I was tricked once--and only once--into signing up for Premium.
I was setting up the app anew on a new account, and IIRC it was my school account, of all things. And I was just mindlessly tapping through dialogs to get it set up ASAP, and I hit a button that probably read "Let's Do It" or "Sounds Good To Me" or some other sort of stupid, slangy, unclear thing, and that was the "consent" to sign up to the service and so I got the Free Trial.
Thankfully I did notice and I properly cancelled and had no billing issues.
That was definitely a dark pattern. I see them wording the buttons all the time so you're not quite sure what you're agreeing to.
I also once "consented" to a Walmart+ subscription, and I had a bit of a crazy time recovering the money they charged for it. I believe that my bank had flagged it for fraud and so I contacted them and said no, I certainly did not authorize this. And then we had a little, er, discussion on what "authorization" meant. Because what I think had happened was a recent purchase that I made had an "opt-out" checkbox clicked for me, and I didn't notice, failing to opt-out of the subscription, and thereby "authorized" it in the financial opinion of my financial institution. Hey, that's not consent, that's a deception.
Anyway, I did pursue a refund and I did get satisfaction from that, and strangely ever since, it's been an opt-in checkbox and not opt-out. I'm still not entirely sure how it happened.
Has there ever been an age where it's easier to accidentally spend money? I suppose any time that a wink and handshake (or :thumbsup:) suffice for a contract, anyone could give away the farm unintentionally.
It used to be that the government protected its citizens. Laws were written to force companies to make disclosures, certain contracts had to be in writing, some documents require notaries, even fair credit reporting standards allowed citizens to see the data banks kept and shared about us.
We used to be safe because the government protected us.
Now you can consent to be spied on for an eternity because you clicked "ok" once.
You have no recourse to do anything with the data SV keeps on you and our government simply doesn't care. As long as SV plays nice with government demands to curtail 1st and 4th amendment protections there will be lax regulation.
My favorite was the old android location services dialog-- there was a "and don't ask me again" checkbox on by default ... but it greyed it out if you disabled location services. So it was just a matter of time until you fat fingered the wrong button and got it stuck on and no longer prompting you.
Gotta make sure the user does the "right" thing, after all.
On the Gmail app in iOS, when opening a web link I get the option to choose Chrome or Safari, I choose Safari and set the checkbox for "Don't ask me again" but the app keeps asking ... dark patterns are common in Google products.
It used to work sufficiently well at detecting them itself that sometimes I submitted links to interesting stories because it was the quickest way to find the existing story with comments, where it would immediately redirect you.
The auto dupe detector only really works if it's the same URL which is not the case for the dupes of this one (4 discussion posts, 1 different news site link)
that's not what they meant by recommendations from subscriptions.
The OP meant that youtube scans the videos that belong to the subscribed channels, and suggest more videos that have similarities in topic or idea, from different channels (that have not been subscribed).
I turned off my history about a year ago in an effort to reduce the time I spend on YouTube. It sort of worked. I suspect this new change will help much more.
I recently had a real drama with my Google One subscription.
I cancelled it months ago, because I projected being poorer and trying to tighten my belt. Then I thought better of it, and so I wanted to resubscribe.
Although my subscription was good through August 12, the system would not allow me to reactivate it early, would not allow me to update payment methods, although it was tantalizingly displaying several "upgrade" buttons for more expensive plans. And it was also displaying a prominent yellow banner that told me I had cancelled "but I can restart it anytime!"
So in mid-July, I contacted a support agent. And they started explaining to me that there was no way to resubscribe until the day it lapsed. And I described their banner and they said welp, just wait for that day. And they also repeatedly said "you can contact us anytime and resubscribe!" and I kept telling them to quit lying!
I was also reminded of a terrible threat, that email is counted in disk quota, and if I was in excess of 15GiB when the 100GiB subscription lapsed, my email would be disabled! Since I can't guarantee I'll have the subscription for life, I'll just have to ensure I never exceed 15GiB, even though I pay for 100, sad...
So the termination day rolled around, and I contacted support to ask them why I couldn't restart it, and they said I had to wait for the cancellation email (different story than the first time around) and I was finally able to safely renew, and hopefully set up autopay on that too.
The funny thing is that if the One subscription lapses, I'd of course lose access to those live agents as well, so if I had any further trouble, I'd be screaming into the void. I mean, if One expires, you're over quota, email won't work, you don't receive the email, you can never resubscribe, nobody will help you... ouch.
Yes. Who you gonna call when they block your email and you have access to no files? It seems like half the time you have to reach someone who works at Google here for help.
I'd get my storage elsewhere at the very least especially when they will disable your email because of their incompetence.
My storage is relatively immaterial to my dependence on Google.
My email address is linked to several hundred accounts which I use to run my life, manage my household, do finances, etc.
My email address is, of course, the primary means of communicating with me other than phone.
YouTube is my primary means of entertainment, but that's disposable.
I also use Sign In With Google on dozens of the above accounts, so they are a definite dependency on the Google account.
I own an Android phone and a Chromebook. I operate 3 personal accounts, and my employer relies on Google as our primary business platform.
My Google Calendar and Tasks are my sole method of scheduling everything I do in life, from daily tasks to events I attend and everyone's birthdays.
My Google Contacts contain all contacts of everyone I know and is the sole repository of that data.
Google Docs and Sheets are my sole word processing and spreadsheet apps, which I use to great effect for writing letters, managing household, etc. etc. I know them like the back of my hand, and I also use them every day for work.
All the photos I've ever taken since 2015 are stored only in Photos. Not many, of course, but some I'd miss.
I'm increasingly using Wallet and GPay for financial transactions and event tickets. I even hear tell that my jurisdiction is putting driver licenses on Wallet now.
So could you rephrase your advice to me please? Which $20/year service replaces these apps, and permits easy import of all my data from Takeout?
If someone used 365, would you demand that they GTFO Microsoft and junk their Windows systems? What should we run? A PDP-11?
From what I can see, you dug yourself into a hole. If google decides to close your account, you will be in some real trouble. You should start working ASAP in diversifying your online life.
>Get a life and pick on someone else. Your mindless hate is transparent and pointless. People make choices in life, and we live with them. I hope you can respect mine a little more.
I'm not hating, it's a recommendation for your own good. If you don't take the recommendation I hope you never get to regret the decision.
>Also, look at yourselves a little bit. Have you got two ISPs? Two routers from different manufacturers? Plenty of mobile providers and a drawer full of SIMs? [...]
I wouldn't have the same corporation provide me with internet access, routers, mobile providers, browsers, OSes, utilities, and my freezer, that's for bloody sure. Each one of the things you mention is provided to me by a different company and that's the way I like it.
If I browse the wrong website and mozilla decides not to allow me to use firefox I don't have my water cut off or my freezer thawing my chicken breasts.
It's absurdly impractical to rent several houses to keep all your offline stuff - most people can not even afford it. On the other hand it's very easy to use several online services to keep all your online stuff.
The only apple I use is an iphone but I don't use any online apple services or any kind of cloud storage of any company for that matter. Even in my iphone I use yandex mail services and I use the local calendar and notes without sending my stuff over to icloud. I also use spotify instead of apple music. Unfortunately as you say I am forced to use ios and safari but it's not that important.
Regarding degoogling, there are lots of free services that do everything you want. How many free email, calendar and contacts providers are there? You can create a microsoft account and use some of their services too - they provide online office for free, and photo storage as well. No alternative to youtube but you can choose not to sign in when browsing videos and use RSS to subscribe to channels. And so on and so forth. "sign in with google" is an awful idea - if they ban your account you will lose not only your google account but accounts on other services as well.
You have an Android phone and a Chromebook but you can still use these third party services on them.
I use an Apple ID, of course. I need it to download stuff from the store. But I don't buy apps or music with it. If it gets banned I just create another; no harm done, no money or data lost. (Luckily that hasn't happened yet). You can do the same with Android.
>Now you want me to sign up with Microsoft. What's the logic in Microsoft? They never ban anyone? Nobody ever loses their account/email from Microsoft?
You seem to miss the entire point of this conversation.
All companies can ban you for no reason. Therefore you have to spread your data as widely as you can so that when it happens, you lose as little data as possible.
You don't need to increase your "support budget" for using more services. Keeping your mail in GMX instead of Gmail won't take you any more time.
If your landlady is frequently brought up on unrelated sites by her other tenants saying she just evicted them without apparent cause or appeal, then maybe your landlady might cause you problems sooner or later.
I personally know multiple individuals with inaccessible google accounts. I'm sure there's millions of lost accounts. They're just gone, period. They're not happy about it, but what can you do? Best I can tell them is post about it on HN.
If there are 2 million lost accounts since Google's inception, then there are 0.1% of all accounts lost. And why are they lost?
Account loss comes from many factors: failing to secure it and being hacked. Losing passwords or credentials. Abandonment. Inactivity. TOS violations. Death of user.
There are many reasons accounts could be lost, and almost none of those reasons are no reason at all.
If any given landlady served as many people as Google does you can be damn sure she would be brought up on all sorts of unrelated sites daily no matter how excellent she was. Being great is no match for having hundreds of millions of customers in terms of avoiding mistakes.
> Nah the trolls are the comrades spreading FUD about band for nyet reazonz and GTFO Google because Chernobyl could happen at any time
I think you are trolling as well and may even be a sock puppet account. Reasonable concerns have been presented, not "FUD." Dismissing them out of hand is done so with unjustified confidence.
he's also doing the ol' but what about you? We're not talking about me, we're talking about you lol. If we always did what's best there'd be no posts like this on HN. We learn from experience and try to give advice based on that.
> My email address is linked to several hundred accounts which I use to run my life, manage my household, do finances, etc.
Any reputable service allows changing email addresses. For less important services like Amazon you can use an email alias. Tutanota and Proton are nice email providers whi do not read the content of your emails and and not scan files.
> My email address is, of course, the primary means of communicating with me other than phone.
If you have a phone, can't you just install a messenger? Session does not require a telephone number nor a smartphone, I think.
> I also use Sign In With Google on dozens of the above accounts, so they are a definite dependency on the Google account.
In your Google Account settings which accounts use Sign In With Google. Go to each account and change authentication to email and password wherever possible.
> I own an Android phone and a Chromebook. I operate 3 personal accounts, and my employer relies on Google as our primary business platform.
Does not prevent you from using a secondary email for your personal important stuff like government and financing.
> My Google Calendar and Tasks are my sole method of scheduling everything I do in life, from daily tasks to events I attend and everyone's birthdays.
> My Google Contacts contain all contacts of everyone I know and is the sole repository of that data.
Should be exportable as ics files I think. Make at least a backup once in a while.
> Google Docs and Sheets are my sole word processing and spreadsheet apps, which I use to great effect for writing letters, managing household, etc. etc. I know them like the back of my hand, and I also use them every day for work.
Get an offline editor like LibreOffice. Online editors are crap when your internet connection is off or need to make a ton of content.
> All the photos I've ever taken since 2015 are stored only in Photos. Not many, of course, but some I'd miss.
You can download them for offline use, make a backup and then print out the ones you really care for.
> I'm increasingly using Wallet and GPay for financial transactions and event tickets. I even hear tell that my jurisdiction is putting driver licenses on Wallet now.
If you use GPay, it is even more important to not have any content stored in your account. See the case of a father sending his doctor a picture of his son for diagnosis. It was falsely recognized as child porn and the father had no way to get back the account. If your account gets suspended, you are out of luck.
> So could you rephrase your advice to me please? Which $20/year service replaces these apps, and permits easy import of all my data from Takeout?
> If someone used 365, would you demand that they GTFO Microsoft and junk their Windows systems? What should we run? A PDP-11?
Noone said to nuke your Google account. In fact you're being very passive aggressive despite not having made any effort on researching alternative apps. Don't tie your whole offline and online identity to one provider who doesn't care about you except for your (and people close to you) money and data.
Since it is more problematic to push videos that are "related" to the video being played than to display recommendations based on the user's past browsing history (since they are usually not very relevant to the video and are popular in the region where the language of the video being played is used and contain discriminatory, violent or sexual content), these measures do not seem to be an essential solution.
I’ve had watch history disabled for years, and the suggested videos were always perfectly fine.
Now I have zero ability to discover new channels, and already my engagement is much lower since I’m limited to what I’m subscribed to, or whatever random search query I make.
My YouTube experience is significantly degraded now.
Fortunately, they appear to have created more interfaces for mass deleting old comments and likes / dislikes, so I’ve been utilising that too.
I look forward to seeing what else they punish me for, for using the settings and tools they provide.
If you want recommendations based on the content you enjoy watching, YouTube still displays recommendations beside videos (even with watch history turned off).
If you want to see a list of videos unrelated to your subscriptions, you have the options of looking at Trending videos, or videos under Gaming, Music, News, Sports.
(...And of course, if you do want recommendations on the home page, you have the option to re-enable watch history and get those).
I don't agree that "zero ability to discover new channels" is a reasonable description of the options someone has with watch history disabled.
I don't subscribe to anything and never use YouTube from a session that's logged into Google. Now all I see is the default vapid millennial influencer dreck that used to disappear after I watched some of my preferred content.
I can live with not having recommendations. What annoys me more is that Google is essentially holding useful features hostage to get their tracking fix.
I.e., I would actually love to have a list of the videos I've watched recently - on my device, with a simple option to delete it, exactly the same way that browser histories have worked since forever.
However, with YouTube, it's all or nothing: Either, I let them track my viewing history globally across all devices, store it on their servers for all eternity and do who knows what with the data - or I don't get any history at all, to the point where when I restart the app, it will completely forget the video I just watched a second ago.
Edit: or not. Seems youtube is not happy with the app and blocks playback randomly with 403 errors.
Also, the app seems to insert undismissable fullscreen ads every few minutes, without even having the courtesy to stop the video when doing so. But at least background play definitly works, I guess...
(Undismissable in the sense that it tries to block me from going to the homescreen if I didn't click the ad - not even talking about going back to the video player or other parts of the app)
It's a sad state of affairs, NewPipe being forbidden from distribution because the ad company that owns YouTube also owns the platorm's app store, and the app store being full of scammy apps including clones and malicious forks of F/OSS. No one deserves to be presented with traps like that. :-\",
Yep. Switched to the F-Droid version and now the ads are gone.
Also explains why the ads in the copycat version didn't integrate at all with playback controls or the rest of the app: Someone probably took the original apk, slapped the ads on as a separate thread/process inside the apk and never modified the app's original source.
If you have strict privacy requirements, it’s interesting to also use the mobile app instead of the mobile website.
My suggestion is to stop worrying about hypothetical privacy problems and just use the watch history feature. Google will even automatically clear old history for you if you want.
HN nerds get the worst user experiences because they have these random lines in the sand. I’ve been guilty and often try to break out of it when I realize that the people who don’t know better are enjoying themselves more.
I don’t know why they thought this was a good idea. I opened up YouTube and was met with what’s basically a blank timeline. How is this good for engagement? All this made me do is quit the app…
What's weird to me is once upon a time the home feed was your subscriptions feed.
They eventually started trickling in suggestions based on watch history and today that's most of the feed.
I can see the argument that not having watch history means they shouldn't be building the per-user dataset to feed into the model to get the history based suggestions. Sure, but then... why not use the subscriptions, the information that users have provided you and what they thought that feature was for?
> What's weird to me is once upon a time the home feed was your subscriptions feed.
it's not weird if you examine it from the point of view of user retention metrics.
A subscription recommendation runs out, since you have small number of subscriptions (compared to the whole of youtube). Google wants to keep you clicking, and watching the next video. Algorithmically recommending videos instead of your subscription means you now have effectively infinite list of videos to watch, keeping your eyeball youtube.
Someone recommended NewPipe, it's a great app for Android.
If you watch videos on your laptop or your non-Android phone, invidious is quite good. I self host but I believe you could use any public instance and create an account there if you are fine with this public instance having your history and subscription list (which are separate from those you have on YouTube itself).
Sorry but that’s just wishful thinking. Many on the first page are only alternative YouTube UIs.
Most of the actual alternatives only offer short videos, there’s nothing with the breadth of content that YouTube has. Very few options could actually evolve into the next free generic video platform.
Remember when Facebook gave you the option to delete all tracking data about you … but made sure there was no way to exclude 3rd party login - to make sure you can’t actually use it without irrevocably losing any login.
Same thing, malicious compliance - Leadership vetoed any attempt to make it useful while simultaneously chest bumping about how much we care about privacy.
Was one of those examples that clearly shoe how double faced senior leadership there always have been - talk to bunch of motivated millennial PMs into great privacy initiatives that prove ‘we care’ but poison pill the features to ensure nobody can actually use them.
I might cancel premium over this. However, having a subscriptions feed is still usable. If you want to get sucked into the algorithm, there are still recommendations on actual video pages.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 165 ms ] threadI was setting up the app anew on a new account, and IIRC it was my school account, of all things. And I was just mindlessly tapping through dialogs to get it set up ASAP, and I hit a button that probably read "Let's Do It" or "Sounds Good To Me" or some other sort of stupid, slangy, unclear thing, and that was the "consent" to sign up to the service and so I got the Free Trial.
Thankfully I did notice and I properly cancelled and had no billing issues.
That was definitely a dark pattern. I see them wording the buttons all the time so you're not quite sure what you're agreeing to.
I also once "consented" to a Walmart+ subscription, and I had a bit of a crazy time recovering the money they charged for it. I believe that my bank had flagged it for fraud and so I contacted them and said no, I certainly did not authorize this. And then we had a little, er, discussion on what "authorization" meant. Because what I think had happened was a recent purchase that I made had an "opt-out" checkbox clicked for me, and I didn't notice, failing to opt-out of the subscription, and thereby "authorized" it in the financial opinion of my financial institution. Hey, that's not consent, that's a deception.
Anyway, I did pursue a refund and I did get satisfaction from that, and strangely ever since, it's been an opt-in checkbox and not opt-out. I'm still not entirely sure how it happened.
Has there ever been an age where it's easier to accidentally spend money? I suppose any time that a wink and handshake (or :thumbsup:) suffice for a contract, anyone could give away the farm unintentionally.
We used to be safe because the government protected us.
Now you can consent to be spied on for an eternity because you clicked "ok" once.
You have no recourse to do anything with the data SV keeps on you and our government simply doesn't care. As long as SV plays nice with government demands to curtail 1st and 4th amendment protections there will be lax regulation.
Gotta make sure the user does the "right" thing, after all.
worked for me
At some point that stopped working it seems.
If you don’t have a watch history, on what basis would YouTube suggest videos?
Maybe there’s a legal angle here too, good suggestions might prove that they store your history even when you have turned it off.
Your subscriptions.
The OP meant that youtube scans the videos that belong to the subscribed channels, and suggest more videos that have similarities in topic or idea, from different channels (that have not been subscribed).
It's always a girl playing guitar very well but you can see her nipples through the top and the camera is set to show you her panties up her skirt.
I don't trust myself not to click it every time.
I cancelled it months ago, because I projected being poorer and trying to tighten my belt. Then I thought better of it, and so I wanted to resubscribe.
Although my subscription was good through August 12, the system would not allow me to reactivate it early, would not allow me to update payment methods, although it was tantalizingly displaying several "upgrade" buttons for more expensive plans. And it was also displaying a prominent yellow banner that told me I had cancelled "but I can restart it anytime!"
So in mid-July, I contacted a support agent. And they started explaining to me that there was no way to resubscribe until the day it lapsed. And I described their banner and they said welp, just wait for that day. And they also repeatedly said "you can contact us anytime and resubscribe!" and I kept telling them to quit lying!
I was also reminded of a terrible threat, that email is counted in disk quota, and if I was in excess of 15GiB when the 100GiB subscription lapsed, my email would be disabled! Since I can't guarantee I'll have the subscription for life, I'll just have to ensure I never exceed 15GiB, even though I pay for 100, sad...
So the termination day rolled around, and I contacted support to ask them why I couldn't restart it, and they said I had to wait for the cancellation email (different story than the first time around) and I was finally able to safely renew, and hopefully set up autopay on that too.
The funny thing is that if the One subscription lapses, I'd of course lose access to those live agents as well, so if I had any further trouble, I'd be screaming into the void. I mean, if One expires, you're over quota, email won't work, you don't receive the email, you can never resubscribe, nobody will help you... ouch.
I'd get my storage elsewhere at the very least especially when they will disable your email because of their incompetence.
My email address is linked to several hundred accounts which I use to run my life, manage my household, do finances, etc.
My email address is, of course, the primary means of communicating with me other than phone.
YouTube is my primary means of entertainment, but that's disposable.
I also use Sign In With Google on dozens of the above accounts, so they are a definite dependency on the Google account.
I own an Android phone and a Chromebook. I operate 3 personal accounts, and my employer relies on Google as our primary business platform.
My Google Calendar and Tasks are my sole method of scheduling everything I do in life, from daily tasks to events I attend and everyone's birthdays.
My Google Contacts contain all contacts of everyone I know and is the sole repository of that data.
Google Docs and Sheets are my sole word processing and spreadsheet apps, which I use to great effect for writing letters, managing household, etc. etc. I know them like the back of my hand, and I also use them every day for work.
All the photos I've ever taken since 2015 are stored only in Photos. Not many, of course, but some I'd miss.
I'm increasingly using Wallet and GPay for financial transactions and event tickets. I even hear tell that my jurisdiction is putting driver licenses on Wallet now.
So could you rephrase your advice to me please? Which $20/year service replaces these apps, and permits easy import of all my data from Takeout?
If someone used 365, would you demand that they GTFO Microsoft and junk their Windows systems? What should we run? A PDP-11?
I'm not hating, it's a recommendation for your own good. If you don't take the recommendation I hope you never get to regret the decision.
>Also, look at yourselves a little bit. Have you got two ISPs? Two routers from different manufacturers? Plenty of mobile providers and a drawer full of SIMs? [...]
I wouldn't have the same corporation provide me with internet access, routers, mobile providers, browsers, OSes, utilities, and my freezer, that's for bloody sure. Each one of the things you mention is provided to me by a different company and that's the way I like it.
If I browse the wrong website and mozilla decides not to allow me to use firefox I don't have my water cut off or my freezer thawing my chicken breasts.
The only apple I use is an iphone but I don't use any online apple services or any kind of cloud storage of any company for that matter. Even in my iphone I use yandex mail services and I use the local calendar and notes without sending my stuff over to icloud. I also use spotify instead of apple music. Unfortunately as you say I am forced to use ios and safari but it's not that important.
Regarding degoogling, there are lots of free services that do everything you want. How many free email, calendar and contacts providers are there? You can create a microsoft account and use some of their services too - they provide online office for free, and photo storage as well. No alternative to youtube but you can choose not to sign in when browsing videos and use RSS to subscribe to channels. And so on and so forth. "sign in with google" is an awful idea - if they ban your account you will lose not only your google account but accounts on other services as well.
You have an Android phone and a Chromebook but you can still use these third party services on them.
>Now you want me to sign up with Microsoft. What's the logic in Microsoft? They never ban anyone? Nobody ever loses their account/email from Microsoft?
You seem to miss the entire point of this conversation.
All companies can ban you for no reason. Therefore you have to spread your data as widely as you can so that when it happens, you lose as little data as possible.
You don't need to increase your "support budget" for using more services. Keeping your mail in GMX instead of Gmail won't take you any more time.
It may be comfortable for you (despite your sole reliance on one company and an inability to leave it). In fact, I hope it is comfortable for you.
Your testimony is basically a modern era journal of a man's life owned by Google. There is no reason why digital life needs to be so complex.
The vendor lock-in is eerily similar to the strict rules and legalism of the old Empire, just hidden behind code structures and service fees.
"freedom" really is shaking out to be more 'dom' than 'free'.
If there are 2 million lost accounts since Google's inception, then there are 0.1% of all accounts lost. And why are they lost?
Account loss comes from many factors: failing to secure it and being hacked. Losing passwords or credentials. Abandonment. Inactivity. TOS violations. Death of user.
There are many reasons accounts could be lost, and almost none of those reasons are no reason at all.
> receives warning to diversify and feigns taking it as a personal insult
> throws around the word incel
I'm pretty sure this guy is just trolling.
I think you are trolling as well and may even be a sock puppet account. Reasonable concerns have been presented, not "FUD." Dismissing them out of hand is done so with unjustified confidence.
Any reputable service allows changing email addresses. For less important services like Amazon you can use an email alias. Tutanota and Proton are nice email providers whi do not read the content of your emails and and not scan files.
> My email address is, of course, the primary means of communicating with me other than phone.
If you have a phone, can't you just install a messenger? Session does not require a telephone number nor a smartphone, I think.
> I also use Sign In With Google on dozens of the above accounts, so they are a definite dependency on the Google account.
In your Google Account settings which accounts use Sign In With Google. Go to each account and change authentication to email and password wherever possible.
> I own an Android phone and a Chromebook. I operate 3 personal accounts, and my employer relies on Google as our primary business platform.
Does not prevent you from using a secondary email for your personal important stuff like government and financing.
> My Google Calendar and Tasks are my sole method of scheduling everything I do in life, from daily tasks to events I attend and everyone's birthdays.
> My Google Contacts contain all contacts of everyone I know and is the sole repository of that data.
Should be exportable as ics files I think. Make at least a backup once in a while.
> Google Docs and Sheets are my sole word processing and spreadsheet apps, which I use to great effect for writing letters, managing household, etc. etc. I know them like the back of my hand, and I also use them every day for work.
Get an offline editor like LibreOffice. Online editors are crap when your internet connection is off or need to make a ton of content.
> All the photos I've ever taken since 2015 are stored only in Photos. Not many, of course, but some I'd miss.
You can download them for offline use, make a backup and then print out the ones you really care for.
> I'm increasingly using Wallet and GPay for financial transactions and event tickets. I even hear tell that my jurisdiction is putting driver licenses on Wallet now.
If you use GPay, it is even more important to not have any content stored in your account. See the case of a father sending his doctor a picture of his son for diagnosis. It was falsely recognized as child porn and the father had no way to get back the account. If your account gets suspended, you are out of luck.
> So could you rephrase your advice to me please? Which $20/year service replaces these apps, and permits easy import of all my data from Takeout?
> If someone used 365, would you demand that they GTFO Microsoft and junk their Windows systems? What should we run? A PDP-11?
Noone said to nuke your Google account. In fact you're being very passive aggressive despite not having made any effort on researching alternative apps. Don't tie your whole offline and online identity to one provider who doesn't care about you except for your (and people close to you) money and data.
Now I have zero ability to discover new channels, and already my engagement is much lower since I’m limited to what I’m subscribed to, or whatever random search query I make.
My YouTube experience is significantly degraded now.
Fortunately, they appear to have created more interfaces for mass deleting old comments and likes / dislikes, so I’ve been utilising that too.
I look forward to seeing what else they punish me for, for using the settings and tools they provide.
If you want to see a list of videos unrelated to your subscriptions, you have the options of looking at Trending videos, or videos under Gaming, Music, News, Sports.
(...And of course, if you do want recommendations on the home page, you have the option to re-enable watch history and get those).
I don't agree that "zero ability to discover new channels" is a reasonable description of the options someone has with watch history disabled.
I.e., I would actually love to have a list of the videos I've watched recently - on my device, with a simple option to delete it, exactly the same way that browser histories have worked since forever.
However, with YouTube, it's all or nothing: Either, I let them track my viewing history globally across all devices, store it on their servers for all eternity and do who knows what with the data - or I don't get any history at all, to the point where when I restart the app, it will completely forget the video I just watched a second ago.
https://newpipe.net/
Edit: or not. Seems youtube is not happy with the app and blocks playback randomly with 403 errors.
Also, the app seems to insert undismissable fullscreen ads every few minutes, without even having the courtesy to stop the video when doing so. But at least background play definitly works, I guess...
(Undismissable in the sense that it tries to block me from going to the homescreen if I didn't click the ad - not even talking about going back to the video player or other parts of the app)
Follow the link in GP.
Also explains why the ads in the copycat version didn't integrate at all with playback controls or the rest of the app: Someone probably took the original apk, slapped the ads on as a separate thread/process inside the apk and never modified the app's original source.
This literally is browser history. Your browser is already giving you this.
My suggestion is to stop worrying about hypothetical privacy problems and just use the watch history feature. Google will even automatically clear old history for you if you want.
HN nerds get the worst user experiences because they have these random lines in the sand. I’ve been guilty and often try to break out of it when I realize that the people who don’t know better are enjoying themselves more.
They eventually started trickling in suggestions based on watch history and today that's most of the feed.
I can see the argument that not having watch history means they shouldn't be building the per-user dataset to feed into the model to get the history based suggestions. Sure, but then... why not use the subscriptions, the information that users have provided you and what they thought that feature was for?
it's not weird if you examine it from the point of view of user retention metrics.
A subscription recommendation runs out, since you have small number of subscriptions (compared to the whole of youtube). Google wants to keep you clicking, and watching the next video. Algorithmically recommending videos instead of your subscription means you now have effectively infinite list of videos to watch, keeping your eyeball youtube.
If you watch videos on your laptop or your non-Android phone, invidious is quite good. I self host but I believe you could use any public instance and create an account there if you are fine with this public instance having your history and subscription list (which are separate from those you have on YouTube itself).
If anything, it has strengthen my resolve not to turn on history tracking on Youtube.
We have over 143 alternatives to YouTube.
https://alternativeto.net/software/youtube/
Sorry but that’s just wishful thinking. Many on the first page are only alternative YouTube UIs.
Most of the actual alternatives only offer short videos, there’s nothing with the breadth of content that YouTube has. Very few options could actually evolve into the next free generic video platform.
Same thing, malicious compliance - Leadership vetoed any attempt to make it useful while simultaneously chest bumping about how much we care about privacy.
Was one of those examples that clearly shoe how double faced senior leadership there always have been - talk to bunch of motivated millennial PMs into great privacy initiatives that prove ‘we care’ but poison pill the features to ensure nobody can actually use them.
YouTube will now show a blank homepage if you don’t have watch history on: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37053817 - 75 points, 56 comments