for sure) but after being constantly bombarded with commercials for Mint Mobile, I legitimately am tired and lately avoid not just him, but Mint Mobile, Ryan Reynolds, and anything associated with him.
The problem with YouTube is not that they have ads...it is that the platform sprays for effect while claiming to care about what they are doing when any reasonable user can tell that they are simply flooding the pipes with ad content.
> The problem with YouTube is not that they have ads...it is that the platform sprays for effect while claiming to care about what they are doing when any reasonable user can tell that they are simply flooding the pipes with ad content.
From what I heard, Google’s sells ad space via an auction system. They collect information about a viewer then when said viewer watches a video/visits a website, all the ad space on the video/website goes on auction with the viewer’s characteristics attached in real time. Advertisers will look at the viewer characteristics and decide if they want to bid. The winner of the auction gets the ad spot and has their ad shown. All this is of course fully automated and over in just a few milliseconds.
What this means is, advertisers have full control over what ads you get. Ad space goes to the highest bidder. If you have money, you can spam a specific demographic to death with your ads. Google does not in anyway try to protect the quality of life of its users.
Google’s system is both amazing and disappointing at the same time. It’s an amazingly efficient way to maximize the value of ad space but disappointing in the Google doesn’t do any kind of advance user behavior modeling to see what ads the user would be most receptive to (i.e. would not frustrate the user, high probability of engagement with what’s advertised, …) instead they leave it to the “free market” (i.e. the advertisers) to figure that out.
It’s an amazingly efficient way to maximize the google profit. Google for google case, when they faked their auction in order to get more revenue…
I'm actually relatively chilled about ads. I like to see who is advertising what from a macro POV but one thing online was super bad at was spamming ads at you. The most egregious was Crunchyroll back in the day where you might see the same ad back to back 3 times in a row for every ep you watched.
Maybe the fix is actually to adjust and make the ad lower energy and more bland to target the subliminal more, assuming the online ad networks don't sort themselves out
That's why when you see an advertisement and recognize it you should make a deliberate effort to remember why you dislike the brand. If the advertiser gets to wish for awareness, I'm entitled to be the monkey's paw.
Not for me.
well then fuckem
Oh I'm so sorry, in that case I'll watch every single NordVPN sponsorship spot.
Sponsors don't get to hijack the caches of our brains. Our minds are ours, we alone will decide what information is or isn't "kept fresh".
I don't agree. I watch YouTube tech, math, and science content every day and that's not my experience.
There are a small set of products that seem to be everywhere for a while, occupying a minority of sponsor segments. But in most sponsor segments I see one-off products that I'll never see again on any channel.
On the rare occasions where they show something that looks really useful to me, I'd have to take a note because it's so unlikely to be a product I will encounter again.
I don't take those notes, so I've seen a lot of great-looking products that I'll never buy due to forgetting they exist by the time they would be useful to me. When I need something I tend to browse for what's available and/or look at reviews with a skeptical eye, as I'm sure many people do.
So the sponsor segments aren't that effective for me. But I wouldn't call them repetitive, except for a few products that come up a lot.
The human ability to rationalise blocking out sponsored advertising is basically infinite.
Why would people watch things they don’t like?
The human ability to justify ads is apparently also infinite but has much less valid arguments
Despite the name, it actually blocks a lot more than just sponsors. It can be set to automatically skip intros, outros, recaps, like and subscribe reminders, non-music sections of music videos, and other "fluff".
It significantly boosts the signal to noise ratio, and makes YouTube a much better experience.
That sounds very useful on the non-ad improvements, and oddly enough I might try it for these areas. The sponsor mentions don't really bother me and I just skip them if they're not relevant. Sometimes it's kind of neat to see one and think "Oh, this creator got sponsored by <big deal tech product>, that's cool, get paid!", or if they're sponsored by bs snake oil companies, then I may discount the creator's input a great deal on account of them not having any discernment.
It's a small data point about the content, so it can sometimes be helpful if I'm trying to decide who to pick amongst forty different 2hr lectures on the same thing.
Maybe they accept the bs snake oil sponsorships because they need the money and assume their audience is smart enough to not get tricked.
I see two scenarios:
1. The computer doesn't know whether you skipped the ad, and won't feel bad when you do.
2. The computer does track whether you watch the ad segment, and that information makes it back to the advertiser. Personally, I wouldn't want to support "creators" spying on me in this way.
In either case, the creator has no costs for you watching, and youtube has lower costs if you skip the sponsored segment. If you choose not to watch the video in the first place, it can only hurt their sponsorship.
At least for Youtube the 2nd statement is true. You can see it in videos with the spike after an ad segment.
> In either case, the creator has no costs for you watching, and youtube has lower costs if you skip the sponsored segment.
I'm pretty sure the youtuber gets money from google for views even if you don't view their sponsored content section (if someone knows better please let me know) and Google makes money by collecting data on what you watch, how often, when, using what device, from what IP address, etc.
Really? They will die? Are you suggesting that long form video didn’t exist before YouTube sponsors?
Innovation requires disruption, which requires competition, which YouTube has none of. If you want long form video content to survive in the medium to long term it needs to be possible to make a living in a diversity of ways and not be dependent on just one provider. So in that sense supporting the existing system only serves to reinforce the failure of long form content, as eventually a system without substantial competition will move to reduce cost and eventually focus only on the more profitable short form content (which is what’s happening).
The current war between YouTube and its users wouldn’t be possible if there were any viable alternatives at all.
I would think if you really cared about long form creators you’d support platforms that paid properly and didn’t keep 45% of their revenues. Even Apple only keeps 30% and they get deeply criticized, but whenever YouTube comes up people come out defend them. And all of this happens before subscription revenue, and it doesn’t include any of the other revenue Google takes off the top like landing page ads, sponsored promotion, etc.
Long form is in danger because of YouTube’s shift towards short form video. We should be pushing for competitors and not allowing them this insanely dominant position to an entire Internet content type.
Are you saying that YT takes 45% of the money a YouTuber negotiates directly with a sponsor to talk about them for 1-2 minutes in a long-form video?
Sponsorblock can also skip theme songs, recaps, and other parts of content you may not want. I also enjoy being able to show my children certain content from regular YouTube without having them subjected to the ads or me scrolling around.
I have it configured to not skip ads on a few creators who:
1- Makes good, useful content that I watch often. 2- Doesn't abuse sponsorship sections. Sponsor segment at the beginning of a video? Auto-skip. Half the video is about the sponsor? Auto-skip. Constantly gets sponsorship from spam/fraudy/irrelevant companies? Auto-skip.
For all the channels that doesn't fall into these categories: tough luck.
it'll lead to more hidden advertisement
If you’re not going to buy the sponsored product you’re just wasting time and bandwidth by watching the sponsor segment
Besides skipping sponsor segments, it has many other useful features such as marking/skipping intros and outros, filler/jokes, and marking the timestamp of the video highlight which is useful if you want to skip 20 minutes of filler and jump to the part the thumbnail promises.
> I do not understand why one should use this.
Because we don't want to be advertised to. There is no need for any further justification.
> I guess if many people block sponsor content, this kind of vids will die.
Let them die.
Try using sponsorblock for a few weeks and then report back...
I think it's one of those things like shoes... Nobody thinks they need shoes till they try them, and then they tend to wear them all the time.
> In those videos where some sponsors mentioned which took only one or two minutes. Seems perfectly OK for me to support the creators.
There is no good reason to force ads on anyone. I dont care if the creator needs to make a living out of youtube. Thats their problem and they should use stuff like patreon instead.
On my laptop alone SponsorBlock has skipped 5225 segments, which equals to 1d 20h. That's a lot of time I would waste by watching all of these.
Also, if you are fine with sponsor spots, you probably would have to also be okay with watching ads, so no adblocking either then.
In most cases sponsored content has the same problem as traditional ads but because it is coming directly from someone people see as more reliable viewers might fall for it quicker. With the added disadvantage of those ads having no real regulation and opaque quality checks, if any by the creator.
One example that comes to mind is how a lot of financial creators pushed crypto products.
This kind of sponsor*
I do not understand why one should use this
I don't care to sit through sponsor reads, nothing more to it than that. When I'm viewing on a client that doesn't support sponsorblock, I'll manually seek to the end of the segment. Supporting the creator is great; I pay for YouTube Premium, though thanks to uBlock Origin I wouldn't see the add if even if I stopped paying. To a couple creators, I send a regular donation. If I could spend another $10/mo to make up for any revenue my sponsorblock usage loses other creators, I'd do that, but I'm less enthusiastic about regularly listening to sales pitches for the same products over and over again.
Also: I'm not sure how common it is for YouTube sponsorship contracts to have payment contingent on the view count for the section of the video with the sponsored segment, and I'm not sure if the way sponsorblock skips such segments is visible to YouTube's analytics. With at least some of the most prolific sponsors of creators I watch (Audible, Brilliant, etc) the payout is based on how many viewers sign up for a trial through the affiliate link. And YouTube has no incentive to make it easy for creators to share their detailed analytics with third-party sponsors, since independent sponsorships cut YouTube out of the deal. YouTube would prefer creators replace their independent sponsor reads with mid-roll ads.
I really don't care about sponsor block (I mean I don't mind these parts of the videos), but adblock on YouTube is absolutely essential. And these apps usually when they have adblocl this includes sponsor block.
So what are we paying premium for if the creator pushes their own ads? Anyhow, when I was watching TV year's ago, I hardly ever stayed on a channel during the ads break. I won't sacrifice my time being sold on mostly rubbish which I wouldn't buy anyway (vpn, brilliant etc.)
Yeah this is the best version. I liked newpipe but their attitude to sponsorblock is tiring.
But I moved to libretube now. Newpipe kept throwing up errors when I jumped around a video.
I use sponsorblock on desktop, and sometimes I find the parts that they skip annoying. I don't fully agree with where and when they skip things. Watching Hot Ones today, they had a segment about how they have Hot Ones Hot Pockets now. and it skipped over it. But also, the hot pockets were a big part of the episode. For LTT videos, they skip the entire segue, instead of leaving the segue and then skipping the sponsor. The segues are a meme. They aren't sponsorship. Another channel I watch tests microphones and uses ad read to demo demo different mic quality. At that point skipping the ad read is skipping the actual content of the video. There's a few channels that mix the ad read into the context of what they are doing, and skipping those sections skips over important context for the rest of the video, and then i have to rewind into the sponsor part to see what is going on.
I actually agree with newpipe to some degree. There is very bad sponsorship, and there is light mentions of sponsorship or sponsorship adjacent content. not everything is black or white. Sponsorblock makes it all or nothing (they have different categories but I often disagree with what they put into the categories).
I wish I could turn it on per channel. because some channels I hate the 2 minute long brilliant ads, but on other channels Im fine with a 5 second "we're building this thing using X company parts because X company is sponsoring the video"
I still use it, but i find it just as frustrating as it is helpful sometimes.
You can configure sponsorblock with various options. End credits, sponsored sections, lots of things
Right. My issue is that I disagree with what they consider "sponsored sections" sometimes. "Only skip sponsor segments longer than 30 seconds" isn't an option. Long ads that make up most of the video: bad. A brief passing comment about "And thanks to our sponsor for supporting this video" dont need a cut.
that entirely depends on the user contributions. you know its people manually submitting these snippets of what to skip and not automatic?
Yes, I'm aware. I suspect the users who contribute tend to fall into the category of "The host saying 'and now a word from our sponsor' or explaining that 'today we are using product X so don't be surprised when the video is different' is part of the sponsorship" because I expect that people who contribute self select into people who are very anti-anything sponsor related ... I prefer having that left in, so that the sudden cut is at least expected.
My issue is less with the tool and more with the user contributions. But until there are alternative sources for sponsorblock that fit my preferences, it seems like the options are "don't use it at all" or "use it and be frustrated from time to time". I don't really care who is at fault, I'm not trying to point fingers, I'm just saying that I understand where NewPipe is coming from. Not everyone has to agree on whether all sponsor spots are good or bad.
I actually like it being aggressive, the fewer minutes of my life I spend on content of questionable value the better, I already watch too much youtube for my own good and never find rewinding back through a skipped section worth it
This is a good perspective.
What did you actually miss? Is your life worse for it?
Realised this when Reddit removed 3rd party apps I never installed the official one, my life is no worse and they lost a user. We are just animals driven by brain chemicals, I never thought app timers were for me but I use them now
Sponsorblock does allow you to whitelist specific channels. Should be in the settings somewhere, I've only ever done it via the ReVanced app but it should still be an option on desktop.
By "on desktop" I mean FreeTube (and simply not via NewPipe or on mobile). It has options for the different types of things to skip, but my issue is with disagreeing with how overly strict they can be about flagging things as sponsor segments.
Some of it is per channel settings (some channels have way too long of sponsor segments), and some of it is just disagreement about how granular to be (on LTT they cut out the entire segue to the sponsor, and not just the sponsor spot, i dont want the LTT sponsors, but not being serious is their whole thing, I don't mind watching the segues)
users mark the segments to be skipped.
What's the channel that does ad reads to demo microphone quality?
That's such a simple and genius idea
Not the channel that OP meant, but Tom Scott recently did a video on decibel and loudness, where he reads a sponsor message during a mic check: https://youtu.be/Is_wu0VRIqQ
Sponsorblock depends on the users specifying which parts are which of course. It's not some kind of AI.
It's not perfect but I want to have the choice.
While they are aggressive, it is optional and you are trying to avoid their revenue source. So there's reason to be so picky.
I just fast-forward or the the sponsorship segments out if they are too annoying.
> I liked newpipe but their attitude to sponsorblock is tiring.
What do they mean? They dont even want to provide it as an option?
Yes, also including the "restore downvotes" functionality
There is also LibreTube that comes with SponsorBlock
LibreTube has a feature that no other piped/invidious client has, which is to have one auth instance and one view instance.
Sometimes videos are not viewable on a specific instance, but this way you can keep all your subscriptions and other settings even when switching to a different instance.
> that no other piped/invidious client has,
If I understand what you are saying, Piped has this. For example I can stream from instance-1.com but at the same time I'm logged into instance-2.com so that I can keep my favourites and settings. See "Instance" section here https://piped.video/preferences particularly the option "Use a different instance for authentication"
Currently, I think for many users Piped is completely unusable due to errors that consistently occur preventing the video from loading.
In my case at least, I can solve this by changing instance in the settings, as explained in my previous comment. Based on my experience, it seems that the less popular instances tend to have less frequent errors. Your mileage may vary though.
And Clipious
LibreTube also allows you to directly stream from YouTube without any Invidious or Piped proxy which might be handy when these proxies are slow.
Huh, quite a choice to not include screenshots.
And FreeTube for desktop (just has regular adblock). It's an alternate client with a nice UI with a similar layout to YouTube.
Yeah this is an absolute gem. Sad that original NewPipe didn't include the functionality, even optionally.
well we tried to argue about it back in the time
It annoyed me so much. Just let the users make their own choices.
But anyway I had too many issues with newpipe anyway even the fork.
Also check out BraveNewPipe, which is NewPipe x SponsorBlock with proper search options NewPipe also refuses to implement as nofix!
If the war on ablockers continues things may escalate, and the next step will soon mean deploying stronger DRM, in the same way that was tried in the fight against piracy.
There's a real parallel between the two. Streaming killed piracy for a while because the service was easy and convenient, with everything in one place. Then, streaming added more and more ads all while it became more fragmented. Now if you pay for a service, you will still see ads, and you have an increasingly limited catalog (even on Youtube, as creators move extra content on Nebula or Patreon)
The more Youtube squeezes and pushes ads, the more demand there will be for adblockers.
What is it with the disdain for paying for services people use? People often don't feel like paying for it even if they use YouTube more than other streaming services combined.
Maybe the issue is that people got so used to a decade of unlimited high-quality videos for absolutely free?
I have zero issues with paying in general.
What I don't see, is me paying for the worse service.
Youtube Premium is 12.99€ a month for me. For that small price I get to create a Google Account, accept their TOS, let them track and profile me, keep logging in everywhere (because I delete all local storage in the browser routinely) and replace the small and efficient NewPipe with the Youtube app. Futhermore I cannot download a video now and play it next month without connecting to the internet, or move it to my small dedicated video player that doesn't even have connection to the internet.
What is Googles CPM (revenue per 1000 clicks)? I don't think it comes down to more the a low cent amount. I do not watch enough video to justify the price of premium and I will never watch ads, because those are psychological warfare and completely underregulated...
If Google and all the others make a nice micro payment platform for the browser, which work anonymously and without much hassle, I will by all means pay them the amount of money which me watching the ads would have generated plus 10% service fee since they build the platform.
But not like this!
Those are the terms YouTube sets out when providing you with the service. You can either pay for it (as the terms set out), watch with ads (as the terms set out), or not watch it. All other use is effectively piracy, and they have the legal and arguably moral* right to block you for not following it.
* Yes, it does cost them money to serve and store videos, and no that doesn't disappear with scale. YouTube ingests hundreds of thousands of hours of video a day, and chances are every single video is on at least 2 continents at any given time. They don't get some insane volume price on the enterprise HDDs they use.
What terms? I don’t recall agreeing to any?
> Your use of the Service is subject to these terms, the YouTube Community Guidelines and the Policy, Safety and Copyright Policies which may be updated from time to time (together, this "Agreement").
https://www.youtube.com/t/terms
Even if you don't think you have to follow them, they can still ban you for not following their terms, or not agreeing to them. They are not under an obligation to serve you video unauthenticated and/or without receiving what they expect to receive in return (agreeing to their terms and thus paying via ads or money).
There’s a terms.txt on my desktop that says by sending me data my browser can choose whether or not to render it. By sending me video data you agree to these terms.
And they're blocking you from receiving video? That's the whole point of this post.
Not sure what you mean. I can view them just fine.
I mean them blocking you from viewing it due to using an ad-blocker (or otherwise not using an official client). The OP comment was about "the war on ad blockers", which is what this thread is about.
I haven't agreed to any of that; don't remember signing anything. This stuff does not hold up in EU. My device, my rules.
This is in the situation they block you from watching if you don’t watch are. They are under no obligation to serve you/your device, so they can institute any amount of technical requirements to gain access to the content it hosts, those requirements being plainly laid out in the terms.
Of course they get insane volume discounts. All big tech companies do. It makes me cry to see how much we pay for a ThinkPad. I wish I could buy one for that :')
Regarding morals I don't don't care. Not worth a discussion :)
> watch with ads (as the terms set out)
There is nothing there forcing me to watch the ads, or that forces the user agent (aka the browser) to behave in the way that server running the application wishes to.
I don’t mind paying. I do mind paying $15 and then see still ads (Thanks to NordVPN for sponsoring this comment). Plus the algorithm keeps getting worse and worse.
I’d prefer to pay like $5. I don’t need YouTube music.
Sponsorblock is 95%+ effective against these
Whole point of youtube premium is getting rid of ads on mobile/tvs
Sure, and there are sponsorblock solutions for both mobile and TV
I don’t understand this logic. Why do you think it would be cheaper without YouTube music? YouTube music literally is just YouTube. Every song on there can be found on YouTube, the only reason it’s even a separate app and included in premium is due to the lack of ads facilitating a better music listening experience.
Because YouTube themselves considers Music as an add-on, and was willing to have a cheaper Premium tier without Music in certain countries before they discontinued it.
https://9to5google.com/2023/09/26/youtube-premium-lite-shut-...
The hilarious thing about all the VPN ads is that they are collecting all the same tracking information as Google and Facebook and aren’t even protecting you from that existing tracking.
$5/mo without YouTube Music would be an easy buy for me. I’d gladly pay that to support creators, remove ads on my tv, and to stop having to sideload uyou+ on my phone. I have zero interest in YouTube music as Apple Music has great offline support on the watch for my backcountry rides.
People will always rationalize their not paying. Tracking, ethics, whatever. Anything other than abstaining from use, lol.
I'd gladly not use YouTube if the creators uploaded their videos somewhere else.
Plenty of creators upload their things both to YouTube and Nebula, and I choose Nebula for the ones that do. The app isn't perfect, but it gets the job done.
YouTube is too lucrative of a platform to pass up. It's not just hosting, but literally sending droves of viewers their way, and making sure those viewers are paying to watch in a way that enables those creators to earn a living. Take any large creator and 95-100% of their regular fanbase probably wouldn't follow them to another platform (unless it's so big that all/most of their favorite creators also go to the same platform).
Any other platform not only needs to offer cheap/free video hosting, but also send tons of users content similar to their interests in a way that enables new and up-and-coming creators to grow, and it needs to provide a way to pay out those creators, or there's a negative incentive to send any viewers to the other platform that strictly makes them no money.
Nope. Thanks to this site i (finally, and only about an hour ago) got newpipe from fdroid, subscribed to all my channels, and sod youtube, I'm not going back. An appropriate ad occasionally, no problem. But recently?? With newpipe there's a way out: i will happily contribute.
Using New pipe is not abstaining from YouTube, lol.
I don't mind paying for services.
I mind paying to get the privilege my data exploited.
I mind paying to a company that use its infinite bags of money to outspend any competition unfairly.
I mind paying after getting blackmailed to accept a new deal when they made sure they left no other choice in the market.
I mind paying for a service that is optimized for "engagement" instead of my own well-being.
I mind paying to a company that doesn't know the time to stop growing and wants to crawl into every aspect of my life.
> I mind paying for a service that is optimized for "engagement" instead of my own well-being.
> I mind paying to a company that doesn't know the time to stop growing and wants to crawl into every aspect of my life.
It's worth recognising that as an ad-supported service, YouTube has an incentive to maximise the watch-time of its users and that this incentive goes away when a user starts paying monthly. But until they begin to earn more from subscriptions than ads I can't see how this changes. Maybe there's a universe in which the adblock crackdown actually accelerates the decline in ad-viewership and YouTube becomes incentivised to stop cramming cheap ad-friendly content down our throats and becomes a platform for actual high-quality content. For now, it's probably better to support platforms that actually already work on this model such as Nebula.
+1
And I mind that paying forces me to give my credit card to a companies that have proven to work against me.
I mind that google will take over my entire phone if I connect to any service with a google account because I paid for it and not just login to that single service.
I mind that it will collect all that data if I don't have an adblocker anyway, just not show me ad, and then give it to gov entities (see PRISM).
What I don't mind is paying. I pay for spotify, for neflix, for dynalist, for kagi, for chatgpt, for codepilot, for github...
But I do mind that many people like you on HN accuses us of being dishonest.
It's not disdain for paying. Netflix proved that. It's disdain for getting nickel and dimed and fleeced and losing access without warning.
What I do have a disdain for with Netflix, is paying for the version with 4k access and then struggling to actually get the service I paid for.
Around two years ago I wanted to watch Squid Game on my MacBook Pro + external 4k monitor, and iirc still couldn’t get it working in 4k after various yak shaving. Perhaps it’s now supported, but it felt pretty ridiculous to me that I can’t even access the full service I’m paying for.
Well, and there's a difference in usage. When I use Netflix, I'm usually either at my desktop computer or sitting on my couch, selecting a movie for myself to watch. It feels like a good old traditional media experience.
YouTube pops up everywhere, on every system I use. Sometimes I'm sitting down to watch something longer, even a movie, but often it's just links from friends or coworkers, or from news articles on Reddit or Hacker News. Sometimes it's lessons, sometimes it's breaking news, sometimes it's 5-second meme videos. I use it at work and at home. I might be on my wife's iPad, or my work phone, or some library computer.
I'm not viewing all those videos on my personal devices logged in using my own personal account. I don't feel comfortable logging in with my personal account everywhere.
And there's something especially annoying about constantly seeing ads on a service I'm paying for.
On top of that, logging in everywhere lets Google track everything I view--every random Reddit click--and Google's the single biggest data collector & exploiter I know. I'm paying them to let them track me.
All told, paying for YouTube feels kinda icky in a way that paying for Netflix does not. I do pay for YouTube Premium, but I still prefer to watch videos without logging in, (ed:) with an adblocker.
I think part of the disdain is that YouTube was ad-free until they ran all the competition out of business.
YouTube hasn't been ad-free for over 17 years.
Digital media can be copied infinitely for free. Thus delivering any benefit to infinite consumers. Thus multiplying that benefit infinitely.
They want to choke that? May as well tell the wind to stop blowing.
> Maybe the issue is that people got so used to a decade of unlimited high-quality videos for absolutely free?
Or the videos aren't that high quality, and are just barely at the level of value where people feel like the time spent watching (or leaving it on as background noise) was worth it, but not at the level of value where time spent+ads or money are worth it.
Like I've watched a LTT video before. I suppose I was very bored. Would I ever pay to watch it? No. Do I even think it was worth the time I spent watching? Probably not. It's like listening to some stranger at the pub tell a story. You might listen if it's interesting, but you probably wouldn't pay them for it.
There's tons of low quality, low effort stuff on there like vlogs, clean/cook/shop with me, hauls, etc. It's a hobby for the creator. People don't want to pay for it because it's not worth anything.
Google has dumped so many gallons of urine into my cheerios over the years that I will never, ever pay them for a consumer service. They have spent literally decades now being absolute assholes to consumers. If they charged for Youtube from day 1 then maybe. But at this point the reputational harm is permanent.
I do pay for Patreon and Nebula. But Google will never get a cent from me.
I was happy paying for YouTube Premium, but they just doubled the price in my geo. So yeah, i'm considering not paying.
What is it with the disdain for mental health, privacy or political mindfulness? Big tech don't feel like paying attention to people even if people use Youtube more than other streaming services combined. Maybe the issue is that big tech got so used to a decade of unlimited high-quality tracking for absolutely free?
Lack of trust. Google will find ways to enshittify YouTube even if you pay for it.
I spend a lot of money at Bandcamp because in exchange I get bits that I do what I want with. For some reason that's not as popular for video, but it would solve this issue pretty well.
The person you are replying to answered in their comment: even the paid service has ads, and a lot of the premium content has been moved off of the platform.
Actually I'm very predisposed to paying for YouTube. My experience with it however is that it presented me with ads for YouTube premium every 5 minutes and put ad screens in my way that were waaayyyyy to easy to click dozens of times a day. It wouldn't take a hint that I was interested but not ready to buy. I was trying to show someone a quick video on my phone, not revisiting my financial relationship with Google. After being treated like that, as much as I have the money and willingness to pay, I don't want to give them my money for a purely emotional reason. Some product manager somewhere at Google needs fired. Probably a lot of them.
The end game is encrypted DRM stream (which is decrypted in the display) with encoded ads (so you can't block it tinkering with JS).
I guess that only abundance of devices without DRM is stopping this scenario.
How are the ads even skippable on YouTube? I have never really had a good answer to that. I mean, why is the ad even a different stream or detectable on the client? Shouldn't the ads just be spliced into the videos if you really want to make sure people watch them? Is it because it would be prohibitively expensive to do that kind of live encoding for each viewer?
Because you could just seek over them?
Yes, but the server knows exactly what frames it has sent you and when. If you don't want to watch the ad frames there's nothing the server can do, but it can make sure to not send you the frame that comes after the ad, until the 10 seconds of the ad has passed since it sent you the last frame before the ad.
That works for pre-roll ads, forcing the client to silence them and wait at best (I believe the Twitch streaming service does this)
For mid-stream ads, that doesn't work. You could pre-fetch the ad and surrounding video early, so that you can watch buffered content while the server thinks an ad is playing.
The server would need to not allow buffering further than the next ad.
Ok, but now you see, it would be a bit more involved than just splicing together static byte streams that even a dumb CDN can accomplish.
Multistream client, continually skipping around, and stitching together buffers?
So basically you would disallow pre-buffering more than an ad's worth of video? I'm not sure about that...
Right now (or few months ago, when I tinkered with it) ads are different streams, so to skip them, ublock intercepts and alters API responses, stripping ad info. Why they're not embedded into video stream, that I don't know.
You wouldn't even need live encoding because every YouTube video is normalized and if you have two streams that were encoded with the same parameters you can cut and concatenate without re encoding
> The end game is encrypted DRM stream
That's not the endgame -- Digg:Reddit::YouTube:Vimeo is the end game, IMHO.
> encrypted DRM stream
Widevine already exists and is increasingly difficult to crack, especially the key levels required for 4k content.
> encoded ads
Only a matter of time before hardware encoders can do this on the fly
And with Microsoft pushing TPM requirements with Windows 11 it's just a matter of time before thing are locked down even further.
Only general purpose computers are stopping this scenario.
It’s surprising how many people in the comments don’t want adverts, don’t want sponsorship AND don’t want to pay anything for content.
It's the old problem of I don't care about anything that you advertised to me, don't care about most of the content that is eating your budget and simply won't stand for being called a criminal after being the reason you are a thing in the first place. You're trying to get my money, I'm trying to get your content. We both cheat. That's always been the game.
So if a store is trying to sell products, and you try to steal them, you are both cheating?
This a a very different situation. Stores are selling products or services, and they explicitly put prices on the products.
Content available freely online is much different, as there is no price and at best the hope is that the consumer sees an ad or sponsorship and that the content creator has accurate analytics as to how many saw the ads.
Your analogy would be more akin to someone stealing access to paywalled content somehow. In that case a price was put on the content and someone took if anyway, much like shoplifting.
Video streaming sites have a cost to create.
The price is ads or paying for a paid service like YouTube premium.
So you're still stealing, you just convince yourself it's ok, and that's fine.
If you go to the store on summer to enjoy the aircon, but you dont buy anything, because you just go there with a book and read your book and leave.
Are you stealing?
The aircon have a cost. Cold fresh air cost electricity that costs money.
The price is to buy stuff from the shopping centre, that gives money to the stores that pay a rent price for the local that pays for the aircon bill.
I'm not saying that ad blocking isn't stealing, there could be a case for that especially if T&Cs specifically require that ads aren't skipped, blocked, or avoided.
My only point there was that shoplifting and ad blocking are very different things. Stores don't make their products freely available to anyone willing to walk past enough ads along the way.
If I come to your house, destroy your door, steal your mom's dinner for 4 ppl, are we both cheating?
How about we compare with something actually worth comparing for? For example switching channels when there's the ad break, or turning the sound off, etc.
When I download something, I'm not "stealing it". When I block an ad, I'm not stealing either. I didn't remove 10$ from Google's bank account that was there before.
If you don't pay your electric bills you never removed money from where it was before. Does it now applies?
I signed a contract with my local power company, which I would be breaking if I did not pay them. I signed no such contract with Internet Historian.
That said, I appreciate it when content creators provide alternative ways to support them. I support dozens of creators with monthly donations and I occasionally buy merchandise when they're selling something I'm interested in. Just don't waste my time with ads.
the store is donating me products with an ad flyer
Ah the old "physical objects work the same as digital copies" argument. Yes I would download a car. You can still drive yours. I was trying to pay you for use of the car but you insisted I drive around your deadbeat family and pay for the drive through that I don't eat.
If you get people hooked by being free you can't be surprised they want it to be free
It's still free, you're not paying for anything.
I would rather not watch anything than watch ads. The cost of watching ads is my sanity.
Then pay for ad removal
Paid ad removal is not possible without signing up for more tracking. Pass.
But why would i pay when i could get it for free?
I don't want ads all over my screen when I browse the web. It doesn't mean I don't want to pay for content (I do pay). If ads were all blocked, websites would charge for content, and I believe people would pay. I would. I'm glad to pay for a better quality of life and less consumerism. Meanwhile I use NewPipe and uBlock Origin which I believe have a good impact on this society.
It's easy to pay for YouTube premium and remove ads. So why not do that?
I for one do not because I do not have a Google account, and do not want one, because I do not consent to their data harvesting practices or give money to surveillance capitalism corporations.
When I can pay creators directly with anonymous microtransactions, I will.
Why would I want to pay for anything? Consumers generally seek the lowest possible price. That's how economics works.
YouTube wouldn't be what it is if it wasn't "free".
I do pay for my internet connection and bandwidth. But obviously I found the best possible deal.
There is the busking model and I do choose to contribute a small amount to a small number of creators that I can tell put a lot of cash and effort into their uploads. But YouTube premium would cost more than all of those and I'd be paying into a monopoly, paying for MrBeast and other worthless crap and no longer paying the aforementioned creators.
Hiding behind theories of consumer behavior is not an excuse for immoral actions. Open source was never meant to be the place where open theft and piracy should thrive. And, the Robinhood sentiment isn't really applicable here because you're stealing from creators. YouTube may be owned by a multi billion dollar corporation, but it does support and bootstrapped a vibrant creator community. The more time we spend stealing content that should be supported by ads or a paid subscription the less effective we make that economy. If we want to do good here, pay some of your favorite creators with a tip, or merch, or specifically sub to their channel. Or, even better, come up with ways creators get paid more. Subverting ads is a downward spiral for things to work better for consumers and creators.
| YouTube wouldn't be what it is if it wasn't "free".
People forget Gopher was around before WWW and wanted to charge for commercial entities. If they'd not done that then the outcome of the internet would have been different (imho)
https://www.nic.funet.fi/pub/vms/networking/gopher/gopher-so...
Isn't that... Bit selfish?
Also, let's start a competing service. How to pay for... Bandwidth alone? Forget about talented engineers or anything else.
Maybe it's a strong word but choking the revenue stream but still getting the fruits of it - there's another word for it.
One way to choke the revenue stream would be not to watch at all.
I don't pay for YouTube but it's the most useful web property. Arguably alongside Wikipedia.
Download bandwidth can be paid for by re-sharing content with peers via upload bandwidth. It works for millions of people torrenting content right now.
Once you remove ads and the ability to track and target people, peer to peer works. Add anonymous microtransactions to creators and you end up with LBRY.
I don't mind LTT-style sponsorships that are relevant and neatly presented as part of the video, but randomly jump cutting to a car insurance ad just ruins the experience and it's easy to see why people would block these.
My (at the time) 2 year old daughter actually cried the first time she saw an ad on the YouTube app.
Not to mention the content that many teens and kids obviously watch is being bombarded with ads for all sorts of things.
YT went too far from being fair for consumers personally. Google cuts off monetization almost randomly at times, creators then have to embed the ads directly into their video, bypassing Google's ad platform and inconsistent monetization terms, the consumers now have to watch through Google's ads and creator's ads. I'm paying Google for YT premium to get rid of its ads, there's no alternative to get rid of shit the creator decides to sell out for. And there should be no sponsorship deals in the first place, since Google should be paying them. So I feel justified to use SponsorBlock.
There's at least three kinds of videos on Youtube and friends.
The first are ones not related to making money in any way, someone doing their thing "for fun" or similar.
The second are ones where it might be someone's "day job" but the money isn't coming in through youtube ads. For example, a band putting their songs online for essentially free because money comes from fans going to concerts, buying CDs, or merchandise. Having the videos available essentially for free means that more people can discover the music and maybe become paying fans. Or a cook who's brought out their own book showing some of the recipes online hoping that people will buy the book. Or a martial arts school putting videos of some training or contests online hoping among other things that people will join up for real.
The third are the "content creator" ones where the author's whole business is the videos themselves and the ads are their primary revenue stream. It's not that there aren't some really good offerings in this space - there are - but if the choice is Youtube with the full ads/tracking/targeting soup or not at all, my life will carry on without this category.
Nonsense. Blocking internet ads is simply the 21st century version of changing channels during commercial breaks.
There are zero payment methods available for those of us who opt out of surveillance capitalism, and we refuse to be excluded from culture either, so we consume content for free and without ads until alternatives emerge.
LBRY has the right idea with microtransactions.
I would like to pay YT/creators with my own PC with several TB disk space and 100Mbps connection (even 1Gbps inside country) which might host some videos by the network's choice.
The fact that you find this noteworthy shows how deeply ingrained capitalism is in your thought process. You are unable to think anything outside of it is possible.
Yes, absolutely fair tbh.
Bit of context: grew up in Sudan, with embargo and us sanction (also Cuba and Iran and lately Syria), there was not even a possibility to pay for these subscriptions, torrent and modded apps were the viable options (also economical factors).
Another benefits to that: while I was in Sudan, I didn't even have to use so many ad blocks, major ads providers (Google and fb) blocked Sudan and that was absolutely great!
I don't mind paying to services, but it should definitely factor in economical status per each country
For iOS users, check out “yattee” for a similar setup
Highly recommend using F-Droid-capable phones/mobile support systems. Perhaps one day the iOS ecosystem will recognize the economic value of democratizing the platform, but until that day it's better to use open source software and as open of hardware as possible.
This is good advice. If you own an iOS device you should consider not owning an iOS device.
As a long time iOS user, I used a Pixel with Graphene for a whole year.
Android has so many rough edges, and the Pixel hardware is still a few years behind the iPhone. I switched back.
I miss syncthing and being able to install the apps that I want, but my phone is too important a device for rough edges.
GrapheneOS did not meet my needs for sovereign control of my own device, and iOS is worse in this regard, so I gave up cell phones entirely 2 years ago. Turns out they are not as necessary as we convince ourselves they are.
Interesting. I'd never used an android before, and recently got a Pixel 7a on which I am running lineageos. Haven't found any rough edges other than that the home screen sometimes hangs fixed by turning the screen off and on again which takes less than 5s. What rough edges did you encounter?
I would love not to, but there is not a single human-sized (as in can be operated by human hand) android phone on the market that is also not a slow budget ohone. Now there is no iphone either, but the last minis should last a while.
Apple's moving away from them as well, to the detriment of their design edge.
[0] https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/12/23868428/iphone-13-mini-l...
The parent comment was a suggestion for an iOS alternative.
Why did you feel the urge to push unsolicited advice? I honestly don’t get it.
Currently, iOS is a substandard platform for software freedom. While it has done a fairly decent job implementing a good user interface, it comes at the cost of freedom on mobile devices, leaving users and developers to the capricious whims of a single company. When that company decides to break encryption for any external group, is eventually hacked, or other myriad of other single single failure node situations occur, the collateral damage is massive.
I think they are going to be forced to open the platform soon, per the new Digital Markets Act by the EU.
Once again, the EU does something right for it's citizens in the face of exploitative practices.
I am very happy with Vinegar for Safari - a simple adblock + PiP + background play extension
You can also use altstore to sideload uyou+.
"musi" is also a great advert-free YouTube client for iOS.
NewPipe is the best. Dunno how people watch YouTube without it. You can also subscribe to channels from it without a YouTube account.
Agree, but unfortunately I still can't use it to stream to my Chromecast so I need to go to the YouTube app when I want to play stuff on TV
SmartTube supports Chromecast/Android TV: https://github.com/yuliskov/SmartTube
To be clear, it doesn't support casting, which is what the previous commenter was asking for.
It runs directly on android tv. The app even says that there is no support for phones or tablets so casting isn't going to work.
I also agree that casting is the major missing feature from all these apps. Mirroring might be a substitute for some but, again to be clear, it isn't the same as casting and in most cases the quality is going to suffer significantly.
Can't you just display your screen using chromecast? I use newpipe on my tv all the time by juat plugging my phone in via HDMI.
I'm watching fine on Firefox with uBlock Origin. I mean, I don't get ads. What else am I missing by not using NewPipe (I don't care about downloading videos).
The parent wrote
> You can also subscribe to channels from it without a YouTube account.
This means that losing your Google account does not mean losing your playlist.
Big tech accounts can be surprisingly fragile.
FYI Google takeout lets you set regular, automatic exports of any of your Google data (e.g. you can have a backup of your YouTube subscriptions, playlists etc emailed to you every month).
One can't switch to a different tab, out of the browser or lock the phone while continuing listening to the video/podcast/music.
It's extremely simple: I pay for Premium.
How can you disable tiktok on youtube? I've been a paying customer for years and I would happily pay more to remove this cancer.
Do you mean their Shorts feature?
I can't find a source which has all the financial figures for YouTube, but YouTube had a gross revenue of 29 bn USD in 2022. Alphabet had 55 bn USD in net income in 2022 of which how much was YouTube's share in the net income is unknown (or at least I couldn't find it).
Let's use some assumptions to get to a number.
1. Let's assume that out of the 29 bn USD revenue that YouTube brings in 55% is shared with creators. Thus we are left with 13 bn USD.
2. We know that YouTube's share in the overall revenue of Alphabet was 10.5%. Let's assume that all of Alphabet's properties were proportionately profitable (highly incorrect assumption). If the properties were proportionately profitable, YouTube's would have bought in a net income of 5.75 bn.
3. In the past it has been reported that YouTube has been breakeven from a profitability perspective.
This means that YouTube's net profit is in the range of 0 to 5bn USD. This is at best a gross profit margin of 17% which is not good for an internet services company.
I strongly believe technology like NewPipe should exist and companies shouldn't push for more DRM. But end users should not misuse open technologies so much so that companies end up with no other option but E2E encryption for video.
I wonder if a torrent style equivalent for bandwidth sharing for things like YouTube content creators could work. Like you get ads unless you seed enough and then no ads when you consume.
I think it'd only work as a near seamless ui experience and not actually using torrents or any extra setup or complications. Probably branded a bit differently.
Bandwidth costs money, YouTube can probably do it cheaper than end users at scale. But this isn’t about reduced bandwidth expenses, this is about maximising profit extraction.
> But this isn’t about reduced bandwidth expenses, this is about maximising profit extraction.
Arent these goals one and the same?
Profit maximization is required under a capitalist system. By optimizig bandwidth expenses, you are achieving profit maximization.
No, the cost of bandwidth is less than their subscription value, presumably providing this option would result in less profit despite lower server costs, but they already have a global CDN so I assume it’s cost is relatively low anyway. I imagine if this was a path they wanted to go down, they could crowdsource it via chrome directly, without providing any positive value for users.
Exactly what you described exists and is called PeerTube.
The problem with p2p for video is that the storage and bandwidth requirements are enormous most platform consumers are using mobile devices with limited storage and bandwidth which would have difficulty contributing to the network.
Maybe some type of appliance one could run out of their home to buy in or something? But a lot of home users have terrible upload or no internet at all.
Peertube is great but could never keep up with the sheer volume of data uploaded to YouTube.
> Let's assume that out of the 29 bn USD revenue that YouTube brings in 55% is shared with creators. Thus we are left with 13 bn USD.
That’s a very poor and totally off assumption to start with, and makes it seem like YouTube is extremely generous. I’d guess YouTube shares, at best, 20% of the ad revenue with the content creator.
It's 55%. This is the first non-Google result from a Google search:
https://www.yrcharisma.com/the-youtube-revenue-split-who-kee...
Yes but this is only for creators who are large enough. Smaller creators still get ads on their videos, but dont get paid for it
I also recommend GrayJay https://GrayJay.app
Louis Rossmann had a video introducing this app, but I can’t find it. Did YouTube force him to take down that video, anybody knows?
Yes... youtube gave the videos a community guideline strike and removed them. You can watch the videos in this thread: https://x.com/futo_tech/status/1719468941582442871?s=46
Wow… that’s… dystopian.
I tried that, and wanted to like it but the lack of video recommendations killed it for me. I couldn't even see videos from my subscriptions. Major disappointment.
Subscriptions work perfectly for me. Better than on YouTube tbh.
What are your experiences with it? Interested to hear a review from a user.
I use it as my main YouTube app on my phone, it's working nice. One drawback for me is the failure if you have too many YouTube subscriptions (>200-300). I removed some creators and it's working fine. You see Grayjay's likes and comments on videos but there are very few of them (you also see YouTube comments and likes). I wish the community around it grew, it has potential.
I use it daily, has been amazing so far
Just a small note about it: it's not open-source and their excuse is… pretty poor. They don't give you modification rights at all, so you can't even legally contribute to the project.
The platform support is implemented inside "plugins" and they are under AGPL-3.0, so… can you even distribute the application, considering that the licence of the application and plugins seem to be incompatible at my non-lawyer first glance?
Their excuse for their application licence so that they can legally prevent people from uploading ad-infested versions in Google Play and similar platforms under their name… but that's why MPL 2.0 and Apache 2.0 have trademark exclusion clauses.
Another reason why Android is the superior phone OS.
iOS has Yattee[1].
It's technically a personal video-watching app, not a Youtube app, which you're supposed to link with your own personal video server, but the server APIs it is compatible with are the same APIs that are exposed by Invidious and Newpipe instances. This is not a coincidence.
I'm sure Apple is going to delist it from the App Store at some point (App Store guidelines are just that, guidelines, and there's no getting around them with a weird loophole like you can do with actual laws), but it works for now.
> I'm sure Apple is going to delist it from the App Store at some point (App Store guidelines are just that, guidelines, and there's no getting around them with a weird loophole like you can do with actual laws), but it works for now.
Hence F-Droid, which cannot exist on iOS.
Not yet! The EU’s Digital Markets Act will go into force soon.
True! Unfortunately, I fully expect Apple to keep alternate app stores locked out in other locales. I'll be happy if I'm proven wrong, but they've been so determined in fighting this that it seems likely they'll consider it to be worth the extra work.
a 30% profit margin business for barely any real work/capital investment, this is a business they will fight for.
We don't know how the DMA will actually be interpreted.
There are three aspects that people often conflate, the ability to install apps from outside Apple's App Store, the ability to install apps that Apple hasn't notarized, and the ability for developers to skip paying a percentage of app sales to Apple.
We might get all three of these, but we might also get just one or two. I can imagine a world where you'll be free to install a .ipa from any website and pay for in-app purchases with your credit card, but where the .ipa will have to go through App Review and the developer will be audited to ensure that the necessary fees go to Apple.
Any hint on how to actually do this? For those of us who are comfortable with Insidious or Newpipe.
Does this actually work? I've tried a couple of times but it nearly always hangs on loading videos, and when it does load it gets stuck buffering every few seconds. Perhaps the Piped instance I'm connected too is overloaded?
It's almost perfect, except for the fact that I really like being able to thumbs-up videos I like, to support the creators. I feel really uncomfortable not having that option.
How does giving a thumbs up “support the creators”?
I’m sure they’d rather you watch the ads or pay for premium.
Not my comment, but maybe support isn't the right word. One person I watch on YouTube says something like "if you enjoyed this video, give a thumbs up. If you didn't, give a thumbs down. It helps me understand which topics you find interesting."
OR, hear me out... Subscribe to the patreon or other non-google revenue stream
- So long as they give their sole custom to Google/Youtube and don't support other platforms in any way, even though it's trivial to upload an mp4 onto another platform and set the title and description same as yt, I don't feel too bad being in a tiny fraction of a minority that doesn't want to have a Google account in order to 'smash' the like button. There's no least evil to be picked here, no market forces at play, it's using google or bust. On the whole, I feel alright not supporting that choice, though part of me also feels as you do of course.
- It's also not as though you're upvoting/liking videos other than theirs, so they won't rank lower because you didn't support them.
- I'm sure the folks at google figured out that watching a video is already a sign of the content being interesting. When using the official (web) player, it clearly uses this to generate recommendations (to many people's frustration)
- You can always share videos with friends or on Mastodon etc. where appropriate, that draws more eyeballs than a passive thumbs up button anyway and thus helps the creator more
What is the other platform you suggest for video uploads? Vimeo? Facebook? Twitch?
> It's also not as though you're upvoting/liking videos other than theirs, so they won't rank lower because you didn't support them.
The math doesn't work like that—if you can't Like any videos, then all of the videos you watch have an infinitesimally smaller Liked ratio and count than they would if you could. Any given video isn't competing with all the other videos you watch, it's competing with all the other videos anywhere on the site.
The big benefit of newpipe besides skipping ads is that you don't need an account. Which you need for those upvotes anyway.
That made me think of an interesting feature idea: Selectively enable ads on certain channels you'd like to support a bit more.
Installable via F-Droid, always a good sign.
f-droid website says "This app promotes or depends entirely on a non-free network service" -- whats that all about?
Because YouTube itself is non-free as in proprietary software
right, i knew that -- thanks max :D
You should use peertube instead. Saddly there isn't much content there, but try to look there first and reward those who post there with your eyeballs.
Peertube is useful, but so little used that I have 3 of the top 20 videos on Hardlimit, and they're tech demos of a rather obscure program. The most popular has 2,500 views.
What might be useful is some way to use PeerTube distribution on any .mp4 file. Peertube is only a caching system, not a replicated hosting system like BitTorrent. You have to host one copy of the file somewhere. You should be able to put that master copy on any low-end web server, generate a Peertube URL for it, and let Peertube spool it out. Peertube works by mooching bandwidth off the people watching, so as viewership goes up, so do serving resources.
I disagree with f-droid on using the term "non-free" for network services, because it conflates the issue of software freedom with SaaS.
See https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-s...
> Many free software supporters assume that the problem of SaaSS will be solved by developing free software for servers. For the server operator's sake, the programs on the server had better be free; if they are proprietary, their developers/owners have power over the server. That's unfair to the server operator, and doesn't help the server's users at all. But if the programs on the server are free, that doesn't protect the server's users from the effects of SaaSS. These programs liberate the server operator, but not the server's users.
Absolutely, though the default F-Droid repo is a little slow to update (in case of the twice-a-year "Youtube changed their UI, breaking the world" update), so Newpipe team recommends their own (third party) F-Droid repo[1], where the updates are fresh off the press.
[1]: https://newpipe.net/FAQ/tutorials/install-add-fdroid-repo/
I've been using this for years to download YouTube videos when I go on trips, it makes it super easy since you can just share the link directly from YouTube to NewPipe and it'll pop up a neat download UI to select quality and threads to use.
Really great app for that purpose, although I will say I just used ReVanced for general YouTube browsing on my phone.
I believe the one thing i see lacking for newpipe is viewing livestreams. Revanced is the way to go for a good youtube experience, but i use newpipe for downloading and saving a video offline.
I can view live streams in NewPipe 0.25.2 and I think I airways did.
This is a live stream I just watched to check that it works https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydYDqZQpim8
It's a water pool in the Namib desert, so safe for work
Confirmed, with seeking.
There were times in the past where this was not the case, but it was likely 0.24 or before.
I've watched livestreams in newpipe. A few hours after it ended I used new pipe again to download the whole thing to see the parts I missed (new pipe wouldn't let me rewind to the start of the livestream after I joined)
v0.26.0 (the next release) should support viewing livestreams. See https://github.com/TeamNewPipe/NewPipe/issues/10471
If you tube blocks their API, would it be game over for such clients? Or how does it work?
iirc it loads the page as if it were a browser, then scrapes and downloads the video.
What prevents YouTube from sending ad and the actual video in a single video download/stream?
Probably the cost of creating that stream realtime while ads spots are being bidded on
They don't use official APIs (if you do you need to register a dev account and this sort of thing would most likely be against the TOS), just like yt-dlp they reverse engineer all sorts of apps youtube has (the webpage, the mobile webpage, the TV app, the android app, ...) and thus get all sorts of undocumented APIs to scrap from.
No mentions about ads?..
No ads. Also play in background or popout window.
GrayJay is a new contender on the block that might be worth looking at too.
Indeed but that also lacks sponsorblock :(
The site mentions: "without annoying ads"
Just be careful that there are many clones filled with ads and sh*t on the Play Store; Play Store where they, the real app, cannot be
Paying $1 to a creator earn them more than all the ads you would watch during your lifetime. Applies to websites also.
But noone wants to pay.
I pay. People pay, stop saying no one wants to pay, it's wrong. One example that comes in mind is Wikipedia: no ads, people pay.
Google and other companies that use Wikipedia pay a lot more than "people".
That's just plain lie.
There is A LOT o f creators supported by pure money donations from individual creators, or mostly by those. A lot of them support themselves by selling merch. Which is nothing new, as nowadays a lot of small/medium size bands live of selling merch.
When a major Polish radio, legendary 3rd national radio channel, went to shit after several decades (fired important staff and dummed down offer) people literally crowdfunded a full successor, with same famous presenters and so on. When that one started to push weird agenda to much and diverged from original goals... There was another one crowdfunded, pulled a lot of other major famous personell, and runs as a huge project successfully from Patreon donations.
These examples are not even unique.
I’m looking for an iOS client that will allow me to block certain keywords from being displayed as recommendations?
E.g. Minecraft, mrbeast, etc
I want my kids to watch something other than their hundredth Minecraft walkthrough, screaming YouTuber video..
Just block YouTube, your kids will find other things to do. If you find a good video then watch it with them on your device
Feels like an opportunity lost.
I want them to explore on their own, including online content.
I just want the topics for videos to be more diverse.
been there. If you block something, they downgrade to something even worse, each bloody time.
It will never be as good as Youtube Vanced (god rest it's soul) but it gets the job done, despite the occasional bug
If you didn't know, there is YouTube ReVanced [1].
Just a small correction: it's not "YouTube" ReVenced, it's just ReVenced. ReVenced is a group dedicated to patching apps, but the group itself doesn't provide any patched apps.
It does provide this app to patch other apps: https://github.com/ReVanced/revanced-manager
Been using this one forever. It's pretty good. Every now and then Youtube changes something in their API, then Newpipe usually needs to a day or two to adjust.
Sometimes it's been several weeks (partly the fault of F-Droid's repo), but it's worth waiting. I refuse to watch youtube using youtube these days.
Newpipe publish their own f-droid repo. No need to wait.
Anything like this for Ios? Im now downloading vids or sound files from youtube for offline use with invidio.us
Yattee, needs a bit more tinkering to setup though (it's a general network videoplayer not an alternate YT client like NewPipe)
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/yattee/id1595136629
https://np.reddit.com/r/Yattee/comments/13d3lj7/how_to_set_u...
Sideload uYouPlus / uYouExtra with Altstore
I've been using this on android for more than 6 years. Love being able to quickly download a local copy of video or music as I'm boarding a flight or train. Highly recommend getting it using fdroid instead of apk because there have been points when youtube made changes that break the app and you'll need to get the latest update
Highly recommend the NewPipe upstream repository within F-Droid, they usually fix breakage right away whereas F-Droid repository version can be a few days behind.
how long until this gets nuked like youtube vanced?
There's revanced, just installed it today.
Youtube seems to be quite efficient with blocking all opensource players. They change the API regulary on purpose. Never had such app working longer than few weeks.
Been using FreeTube daily for the last few years. They stay on top of it.
I use Skytube; I wasn't aware that Newpipe had a download feature.
skytube is nice for search since you can ban chans, and therefore skip the spam.
What do you guys think to GrayJay? Following the creators, not the platforms. I'm told sponser block is in the works too.
When it is open source and available on Linux I am sold.
Don't forget about android TV :-)
There is SmartTubeNext with ad/sponsor block and most importantly it let's you remove shorts, news, games, music, transmissions. And it is open source.
I use this daily and it's been an absolute breath of fresh air, making youtube actually watchable.
My first install on getting a new phone.
My first install on every phone of any friend who wants this after a short pitch.
We use it daily. We love quietly streaming music during meals. It supports subscriptions (though no account integration to Google, obviously).
Well done NewPipe, you're showing how web applications should be done.
I need a replacement for baconreader if there's something in the vein
I had trouble switching to alternative clients because I rely on algorithmic feed for new content. However I have a perfect application for NewPipe. I like to run it quietly in the background as I fall asleep. Murmur of a voice too quiet to understand helps me sleep. Ads were making that use case impossible.
Another use case is downloading music I like. I used YouTube for music discovery an ingestion. Now after I find something good I go to NewPipe and dowlnoad it as local audio file and enjoy it like it's good old times of napster and mp3-s.
Amazing app, I hope it will last for a long time.
Is there somewhere a curated list of good YouTube channels, since the recommendation engine of YT won't work with these apps (or at least I guess that they won't work with them)?
Like a RSS with a channel list containing channels like Jeff Geerling, Code to the Moon, Jon Gjengset, Everyday Astronaut and the like?
Best part of new pipe is setting up channel groups, which default youtube really needs. But annoyng you can't play channel as playlist.
Honestly, if there is one reason to use this app is because it allows you to share video with timestamp unlike the official Youtube app that is still unable to do that in 2023.
Yes! Awesome app
I would love an alternative client that works with a YouTube Premium subscription. I'm happy to pay for no adds, I just want a UI that respects my attention and intentions as well.
I enjoy using newpipe for streaming music and podcasts on a phone. However I feel like nothing has changed for a while. My wishlist: viewing replies, after clicking on a timestamp it should stay in background mode (now it switches to popup), do not stack videos (back button should return to main page), searching within history, incognito mode.
The main reason why I don't use it is that I can't log in into my PeerTube instance and watch the Internal and Private videos for which you have to be logged in. But this kind of goes against the privacy stand against giving google the information about who you are they have. Which in my case is a bit different because I'm the admin of my own PeerTube instance.
Does anyone else have the experience of next queued videos always going wild with longer and longer videos of the same stuff? I had a screenshot prepared to report as an issue, but in the end didn't feel it would be worth it.
Absolutely every time I'll start with a song, and 3 next videos after, I'll be facing a 10 hour long version of the same fkng song, if not a loop of the same 2 or 3 videos.
Being cheap can ruin your life. Stop it, get some help.
Ok
I wanted to listen to youtube videos while working out. Couldn't figure out the default youtube player to let me do that. This worked first time I tried. Supper happy. Thanks.
Newpipe tip for people studying via YT videos: use the speed adjustment and enable skip silence.
Now that Google is cracking down on adblockers, are any 3rd-party apps like this going to survive? I'm assuming Google's going to do things to break them.
Which makes me worried about yt-dlp as well -- sometimes I download educational videos and other useful content I'm worried might get deleted, and with the crackdown on adblockers, I'm worried the ability to download videos will just completely cease to exist.
Things like these are what keep me from switching to iOS. And apps like Instander for Instagram etc.
Newpipe is great for background listening and PIP (window can be resized/moved). For downloading, Seal reigns supreme. You can 'share' a video to the app and it downloads the video right away.
I use an old Android device for watching Youtube, but Youtube recently dropped support for it. Immediately downloaded F-Droid, installed this, back up and running better than ever.
One thing to note is that the Google export for Youtube is completely broken and I've been manually importing subscriptions.
If you want this on PC there is FreeTube.
Shhhhht!
I found NP was having trouble keeping up, meanwhile youtube revanced has been amazing.
Awesome app. I send them money from time to time when possible!
This is the default player on https://e.foundation/e-os/
Anything new here?
(2022)
Some previous discussion last year https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30449570
I prefer to use revanced. I noticed that newpipe sometimes had issues playing videos while revanced can play the same video with no problem
Also, checkout NewPipe with built in SponsorBlock functionality:
https://github.com/polymorphicshade/NewPipe