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.
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.
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?
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'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'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)
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.
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.)
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.
> 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.
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.
> this is a misleading reply because you ignore the speed and scale at which the internet allows sharing to happen.
You are misleading because i explicitly talked about the Internet and widespread file-sharing in my comment. Most people would love to pay a fair price for high-quality DRM-free content and that's why for a while Spotify and Netflix won. Now that Netflix raises prices and doesn't license all the interesting shows anymore, people are going back to piracy because they can't afford 5 10$/month subscription for every streaming service out there.
Historically in France, a "global license" was proposed instead of HADOPI. It was like those streaming services, but run as a public service to ensure artists don't get scammed by corporations. Guess who opposed that proposal? Those same corporations, who keep exploiting the artists and milking the consumers.
I've been pirating all along. I still buy a lot of stuff, eg. CDs at concerts. Make it convenient and ethical for me to pay within what i can afford and i will. In the meantime, i'll keep pirating because i can't spend more on culture than i spend on food, often for content of dubious quality.
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.
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.
>People used to literally pay to have their own website in order to get their ideas out there.
Somewhat; at first, this was the case, though I'd say many of them were simply using their university's computer resources. Later on, banner ads happened and then we had sites like Tripod, where people could build their own simple website and not pay anything for it. Somehow, these sites did just fine (for a while) by hosting banner ads. These days, somehow it supposedly costs a small fortune to run a simple website even though computers are FAR more powerful than they were in 1999 and computer hardware generally costs much less.
> 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 don't need to make a living. They're already making a living by doing some other job, probably a boring job. They're writing because they enjoy writing, and there might be a financial payoff, but it's certainly not something they're banking on. It's just like aspiring actors; they work as restaurant servers to make a living, hoping to become a big star. It's not really a good career move; if you want a low-risk high-paycheck career, you do something unglamorous and boring, like writing software, or some other office job that requires a college degree.
May I then suggest that all software developers also should forego their paychecks and work for free, since they love programming and should do it in their spare time while having another day job? For example in a restaurant.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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 guess if many people block sponsor content, this kind of vids will die.
Then so be it. I miss when people uploaded videos for the sake of it, not to make money by way of exploiting the users' cognitive vulnerabilities. I remember the days when I could search for a video on how to replace my dirt bike's carburetor and it was less than two minutes, didn't include any ads, and was straight to the point, all first person POV; you wouldn't even see the guy's face. Nobody was trying to get rich off it. It was all about sharing it with other people.
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.
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"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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
The tom scott one was one example I was thinking of... With the sponsor segment clipped out, that video lacks a LOT of context.
The main one I was thinking of was Senpai Gaming. He does reviews of microphones and streamer equipment. He just released a video of the new Shure SM7dB mic where he does the sponsor read on the new mic.
Recently, he reviewed the new Elgato teleprompter. During which he read the ad read from the teleprompter as a means of demonstrating how the eyecontact looks/feels while reading text from the prompter. It feels like a legit test for a teleprompter to be able to demo it as such. The problem is. He says that he is going to demo 4 things about the prompter and the first one is simply reading text. And then he starts to say "And we're going to do that by sharing the sponsor of today's video"... But it sponsorblock cuts it as "And we're going to" and then it cuts to point 2. Had sponsorblock cut that after he said "sponsor" I would have at least known what was going on, but a random mid sentence cut... I feel like the Sponsorblock contributors self select to be the most rabid anti-sponsor people out there. Sponsorships are pure evil and we shouldn't have to even hear words next to the sponsorship. I understand why NewPipe disagrees and wants to differentiate between good and bad and not just "everything bad".
Wasn't trying to suggest it was AI. I'm aware it's crowd sourced. But in the end, I disagree with the crowd sourcing most of the time, so regardless of if it's a single person, crowd sourced, AI, or anything else... it doesn't cut things where I want it to in a lot of cases.
And I'm pretty sure that the type of person who would spend time submitting the timestamps is probably a person who also is aggressively anti-ads/sponsorships, so is probably aggressive in their timestamps, which is fine, but it makes me gravitate towards agreeing with NewPipe on "not everything is pure evil" more than the sponsorblock submitters.
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
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
In the limit: might as well tune out everything and skip life.
The other limit: all things must be consumed exactly as delivered, and we must consume everything we can. (I'll disregard selection / filtering algorithm.)
The healthy medium is to consume, analyze, and synthesize how it makes sense for your particular style of traversing the information topology. Climb the gradients you want. Go as deep or as shallow as makes sense to you.
If you can derive value from skipping video played at double speed, good. If you want to or need to watch the whole thing twice, also good. You do what you need to do. No one prescription fits the bill for all people and all circumstances.
This reminds me of a game jam where the guy I was working with was watching a tutorial video at like 2.5x. I was shocked at the time yet later realized the brilliance. He learned so much faster that way. Now I have a hard time with less than 3x when watching some creators.
SponsorBlock has a lot of configurability: segments can be marked as various different things, so it's not all-or-nothing. You can set it to skip certain types of segments, and show other types. As for where things start and stop, it's crowdsourced, so you're relying on some volunteer to get those time points correct. I think it's possible to upload your own corrections, but I haven't played around with it much.
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.
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).
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).
Subscribing to channels. Trim silences. Various pitch and speed options. Background play. Picture in picture. Watch history. Playlists. NewPipe also plays Soundcloud, Bandcamp, and has the entire media.ccc.de library and can do all those things with those services as well.
Don't you have to be logged in to get all of those features? For obvious reasons I didn't even consider that to be a option, as the goal is to put as many barriers between Google servers and yourself as possible.
Big +1. I feel I can keep my kids YouTube usage under control and effectively moderate what they watch. With shorts I can't scroll through the 100 shorts they quickly swiped through, have no idea which ones they actually watched, and I frequently see a lot of inappropriate content in shorts that I don't normally see on their accounts.
Shorts actually makes me want to ban YT in my house altogether and cancel my premium sub
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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").
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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'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.
I would recommend using Obtainium[1] over F-Droid.
Obtainum downloads APKs directly from the repository's releases page, for example the GitHub releases page.
Why not use F-Droid?
"Due to their process of building apps, apps in the official F-Droid repository often fall behind on updates. F-Droid maintainers also reuse package IDs while signing apps with their own keys, which is not ideal as it gives the F-Droid team ultimate trust. Additionally, the requirements for an app to be included in the official F-Droid repo are less strict than other app stores like Google Play, meaning that F-Droid tends to host a lot more apps which are older, unmaintained, or otherwise no longer meet modern security standards."[2]
Do keep in mind the prior part that explains why they reuse package IDs and use signing keys that way; F-Droid aims for reproducible builds[0]. They also to my knowledge do respect developers that want a different build ID/package title to be used compared to the "official" version. The F-Droid version of Island for example is called Insular specifically to avoid this issue.
PrivacyGuides' motivations here are really aimed for a specific type of user (and I'll note that it's slightly odd for them to place so much faith in a point of origin that's historically been the easiest to compromise: the upstream developer usually is the easiest target, particularly on otherwise dormant software); the tradeoff F-Droid does might be more worthwhile for most people in that they act more like a linux distro maintainer, so there's a second set of eyes to prevent any shenanigans from being afoot on the upstream.
You can as I understand it run their actual servers rather easily (provided you have the computer space to do so)[1], so solving that is pretty easy, should you feel inclined to do so.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
>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.
I haven't tried NewPipe, but you can easily download audio streams on YouTube using yt-dlp. It even lets you see all the available stream options and pick the one you want, so if you prefer opus or aac, you can select that.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 325 ms ] thread[0] https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/12/23868428/iphone-13-mini-l...
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.
Why did you feel the urge to push unsolicited advice? I honestly don’t get it.
GrayJay is a new contender on the block that might be worth looking at too.
Really great app for that purpose, although I will say I just used ReVanced for general YouTube browsing on my phone.
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
There were times in the past where this was not the case, but it was likely 0.24 or before.
https://github.com/polymorphicshade/NewPipe
But anyway I had too many issues with newpipe anyway even the fork.
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.
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.
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 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.
The vast majority of people do not pirate, and most people who pay would probably find piracy unethical to begin with.
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".
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.
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.
You are misleading because i explicitly talked about the Internet and widespread file-sharing in my comment. Most people would love to pay a fair price for high-quality DRM-free content and that's why for a while Spotify and Netflix won. Now that Netflix raises prices and doesn't license all the interesting shows anymore, people are going back to piracy because they can't afford 5 10$/month subscription for every streaming service out there.
Historically in France, a "global license" was proposed instead of HADOPI. It was like those streaming services, but run as a public service to ensure artists don't get scammed by corporations. Guess who opposed that proposal? Those same corporations, who keep exploiting the artists and milking the consumers.
I've been pirating all along. I still buy a lot of stuff, eg. CDs at concerts. Make it convenient and ethical for me to pay within what i can afford and i will. In the meantime, i'll keep pirating because i can't spend more on culture than i spend on food, often for content of dubious quality.
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.
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.
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.
Somewhat; at first, this was the case, though I'd say many of them were simply using their university's computer resources. Later on, banner ads happened and then we had sites like Tripod, where people could build their own simple website and not pay anything for it. Somehow, these sites did just fine (for a while) by hosting banner ads. These days, somehow it supposedly costs a small fortune to run a simple website even though computers are FAR more powerful than they were in 1999 and computer hardware generally costs much less.
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
How benevolent of you...
May I then suggest that all software developers also should forego their paychecks and work for free, since they love programming and should do it in their spare time while having another day job? For example in a restaurant.
There is still value to the sponser in keeping a brand fresh in your mind
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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 significantly boosts the signal to noise ratio, and makes YouTube a much better experience.
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.
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.
Also, if you are fine with sponsor spots, you probably would have to also be okay with watching ads, so no adblocking either then.
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.
One example that comes to mind is how a lot of financial creators pushed crypto products.
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.
Then so be it. I miss when people uploaded videos for the sake of it, not to make money by way of exploiting the users' cognitive vulnerabilities. I remember the days when I could search for a video on how to replace my dirt bike's carburetor and it was less than two minutes, didn't include any ads, and was straight to the point, all first person POV; you wouldn't even see the guy's face. Nobody was trying to get rich off it. It was all about sharing it with other people.
https://libretube.dev/
https://codeberg.org/NullPointerException/PipePipe
https://github.com/lamarios/clipious
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.
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"
https://freetubeapp.io/
Also, I would not call it "adblock". It just comes without ads out of the box, just like most comparable apps.
But I moved to libretube now. Newpipe kept throwing up errors when I jumped around a video.
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.
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've done it a few times too, and if ever the recent submission wasn't good they can lock the video from further submissions
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)
That's such a simple and genius idea
The main one I was thinking of was Senpai Gaming. He does reviews of microphones and streamer equipment. He just released a video of the new Shure SM7dB mic where he does the sponsor read on the new mic.
Recently, he reviewed the new Elgato teleprompter. During which he read the ad read from the teleprompter as a means of demonstrating how the eyecontact looks/feels while reading text from the prompter. It feels like a legit test for a teleprompter to be able to demo it as such. The problem is. He says that he is going to demo 4 things about the prompter and the first one is simply reading text. And then he starts to say "And we're going to do that by sharing the sponsor of today's video"... But it sponsorblock cuts it as "And we're going to" and then it cuts to point 2. Had sponsorblock cut that after he said "sponsor" I would have at least known what was going on, but a random mid sentence cut... I feel like the Sponsorblock contributors self select to be the most rabid anti-sponsor people out there. Sponsorships are pure evil and we shouldn't have to even hear words next to the sponsorship. I understand why NewPipe disagrees and wants to differentiate between good and bad and not just "everything bad".
It's not perfect but I want to have the choice.
And I'm pretty sure that the type of person who would spend time submitting the timestamps is probably a person who also is aggressively anti-ads/sponsorships, so is probably aggressive in their timestamps, which is fine, but it makes me gravitate towards agreeing with NewPipe on "not everything is pure evil" more than the sponsorblock submitters.
What did you actually miss? Is your life worse for it?
The other limit: all things must be consumed exactly as delivered, and we must consume everything we can. (I'll disregard selection / filtering algorithm.)
The healthy medium is to consume, analyze, and synthesize how it makes sense for your particular style of traversing the information topology. Climb the gradients you want. Go as deep or as shallow as makes sense to you.
If you can derive value from skipping video played at double speed, good. If you want to or need to watch the whole thing twice, also good. You do what you need to do. No one prescription fits the bill for all people and all circumstances.
I just fast-forward or the the sponsorship segments out if they are too annoying.
I prefer using it without auto-skip though.
What do they mean? They dont even want to provide it as an option?
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.
Sure, if you have the video link in your phone, you might need to get it to the TV/Chromecast somehow, but I think that is usually manageable.
> 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.
Sent to your gmail account? :D
One of my most used F-Droid apps.
Shorts actually makes me want to ban YT in my house altogether and cancel my premium sub
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.
I guess that only abundance of devices without DRM is stopping this scenario.
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
That's not the endgame -- Digg:Reddit::YouTube:Vimeo is the end game, IMHO.
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.
Maybe the issue is that people got so used to a decade of unlimited high-quality videos for absolutely free?
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.
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.
I’d prefer to pay like $5. I don’t need YouTube music.
https://9to5google.com/2023/09/26/youtube-premium-lite-shut-...
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.
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.
> 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.
I do pay for Patreon and Nebula. But Google will never get a cent from me.
They want to choke that? May as well tell the wind to stop blowing.
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.
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!
* 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.
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).
Regarding morals I don't don't care. Not worth a discussion :)
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.
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.
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.
I'm sure there will be lovely things this community has to say about that demographic.
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/yattee/id1595136629
https://np.reddit.com/r/Yattee/comments/13d3lj7/how_to_set_u...
Link: https://f-droid.org/packages/com.junkfood.seal/
Obtainum downloads APKs directly from the repository's releases page, for example the GitHub releases page.
Why not use F-Droid? "Due to their process of building apps, apps in the official F-Droid repository often fall behind on updates. F-Droid maintainers also reuse package IDs while signing apps with their own keys, which is not ideal as it gives the F-Droid team ultimate trust. Additionally, the requirements for an app to be included in the official F-Droid repo are less strict than other app stores like Google Play, meaning that F-Droid tends to host a lot more apps which are older, unmaintained, or otherwise no longer meet modern security standards."[2]
[1]: https://github.com/ImranR98/Obtainium#readme [2]: https://www.privacyguides.org/en/android/#f-droid
PrivacyGuides' motivations here are really aimed for a specific type of user (and I'll note that it's slightly odd for them to place so much faith in a point of origin that's historically been the easiest to compromise: the upstream developer usually is the easiest target, particularly on otherwise dormant software); the tradeoff F-Droid does might be more worthwhile for most people in that they act more like a linux distro maintainer, so there's a second set of eyes to prevent any shenanigans from being afoot on the upstream.
You can as I understand it run their actual servers rather easily (provided you have the computer space to do so)[1], so solving that is pretty easy, should you feel inclined to do so.
[0]: https://f-droid.org/en/docs/Reproducible_Builds/
[1]: https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroiddata contains all the files used to generate their servers, should just be able to combine it with their guide on how to run a buildserver on https://f-droid.org/en/docs/Build_Server_Setup/
Well done NewPipe, you're showing how web applications should be done.
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 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.
Arent these goals one and the same?
Profit maximization is required under a capitalist system. By optimizig bandwidth expenses, you are achieving profit maximization.
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.
https://joinpeertube.org
https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube
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.
https://www.yrcharisma.com/the-youtube-revenue-split-who-kee...
Should YT run ads on non-monetized content? It's a fair question, and I can see a justifications either way.
[1]: https://newpipe.net/FAQ/tutorials/install-add-fdroid-repo/
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.
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.
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.
I haven't tried NewPipe, but you can easily download audio streams on YouTube using yt-dlp. It even lets you see all the available stream options and pick the one you want, so if you prefer opus or aac, you can select that.
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.
Hence F-Droid, which cannot exist on iOS.
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.