Use Invidious, self-hosted or otherwise with the Sponsorblock extension and you get these benefits everywhere - mobile, desk/lap/${whatever}top instead of just on a single device. Yes, you need a mobile browser which supports extensions but then again, you want to block ads and other malcontent anyway so you may as well use Firefox or one of its derivatives.
> In summary, it can be said that sponsoring is a good approach. It is fair and non-discriminating to all users, preserves their privacy, lets creators select their partners themselves, and provides them with a larger share of the revenue. Even though there are some disadvantages, it is more or less beneficial for all sides. [...] Ethical advertising, for example through sponsorship, should therefore not be touched by us. This would turn our key selling proposition from being privacy-friendly to being a gatekeeper for advertising. And this is not what NewPipe ever has been or wants to be. We’ve always stressed that NewPipe’s main goal is to protect the users by maintaining their privacy, not to, e.g., provide features a user would otherwise have to pay for, for free. Regarding SponsorBlock: after a lot of discussion within the team, we decided not to support this system. As stated earlier, we don’t consider advertising in general problematic. It’s the unethical, privacy-invasive systems that are very common today which we consider evil. Sponsorship provides a mostly ethical way of advertising.
> Thus, employing a system to bypass those ads is harmful to those creators.
There's an obvious catch-22 here: either you are maintaining privacy, and the sponsor has no way to know whether their segment was viewed, so you are wasting your life watching an ad to make an inanimate object happy, or they are spying on you to learn whether you watch it.
Either way I fundamentally disagree with them on the idea that push advertising is ethical in the first place, but it's kind of absurd thinking about people feeling good about themselves for watching a recording. Like did you also not fast-forward your VCR through ads in those days and instead dutifully watch attentively lest God know you were naughty? You make sure to read all of the spam in your mail, or inserts in newspapers rather than chucking them in the bin?
> There's an obvious catch-22 here: either you are maintaining privacy, and the sponsor has no way to know whether their segment was viewed
The same way they did in the past, with broadcast radio and television: they base it on audience numbers rather than tracking whether people actually listened or viewed the ad. Besides, isn't one of the major motivators of tracking to avoid fraud? (Which I find ironic, given I don't view advertisers as very ethical in the first place.)
> Either way I fundamentally disagree with them on the idea that push advertising is ethical in the first place
The way I think of it: advertising doesn't have to be unethical, but it incentivizes unethical behaviour.
> Like did you also not fast-forward your VCR through ads in those days and instead dutifully watch attentively lest God know you were naughty?
I would typically walk away to do something else. Same outcome though. That said, I started to turn away from broadcast media in the early to mid-1990's. I forget whether it was due to advertising, but the end result was a lot less exposure to advertising. Which is a good thing IMHO.
> As stated earlier, we don’t consider advertising in general problematic. It’s the unethical, privacy-invasive systems that are very common today which we consider evil. Sponsorship provides a mostly ethical way of advertising.
Considering the fact that the vast majority of YouTube sponsors seem to be some kind of scam or are privacy-invasive themselves, the word “mostly” is doing a lot of heavy lifting there.
They circumvent YouTube ads but draw a line at in video ads? Their stance is inconsistent, not to also mention that lots of sponsorship ads can be unethical (see the outrage over BetterHelp) while normal YouTube ads don't have to be unethical.
Issue further is that sponsorship ads put the onus on the video authors themselves to make a judgement call and put their own reputation somewhat on the line.
Rather it lets them creator-wash half truths and potentially misleading information.
Not that I think youtube or other ad platforms make great decisions on ads one bit either, its all just a very abusable medium.
Ugh, sponsors are not ethical at all. See how losers like LTT were pushing PayPal honey that hijacked other people's affiliate codes. They were told about it and did nothing.
No thanks I'm not using anything without sponsorblock.
Luckily there's many newpipe forks with it. There's pipepipe but also tubular and a few others.
It would be nice if newpipe would just support sponsorblock though and leave the decision to the user, like grayjay also does.
theres an unofficial version of freetube on the f-droid store as well. the UI isnt great for small screens really but you would probably have any eaiser time transferring the settings and subs between devices
I have been happily using PipePipe for the past few months and have been very satisfied with it. The developer seems to spend the time and attention needed to make it work again whenever youtube likes to change things and I really appreciate that.
I think it's been about 6 months or more for me and I am also very satisfied with it. I left NewPipe because I'd often have to wait days to weeks for simple fixes to get implemented. PipePipe is patched very often.
I think part of the reason why NewPipe is so slow is that they are in the middle of a rewrite/redesign. All the focus is there and the current app is in the maintainance mode.
This is the reason I switched probably mor than a year or two ago. YouTube remains a cat and mouse game. Strange things with those forks is that they always add some more streaming sources Mike BkliBili but keep the old stuft. Actually soundcloud only works very limited lately.
Same. It's also less buggy, and they've fixed long-standing navigation gripes I had with NewPipe. I did disable the SponsorBlock integration because I find it quite annoying to go back on a skipped sequence.
Same. My only issue (with NewPipe also) is that at ~50 subscribed channels, Google rate limits me when I refresh. I wish there was better logic to get new content or a way to space it out over an amount of time.
Shameless plug.
I also implemented SponsorBlock functionality into the NewPipe. My fork is focused on as minimal changes to the original as possible, so it is easy to be up to date with new releases. The implementation is as minimalistic as possible, so no seekbar highlights and no option to submit new segments, just skipping segments that were selected in settings. You can turn it off for a video tho.
I am using it myself heavily, so I am motivated to maintain it.
https://github.com/simur407/NewPipe-SponsorBlock
Used through all of the apps and personally there's little incentive for me to not use Firefox/Fennec. The only issue is that background playing is flaky, not sure it only works on my Poco F7 and not my S23, or if it randomly starts pausing the video when leaving de browser or even if it's a browser or OS power saving settings. But when it works it works flawlessly.
In any case, there needs to be a huge problem to justify installing an android app. I prefer to keep them to a minimum and focus solely on the browser. It's the only vendor safe option which I can use to bail entirely on Google's Android or iOS and go some place else.
One of the reasons why I use an app to view YouTube is to disable suggested videos and comments. Basically, I want to have a personalized list of the channels I view as worth watching and I want to discourage continued watching outside of those boundaries.
I don't have a problem with compulsive watching, so for me the subscriptions view is good enough. I think there are be extensions for Firefox to customize the layout the way need, but it falls in the pitfall of relying on YouTube code for it to work, so it's bound to be flaky or have a short lifespan.
For the most part, I've been using the apps for so long that compulsive viewing is not an issue on my end either. That said, I do have my days and I don't want to slide into that habit. By sticking to my curated list, I am limited to a couple of hours of videos a week. Quite often it turns out to be less since I've grown much more selective about what I will watch from that list.
NewPipe has a one-click download button. If one follows channels with mainly-audio content that one may want to listen to later, possibly away from an internet connection, that is super-handy.
NewPipe also lets you export your subscriptions (which is just a bunch of links to RSS feeds), so you aren't shackled to Android/RSS.
It's even better with a podcast app that can have a directory read as a podcast. Have to click once more though to have the"podcasts"refreshed to get it in my playlist. Still cool for podcasts that are only on YouTube and Spotify.
Solid take, these days most apps are just glorified browser wrappers and you don't miss out on anything. In fact, you could have a separate browser with all these saving modes disabled just for the youtube use case.
I mean, so is Edge. I can't say I feel more comfortable with them. Probably the most direct thing I can point to for Brave is that having cryptocurrency features in a browser doesn't give trustworthy vibes.
It always hurts me, when people basically say "I'm not giving up [something that has cornered the market] for the alternative, because [minor-grievance]", even though it is already clear that the monopoly is being exploited to make things worse for all customers.
agreeable argument. I am also running towards firefox, but keeping the firefox open, juggling between the tabs, especially the quirks YT poses on Firefox, these apps poses a usecase. Yes, download/subscribe/SB support etc. Currently using libretube mostly.
Using alternative apps consumes less of YouTube's ressources than watching videos on their website directly. These wrapper apps download only the videos, thumbnails and texts - not the other resources, so the impact is actually less on their servers.
Mobile Firefox with background playing is really bad, do they just stop everything "to save battery?" I use Brave only to stream web radio while in the kitchen.
From time to time I get blocked by YouTube and both NewPipe and PipePipe become unusable. I wonder if it has something to do with my internet provider putting me behind a CGNAT proxy
Yes, it happens quite often recently. I think, their approach is "dominate and tolerate" in a controllable way, so they know quite a bit about who is actually using NewPipe, yt-dlp, etc. and they tolerate it in order to have a kind of leverage to preserve their monopoly. Then if number of out-of-official-app views becomes like above certain point, they aggressively block with "bot detected" message.
Been using pipepiple since December of last year, very happy about the app. The developer seems to care about the project and introduces a lot of quality of life improvments.
Morphe just patches the YouTube app no? Then you need to still use that abomination. NewPipe/PipePipe is fast, lightweight and I couldn't care less about any "features" other than watching a video.
Maybe I'm different because I actually like those features like the AI summaries, saves time on watching videos I don't think are worth it. In contrast NewPipe is quite buggy comparatively or simply not as clean in my experience (it queries each subscription and can take a while rather than streaming each subscription's new video one by one as in the regular YouTube app).
Revanced has some issues with developer drama where the lead banned other devs so they moved to create Morphe. Also Morphe can patch a lot more apps than just YouTube.
I'm only seeing YouTube, Reddit, and YouTube Music in Morphe. I use some other app patches that Revanced Manager supports like ProtonVPN. I'll try both and see which I like better. Thanks!
Quick search makes it look like there were some politics and ReVanced devs left and created Morphe. Seems more active but I'm also just learning about it
I just use ReVanced. I like shorts and recommendations and don't really care about privacy when most of my feed is football highlights, K&P sketches, gaming channels and random bullshit comedy videos. But having a full open source alternative is still important.
https://github.com/revanced
Download the latest revanced manager and it works fine. I've had no issues but the account I use is on a friend's family YouTube Premium plan so I don't need to rely on the ad blocker.
Does it auto-update now? I like its UI better than PipePipe, but I got so sick of hand-updating Vanced (including hand-downloading the correct apk and waiting several minutes for the patches to run against it) every time Google breaks Youtube again. There was a period of Warfare last year where Google would make breaking changes more than once a week...
PipePipe is so nice with the fast auto-updates. If I ever even catch it breaking, I just have to use Firefox for a few hours and then F-Droid ships the fix and PipePipe works again.
It doesn't, sadly. The new kid on the block, Morphe (there was some classic open source drama) directly gives you the link to the correct apkmirror page, don't know if revanced also did this. But it makes things easier. Tbh, I only update every few months, it's bearable
This app and previously NewPipe is the main thing I miss after moving to iOS. I really can't stand ads (including organic ads that SponsorBlock deal with).
i had a look at yattee, but it looks like there is only the possibility to sideload it to ios devices, which you would have to do every 7 days, or am I missing something? The repos is unfortunately very sparse with installation instructions
I’m using https://github.com/Tonwalter888/YouMod on my iPhone and I’m very satisfied. It has integrated adblock, sponsorblock, and despite being modded stock YouTube app it has tons of features, like completely removing shorts from the app, customizing the UI, and more.
I have watch history in NewPipe just fine? And I find it very convenient to know what I've already watched. All local, Google doesn't need to store it for you / you can't lose access to it
Is it a problem for you that YouTube's watch history is littered with videos you didn't watch, but got recorded as being watched because the mouse pointer moved over one of their suggestions for a moment.
I want these things to implement peer to peer caching, so that when 10 people are watching the same video, only one downloads from youtubes own servers.
Then it's just a matter of letting people add their own videos directly to the service and it can become fully independent of YouTube.
Delivering the bits is not the hard part of making a successful video platform. It's other stuff like recommendations and content discovery that is actually useful, allowing creators to monetize enough that they want to be on your platform, navigating legal issues, fighting spam and abuse, and getting enough users to sign up and start using your service.
Delivering the bits is a part of it though. When youtube changes its api in a way that forces NewPipe to change its algorithm, they have to push out a change that forces users to update the app. This is annoying because naturally you won't find NewPipe on the app store so updating the app is tedious for users who use it. The parent's workaround fixes some or all of this nuisance, depending on how implemented
I don't find ads tedious at all. In fact, since I grew up with ads on tv, I miss them. The commercial break was a scheduled time to get a snack, go to the bathroom, get a snack, etc. Today's platforms put the ad breaks in such awkward spots that doing those things is a lot less natural. IMO, it's not the ads that after the problem; it's the way they are used.
So you don't miss ads, you miss a scheduled break. You literally said you walk away when they happened, so you didn't even see them.
That's fine and there are tools to get that scheduled break back - even the official YouTube app has options to remind you to take a break every X min of watchtime and there are some very advanced general screentime limiting apps out there.
As you say YouTube ads aren't scheduled well and they're too short and unpredictable to even go to the bathroom during. Integrated ad reads are even worse in that regard.
You bring your phone or tablet to the bathroom, or are you playing YouTube on an unmovable TV set?
I did without a TV set since I moved in a larger home. Previously I could listen to the TV anywhere in my home, now I can't so instead of pinning me in a place I moved my TV into my phone and tablets. Everything is in an app anyway and for free to air TV I got a couple of RPi 3 with a TV hat and the TVHeadend app.
And when I have guests everybody is watching something different on their phones most of the times.
NewPipe dev here: We discussed something like this, but decided against “hot loadable code” like JavaScript snippets. Instead, we notify the users when a new version of the app is available. However, this features is opt-in due to privacy concerns. Maybe we should make it more obvious that this feature exists.
I checked right now: I installed both NewPipe and PipePipe from F-Droid but both apps notify me about new versions and I always download and install them from the notification message bypassing F-Droid.
NewPipe dev here. Just like @nijave said, we offer OTA updates. Apps in android are capable of updating themselves this is why we show notifications when a new update is available. However, due to privacy concerns this automatic update checking is an opt-in feature, which you will have to enable in the settings first.
You could have local caches of the users recently watched videos on their machines as available seeds. bittorrent now also supports http based init seeds so you could create torrents with a verified sha of a youtube mp4 downloaded once or something like that.
if someone is seeding that video cause they recently watched it and it remains on their local cache, you could get the bits from there vs hitting youtube servers
That works if you fix everything to a single quality and codec. YouTube videos tend to have something like 20+ variants that can get dynamically switched between while the video is playing (adaptive streaming).
The client can pick the optimal encoding and quality which makes that quite a bit more difficult. A user on a modern device that can hardware decode HDR av1 will have a file cached completely useless to a browser that can only do SDR h264.
I think there is a sort of network effect needed to make it become reasonable.
I'd be interested in seeing data that supports this.
Netflix reported in 2025 something like 30% of traffic was av1. I think smartphone and PC support are fairly robust but under the impression streaming devices are still quite terrible unless it's a Chromecast.
AVC/h.264 is the only thing I know of that's pretty much universally supported at this point. I found a Facebook/Meta report citing some consultant provided data that VP9 was a close second. Limiting to devices from the last few years, HEVC might work.
Why is that the right tradeoff? It seems like the Plex/Jellyfin ecosystem has landed on keeping high quality persisted and hardware accelerated transcoding for everything else. Put another way, transcoding capable caches.
Peer to peer died because (1) a lot of the world, especially outside the US, has terrible upload/bandwidth, (2) HTTPS CDNs got _really_ cheap, far cheaper that p2p technologies like BitTorrent+WebSeed.
There are a minority of users who care about being able to host videos that violate YouTube/TikTok/Instagram policies. Unfortunately, a significant part of that minority is working with infringing or illegal content, which both prevents ad networks from working with you and attracts attention from law enforcement.
The CGNAT problem is solvable in the majority of cases via multiple solutions (tailscale/tailcat/DERP, for example), but that certainly doesn't make a mobile connection's upload any better for sure.
Meh - you can block ports inbound without state tables. I think you're ascribing purpose to what i imagine is a sclerotic and dysfunctional entity.
When i was 20, i was reflexively cynical, because it let me pose as intellectual without the burden of having to learn or think. As an adult, i find that pose very fucking obvious.
My interest was piqued by the concept of natting ip6, and why an isp might do so, and why cgnat might be disabled if you ask the isp to disable ip6.
...bb-but I thought cynicism was the same thing as experience![1]
No but seriously, I agree it is primarily "we can't be arsed to change our methods".
"Primarily" is not everything; the other 10-20% is the long tail of everything else. Europe is getting much harder on filesharing[3][4] because of business interests, and - despite the much better regulation - there's probably some "you shouldn't be hosting things on a residential connection anyways, pay us for a business connection peasants" like in the US[2].
Of course, all these ready-made restrictions are then easily adaptable for abuse (when's the next Chat Control proposal anyways?), so there's not much pushback from above...
Cynicism is easily a thought-terminating cliche, but it is unfortunately earned nowadays, especially as a coping mechanism for a feeling of helplessness against the usually stupid, sometimes malicious forces at play (Hanlon's Razor doesn't account for weaponization of stupidity).
Sure, but cgnat doesn't defeat filesharing, because of your STUN and your DERP and what-have-you.
It's common, at least in the UK, for residential lines to block smtp inbound. That's an ACL, which is operationally ~free. NAT does not serve the purposes you've outlined.
Some cynicism is warranted about, e.g. chat control, but it's better explained by good-faith desire to fight egregious crime coupled with low care for the privacy invasion. Other people have different values to you and me.
It's hard to reconcile an EU government in anyone's pocket with gdpr and dma, which afaics serve citizens and no big interests. Like most governments, the EU is somewhat fractious and incoherent, so it's not a given that everything they do is citizen-friendly. But i, for one, accept that law enforcement should exist; accept that this is inevitably a trade-off against citizen rights; concede that preventing the next bataclan is nigh-on impossible; and understand why some might, to that end, desire greater power to comb through conversations. I don't agree, but i also don't need to assume conspiracy. At heart, the problem is not that all government is evil - although you're welcome to that view - it's that thick pillocks vote without any consideration of nuance.
They aren't actually doing that, as far as I've seen.
There are a number of big ISPs in Europe that that have a "new" native v6+CGNATed v4 platform, and an "old" native v4+no v6 one. That's where a lot of the "I had to ask the ISP to disable v6 to get inbound connections" comes from -- the actual relevant part was getting out from behind CGNAT, and the loss of v6 was just a side-effect caused by the ISP moving you to their old platform.
Inbound v6 should generally work on those ISPs. If it didn't... I'd be tempted (perhaps unfairly) to blame the user for not configuring things properly, or their software for not supporting v6. A lot of people will give up and blame a problem on v6 when they would have found and fixed it instead on v4.
It's much more of a storage space problem and a device running 24/7 problem. With the desktop of yore you can just leave them running and attach cheap HDDs to them for media storage. Nowadays, most people have laptops -- which are explicitly closed for most of the time -- and phones -- which doing 24/7 upload on will kill your battery life. And neither support 3.5" HDDs.
BitTorrent is certainly built around the idea that upload can be slow. Even if user have upload 100x worse than download, 100 seeders can saturate a leacher, and then the leacher becomes a seeder.
The problem is just that he doesn't stay a seeder forever, because of the other problems.
Phones are charging ~8 hours a day whilst you sleep though. And few people mind the phone seeding stuff on your home WiFi whilst charging. Many users could also spare 32gbytes for seed data too, especially if the app was smart and automatically reduced the store size before the phone started to notify you of low storage space.
If a typical user uses preertube 30 mins a day, that still gives a 16 to 1 ratio between seeding and leeching, and a 1024 to 1 data storage to data viewed ratio, meaning there is a good opportunity for a big back catalogue.
3- Also, this is rebroadcasting, technically a textbook definition of piracy even when that content might normally be obtained for free, especially if the content began encrypted.
(Because some laws are stupid. Please support right to repair and DMCA reform.)
And we haven't yet found a way to solve recommendations for full P2P networks without making them trivial to game via sybil attacks. This makes truly decentralized P2P unusable in ways most people use Youtube.
YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok (especially) are becoming stricter and stricter about the kinds of content they allow to exist and spread on their platforms. Right now I think an alternative is non-viable but it's increasingly possible that won't be the case in the near future.
Yes, because the amount of pirated content floating around was not 1/100th the amount that is out there now, and obtaining content is easier than ever. Especially when you have a sanctioned "library" that hosts it all for you for free.
1. The audience changed. Billions of people came online in the 2010s on smartphones, streaming works better for them.
2. For most people bandwidth did not increase at the same rate as video file sizes during that period, streaming could do smart things like serve transcoded media sized to fit your screen and internet connection. It's only recently with HEVC and AV1 that video file sizes have caught up.
3. Streaming can be easily monetized, p2p generally cannot.
With no end in sight to the increasing cost of storage I can't imagine a worse time to put the burden of video storage onto users.
Even forgetting that issue, the last thing I want is to use some unknown, unpredictably changing residential connection for my videos. Google has invested in a powerful edge network so they can server my videos lightning quick.
At current prices, pledging $5 worth of storage while the app is installed is enough to cache 20 hours of video. It's not too bad.
> the last thing I want is to use some unknown, unpredictably changing residential connection for my videos
YouTube only buffers a handful of seconds. Let's say other users would only be used to buffer 30-60 seconds in the future and if it drops below 15 a fast server is used. Does that solve your worries?
Can you give a reason you don't want data from that dude? Because the design I outlined can only make your buffer bigger, never smaller. The absolute worst case of phone guy dropping out still leaves you in the same place youtube puts you by default. So there's no downside.
AFAIK Newpipe is mobile only, so I don't really see how that'd work.
P2P is great on desktop computers (and, in the modern age, Smart TV boxes), where your network connection has no data cap, there are no battery concerns, you're unlikely to be behind CGNAT (common for cellular data connections), and the app can surreptitiously minimize itself to tray instead of closing itself outright, making you an unwitting seed.
That's what PeerTube does. If enough people are watching the same thing, the clients start to serve blocks of the video to other clients, taking load off the hosting server. There's still only one hosting server. It just scales for popular videos.
Nobody uses PeerTube much. I put technical videos on Hardlimit because it doesn't insert ads. I don't care about "discovery"; they're for a tiny audience that comes in from postings elsewhere. Works fine for that. The client side is all Javascript in user's browsers.
(One of the) NewPipe devs here: I've been dreaming of something like a Worldwide Video (WWV) for a while. Essentially instead of having one huge platform you would have many small platforms, that all talk the same content language. Like HTML/HTTP for the Web. So you could have Video browsers like PipePipe, NewPipe or an Invidious. Peertube kind of goes into that direction, but the Peertube network just like other similar platforms have problems right now. These platforms often suffer from lacking content moderation, a strong network effect towards bigger platforms and a well scalable content provisioning (CDN costs money and P2P is complicated) makes this more of a dream rather than something feasible. (Please correct me if I am wrong with my view :)
I've been using Tubular which was a NewPipe fork that implemented SponsorBlock. Works really well, and I was going to see what the differences are. Just noticed, now that Tubular is no longer maintained.
> Just noticed, now that Tubular is no longer maintained
How have you just noticed that when Tubular reliably broke every single month when YouTube changes something and you had to wait for weeks for it to be fixed? It was barely maintained for a long time now
Still no good solution for Apple TV? Running SponsorBlock container, on the same network appears to be the best solution but that only mutes ads and skips them when permitted.
I respect your stance. A couple counter points from personal experience: even if I can't skip the ads, I'm not paying attention - I immediately mute/ tune out. And the ads are typically so obnoxious that the reflex to ignore/avoid is only magnified. Is that so different from having a mechanism to auto skip?
Posting YouTube videos can just be a hobby - it was in the beginning, and that was fine. It's OK if posting a video isn't a profitable career path. Enthusiasts > "creators".
And in-video ads like these are even less defensible given that they still show up when people are paying YouTube (and creators by extension) to not display ads.
Actually I didn’t sign anything. And I will watch online content however I want to. You’re free to paywall it or not put it online at all if you don’t like it, someone else will fill the gap.
Out of the options "creators released content only behind paywalls", "users steal from creators", and "creators incentivised platforms to lobby to remove user freedom so users can't steal from creators", what actually happened was, by far, my least preferable option.
How is blocking in-video apps stealing from creators? If the advertiser pays them per view, your view still counts. If they pay a commission per purchase, it doesn't matter if you skipped the ad if you wouldn't have bought the product anyway, and I doubt you buy every single advertised products to support creators.
Just a heads up, this includes support for Return YouTube Dislike, which tells a third party service what videos you click on and has no measures to ensure anonymity like SponsorBlock does. The option for disabling it doesn't seem to do anything.
token controverial comment that all good stuff needs to be sustained with money somehow. always good to find alternatives if/when/for can't afford/appreciate. but there has to be sustenance. nothing against a cheeky freeride, of course. but when it becomes the main source something has to give.
No (realistic) amount of money can protect an app like this from Alphabet. It's their service, and clients like NewPipe are always at risk of being depreciated forever.
If this is in reference to sponsorblock: I see this argument often but it's never made sense to me. There's no world in which not using sponsorblock leads to me spending money on the advertised product. It simply saves me 4-5 presses of the "skip forward" button.
It's like when a telemarketer calls, I tell them, there's zero chance of me buying anything, so save us both some time and don't call again.
for sure. but if everyone did this, then there wouldn't be a point for sponsorships and creators would be less incentivised to make content. and at least it's an ad they can control. believe it or not, ads work, and sponsored bits even more. and tbh i do watch some of the sponsored bits if they're fun and creative. i invite you to watch any wulff den video.
See, this is what I don't get. I don't like watching ads, and not using sponsorblock is not gonna make me watch ads. Even if you went to the "drink a verification can" route, and disabled the skip button, I'd just stop watching the videos.
> if everyone did this ... creators would be less incentivised to make content
Yeah, I guess they'd just have to stop making videos then.
> believe it or not, ads work, and sponsored bits even more
Is that... good? Most of the sponsors I have seen have been semi-shady snake oil like NordVPN and BetterHelp.
You are right. In my subscription list, around 15 channels, there are a few channels who offer patreon subscriptions for 1-2 euros. In my opinion more channels should try to offer this. I don't think they get that much from ads/premium user view.
About NewPipe, which I've tried it in the past, I have to say it was a better app than Youtube's official app, and I'm not talking about the fact it was blocking ads. For example, three weeks ago, the new Youtube app upgraded to a new GUI, and all those filters in the subscriptions list (not watched, continue watching etc) disappeared or at least I can't find them anymore. It's like this new version is trying to make you not see old stuff or wants you to lose time scrolling instead of watching videos. I use very little the Youtube app because TV screen + browser with extensions (there are no ads blocked on Youtube on my PC) + KDE Connect offer a much better viewing experience.
I have been using adblockers since perhaps 2012 and now have it on my router.
I don't think I missed anything, or in some cases where ads are unavoidable, ever decided to buy something because of ads. I do my own research for purchases.
In other words, the conversion rate is near zero for me.
I don't care what others do, but it's a waste of compute and network bandwidth to try to target me. Ad lords had better use that resource to target someone else.
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[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 64.2 ms ] thread> In summary, it can be said that sponsoring is a good approach. It is fair and non-discriminating to all users, preserves their privacy, lets creators select their partners themselves, and provides them with a larger share of the revenue. Even though there are some disadvantages, it is more or less beneficial for all sides. [...] Ethical advertising, for example through sponsorship, should therefore not be touched by us. This would turn our key selling proposition from being privacy-friendly to being a gatekeeper for advertising. And this is not what NewPipe ever has been or wants to be. We’ve always stressed that NewPipe’s main goal is to protect the users by maintaining their privacy, not to, e.g., provide features a user would otherwise have to pay for, for free. Regarding SponsorBlock: after a lot of discussion within the team, we decided not to support this system. As stated earlier, we don’t consider advertising in general problematic. It’s the unethical, privacy-invasive systems that are very common today which we consider evil. Sponsorship provides a mostly ethical way of advertising.
There's an obvious catch-22 here: either you are maintaining privacy, and the sponsor has no way to know whether their segment was viewed, so you are wasting your life watching an ad to make an inanimate object happy, or they are spying on you to learn whether you watch it.
Either way I fundamentally disagree with them on the idea that push advertising is ethical in the first place, but it's kind of absurd thinking about people feeling good about themselves for watching a recording. Like did you also not fast-forward your VCR through ads in those days and instead dutifully watch attentively lest God know you were naughty? You make sure to read all of the spam in your mail, or inserts in newspapers rather than chucking them in the bin?
The same way they did in the past, with broadcast radio and television: they base it on audience numbers rather than tracking whether people actually listened or viewed the ad. Besides, isn't one of the major motivators of tracking to avoid fraud? (Which I find ironic, given I don't view advertisers as very ethical in the first place.)
> Either way I fundamentally disagree with them on the idea that push advertising is ethical in the first place
The way I think of it: advertising doesn't have to be unethical, but it incentivizes unethical behaviour.
> Like did you also not fast-forward your VCR through ads in those days and instead dutifully watch attentively lest God know you were naughty?
I would typically walk away to do something else. Same outcome though. That said, I started to turn away from broadcast media in the early to mid-1990's. I forget whether it was due to advertising, but the end result was a lot less exposure to advertising. Which is a good thing IMHO.
Considering the fact that the vast majority of YouTube sponsors seem to be some kind of scam or are privacy-invasive themselves, the word “mostly” is doing a lot of heavy lifting there.
Not that I think youtube or other ad platforms make great decisions on ads one bit either, its all just a very abusable medium.
No thanks I'm not using anything without sponsorblock.
Luckily there's many newpipe forks with it. There's pipepipe but also tubular and a few others.
It would be nice if newpipe would just support sponsorblock though and leave the decision to the user, like grayjay also does.
I'm not sure about transferring subscriptions between Pipe and Brave...?
I have had this issue few times on a specific wifi router (different router on same line doesn't) so don't know exactly.
In any case, there needs to be a huge problem to justify installing an android app. I prefer to keep them to a minimum and focus solely on the browser. It's the only vendor safe option which I can use to bail entirely on Google's Android or iOS and go some place else.
NewPipe also lets you export your subscriptions (which is just a bunch of links to RSS feeds), so you aren't shackled to Android/RSS.
This has worked flawlessly for me on every phone I've used.
Funnily what I found was to install 1.1.1.1 from cloudflare. Enable that. PipePipe works perfectly.
Default app for sure is an abomination and so are most Androids straight out of the box before debloat + clean rom + root.
Bad name though, first few results for "Morphe" is a well-known make-up brand.
https://morphe-patches.software/
[1] https://github.com/MorpheApp/
PipePipe is so nice with the fast auto-updates. If I ever even catch it breaking, I just have to use Firefox for a few hours and then F-Droid ships the fix and PipePipe works again.
https://wispydocs.pages.dev/morphe-piko-obtainium/
I've been watching youtube without ads on all Apple hardware for years.
I use invidious as backend.
https://github.com/iv-org/invidious
Absolutely fabulous.
https://yattee.stream/beta2
Super easy.
https://docs.yattee.stream/docs/app/getting-started
Killer feature!
https://github.com/MetrolistGroup/Metrolist/releases
All the YouTube alternative frontends are so privacy focused that they do not even offer video history in your account.
Having video history is a must for me as I might start watching a video in my computer and then continue on my phone.
Also as it is just a web (and includes support for SponsorBlock) it works everywhere, no need to patch apps or install extensions.
Then it's just a matter of letting people add their own videos directly to the service and it can become fully independent of YouTube.
That's fine and there are tools to get that scheduled break back - even the official YouTube app has options to remind you to take a break every X min of watchtime and there are some very advanced general screentime limiting apps out there.
As you say YouTube ads aren't scheduled well and they're too short and unpredictable to even go to the bathroom during. Integrated ad reads are even worse in that regard.
I did without a TV set since I moved in a larger home. Previously I could listen to the TV anywhere in my home, now I can't so instead of pinning me in a place I moved my TV into my phone and tablets. Everything is in an app anyway and for free to air TV I got a couple of RPi 3 with a TV hat and the TVHeadend app.
And when I have guests everybody is watching something different on their phones most of the times.
Smarttube on Android TV just pulls its own APK so you just need to click Install after it downloads and opens it.
F-droid enters the chat.
if someone is seeding that video cause they recently watched it and it remains on their local cache, you could get the bits from there vs hitting youtube servers
The client can pick the optimal encoding and quality which makes that quite a bit more difficult. A user on a modern device that can hardware decode HDR av1 will have a file cached completely useless to a browser that can only do SDR h264.
I think there is a sort of network effect needed to make it become reasonable.
Netflix reported in 2025 something like 30% of traffic was av1. I think smartphone and PC support are fairly robust but under the impression streaming devices are still quite terrible unless it's a Chromecast.
AVC/h.264 is the only thing I know of that's pretty much universally supported at this point. I found a Facebook/Meta report citing some consultant provided data that VP9 was a close second. Limiting to devices from the last few years, HEVC might work.
There are a minority of users who care about being able to host videos that violate YouTube/TikTok/Instagram policies. Unfortunately, a significant part of that minority is working with infringing or illegal content, which both prevents ad networks from working with you and attracts attention from law enforcement.
When i was 20, i was reflexively cynical, because it let me pose as intellectual without the burden of having to learn or think. As an adult, i find that pose very fucking obvious.
My interest was piqued by the concept of natting ip6, and why an isp might do so, and why cgnat might be disabled if you ask the isp to disable ip6.
...bb-but I thought cynicism was the same thing as experience![1]
No but seriously, I agree it is primarily "we can't be arsed to change our methods".
"Primarily" is not everything; the other 10-20% is the long tail of everything else. Europe is getting much harder on filesharing[3][4] because of business interests, and - despite the much better regulation - there's probably some "you shouldn't be hosting things on a residential connection anyways, pay us for a business connection peasants" like in the US[2].
Of course, all these ready-made restrictions are then easily adaptable for abuse (when's the next Chat Control proposal anyways?), so there's not much pushback from above...
Cynicism is easily a thought-terminating cliche, but it is unfortunately earned nowadays, especially as a coping mechanism for a feeling of helplessness against the usually stupid, sometimes malicious forces at play (Hanlon's Razor doesn't account for weaponization of stupidity).
[1]https://youtu.be/v0VA6u8cTxE?t=540
[2]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18238827
[3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_and_survei...
[4]https://torrentfreak.com/?s=europe
It's common, at least in the UK, for residential lines to block smtp inbound. That's an ACL, which is operationally ~free. NAT does not serve the purposes you've outlined.
Some cynicism is warranted about, e.g. chat control, but it's better explained by good-faith desire to fight egregious crime coupled with low care for the privacy invasion. Other people have different values to you and me.
It's hard to reconcile an EU government in anyone's pocket with gdpr and dma, which afaics serve citizens and no big interests. Like most governments, the EU is somewhat fractious and incoherent, so it's not a given that everything they do is citizen-friendly. But i, for one, accept that law enforcement should exist; accept that this is inevitably a trade-off against citizen rights; concede that preventing the next bataclan is nigh-on impossible; and understand why some might, to that end, desire greater power to comb through conversations. I don't agree, but i also don't need to assume conspiracy. At heart, the problem is not that all government is evil - although you're welcome to that view - it's that thick pillocks vote without any consideration of nuance.
There are a number of big ISPs in Europe that that have a "new" native v6+CGNATed v4 platform, and an "old" native v4+no v6 one. That's where a lot of the "I had to ask the ISP to disable v6 to get inbound connections" comes from -- the actual relevant part was getting out from behind CGNAT, and the loss of v6 was just a side-effect caused by the ISP moving you to their old platform.
Inbound v6 should generally work on those ISPs. If it didn't... I'd be tempted (perhaps unfairly) to blame the user for not configuring things properly, or their software for not supporting v6. A lot of people will give up and blame a problem on v6 when they would have found and fixed it instead on v4.
BitTorrent is certainly built around the idea that upload can be slow. Even if user have upload 100x worse than download, 100 seeders can saturate a leacher, and then the leacher becomes a seeder.
The problem is just that he doesn't stay a seeder forever, because of the other problems.
If a typical user uses preertube 30 mins a day, that still gives a 16 to 1 ratio between seeding and leeching, and a 1024 to 1 data storage to data viewed ratio, meaning there is a good opportunity for a big back catalogue.
Almost everyone I've ever known has problems with running out of phone storage, so I disagree with this.
The seeding while charging and on wifi idea is cool though.
IF I had a penny for every time I heard "unalive", I'd build my own hosting platform.
(Because some laws are stupid. Please support right to repair and DMCA reform.)
I even got 100 times faster upload than 20 years ago...
2. For most people bandwidth did not increase at the same rate as video file sizes during that period, streaming could do smart things like serve transcoded media sized to fit your screen and internet connection. It's only recently with HEVC and AV1 that video file sizes have caught up.
3. Streaming can be easily monetized, p2p generally cannot.
Even forgetting that issue, the last thing I want is to use some unknown, unpredictably changing residential connection for my videos. Google has invested in a powerful edge network so they can server my videos lightning quick.
> the last thing I want is to use some unknown, unpredictably changing residential connection for my videos
YouTube only buffers a handful of seconds. Let's say other users would only be used to buffer 30-60 seconds in the future and if it drops below 15 a fast server is used. Does that solve your worries?
As for upside, is fewer ads enough to tempt you?
P2P is great on desktop computers (and, in the modern age, Smart TV boxes), where your network connection has no data cap, there are no battery concerns, you're unlikely to be behind CGNAT (common for cellular data connections), and the app can surreptitiously minimize itself to tray instead of closing itself outright, making you an unwitting seed.
Nobody uses PeerTube much. I put technical videos on Hardlimit because it doesn't insert ads. I don't care about "discovery"; they're for a tiny audience that comes in from postings elsewhere. Works fine for that. The client side is all Javascript in user's browsers.
I'll move over to PipePipe now.
How have you just noticed that when Tubular reliably broke every single month when YouTube changes something and you had to wait for weeks for it to be fixed? It was barely maintained for a long time now
Most of my YouTube viewing is done with SmartTube on my TV. My phone is mostly used for watching a DIY video when I'm trying to fix something.
And in-video ads like these are even less defensible given that they still show up when people are paying YouTube (and creators by extension) to not display ads.
There are platforms for paid content, YouTube was never made for it. It’s an afterthought.
NewPipe was so buggy for me in the past, I've avoided it. Did it get better? Any reason to use it over Morphe?
It's like when a telemarketer calls, I tell them, there's zero chance of me buying anything, so save us both some time and don't call again.
Ref https://watchwithmira.com/blog/sponsorblock-categories-expla...
Cutting intro/outro/preview is nice if you're watching a bunch of videos on the same channel in a row.
> if everyone did this ... creators would be less incentivised to make content
Yeah, I guess they'd just have to stop making videos then.
> believe it or not, ads work, and sponsored bits even more
Is that... good? Most of the sponsors I have seen have been semi-shady snake oil like NordVPN and BetterHelp.
About NewPipe, which I've tried it in the past, I have to say it was a better app than Youtube's official app, and I'm not talking about the fact it was blocking ads. For example, three weeks ago, the new Youtube app upgraded to a new GUI, and all those filters in the subscriptions list (not watched, continue watching etc) disappeared or at least I can't find them anymore. It's like this new version is trying to make you not see old stuff or wants you to lose time scrolling instead of watching videos. I use very little the Youtube app because TV screen + browser with extensions (there are no ads blocked on Youtube on my PC) + KDE Connect offer a much better viewing experience.
I don't think I missed anything, or in some cases where ads are unavoidable, ever decided to buy something because of ads. I do my own research for purchases.
In other words, the conversion rate is near zero for me.
I don't care what others do, but it's a waste of compute and network bandwidth to try to target me. Ad lords had better use that resource to target someone else.