It’s funny that free third party apps literally have more features and are more user friendly than the official app with premium.
Why the fuck would I pay for less when I can get more for free?
I think there’s a couple things at play:
-
You know enough to find a different app and make it do what you need it to. Not a hard thing, but something many non-tech savvy people could struggle with, or more likely–
-
People often will just use what’s there. We know we have options, we are aware of the privacy concerns… but many people simply aren’t and/or don’t care enough to do anything about it.
We spend a lot of time here, so it seems to us like second nature to avoid intrusive apps… I find in my day-to-day life not many people are talking about that kind of stuff, or don’t have much knowledge/experience in that realm. (I realize that is anecdotal).
I 100% agree with your statements–just trying to rationalize how so many people end up using/staying with these ever-worsening services/apps…
To prove your point I am person #2, I know things liked invidious and piped exist but I just idk haven’t gotten around to it
-
Some of the youtube channels I watch also have channels on Peertube instances or on Odysee. Both options allow me to follow using RSS. I prefer my views to go to these platforms, so hopefully more content creators see these as viable hosts for their videos.
Peertube is also federated, so you can follow channels from your Mastodon account (and I think Lemmy too). You could also spin up your own instance if you like too.
I assume you help and financially support your instance of choice to help them with server costs? Video platforms are much more expensive to host than text platforms like mastodon or lemmy.
I haven’t yet, although I may do in future. If they were hosting my own videos I would certainly be giving them a cut of sponsor revenue though.
My libretube isn’t working.
Newpipe
Newpipe is not the same. LibreTube has a built it proxy to prevent leaking your IP. Newpipe doesn’t have that afaik
Just use your own proxy, you can use that for everything
Well yes but in that case VPN is better and good VPNs are paid or really hard to set up (compared to just downloading an app) so yea
It’s not so hard, you just run it in your own VPS, open the ports and go
I use a proxy and route all of the packets except DNS through it using iptables
As soon as 3rd party clients don’t work as they do anymore, I am stopping going to YouTube. Simple as, I know it doesn’t matter as a singular thing, I am just one user. Was the same with reddit, now I am here but reddit is still going (how well we don’t need to debate now).
You’re not alone. Don’t think that. A lot of people will do the same. I’m right there with ya. Fuck YouTube
Fuck them. I’d rather donate quadruple the money for premium to my favourite creators directly than give a single penny to this parasitic mega corporation.
The issue is not only the ads, it’s the stupid shit it throws you to keep you hooked, it’s the stupid shorts that literally no one asked for, it’s every stupid little thing that fights for your attention. Basically the app doesn’t work for you, it works against you. That’s not the case with third party apps, they have you, the user, in mind, not their profits.
Start to use other services like Odysee or Elacity Cinema…
Nebula is really good. I just bought a lifetime sub. Expensive but pays itself back in only a few years. Plus the creators there run it as a coop that has a takeover poison pill of some kind.
@rbos @EverlastongOS that’s the only thing I don’t understand. If it’s lifetime sub, how do they fund their costs from your usage after?
Host providers don’t have a one-time payment lifetime subscription for bandwidth usage. Eventually you will surpass the bandwidth cost of your lifetime sub and they’d be losing money keeping you. Something doesn’t feel right.
There are some ski lifts that give lifetime passes. Its used as a cash injection to fund investments rather than lending off an institution that will want their money back.
Sure you’ll want your lifetime video data for free, but I bet there are a bunch of lifetime members that don’t watch much over a lifetime and/or the risk of future video watching outweighs the loan interest they’d have to pay otherwise.
@b_n
For me, it boils down to this: relying solely on cash injections to scale up seems short-sighted. Bandwidth costs are often underestimated, especially for high-quality video streaming. If users’ lifetime costs outweigh bandwidth expenses, the injection could turn into a liability. I’m concerned about the sustainability of their model. Unlike a ski-lift company that generates revenue from various sources (food, merch, rentals).Maybe my hosting knowledge is just too old school.
relying solely on cash injections.
That’s just the case. Not everyone buys lifetime subscriptions. This is a short term cash injection for investment. I don’t know their books, but I doubt the majority of their long term income will come from these lifetime subs.
It can work out financially - I don’t know how they do it specifically, but suppose they put all the lifetime subs into one investment pool and used the interest on that to fund operations.
$300 can generate $20 per year for them. So I benefit by only having to pay once, and they benefit by getting a chunk up front instead of having it drip out over time.
Up front cash can also mean the ability to invest in larger things. They can put it into infra budget instead of ops budget.
@rbos yea, that sounds similar to what a lot of these monopolistic internet companies do. But eventually the bill is due.
If they can’t scale up with what they got, then maybe it isn’t profitable. But what I’m understanding is that they’re using “Lifetime Users” as a gamble to grow.
hmmm… maybe I just don’t like private infrastructure, but I’m at odds with this model. But if the users understand that the bubble can burst, then I wish them luck.
It’s funny how this comes after Chrome’s switch to Manifest V3, which makes ad blocking not possible on Chrome and was purely for security reasons and not for disabling ad blockers. Now that Chrome users can’t block ads on the first-party site, they’re going after third-party clients. Such coincidental timing.
“security reasons” is the classic cop-out for making users lives more miserable.
Like what are you gonna do, argue that you don’t care about security?
was purely for security reasons and not for disabling ad blockers.
I had not heard of Manifest v3 and actually can’t tell if you’re being sarcastic or not. I guess you are.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/12/googles-manifest-v3-still-hurts-privacy-security-innovation
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/12/chrome-users-beware-manifest-v3-deceitful-and-threatening
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/11/google-chrome-will-limit-ad-blockers-starting-june-2024/
They’ve been trying for years to implement this at a large price to the users. They always try to hide under the guise of security.
https://www.ghacks.net/2024/04/16/google-intensifies-fight-against-youtube-adblockers/
https://www.statista.com/statistics/513049/alphabet-annual-global-income/
Let’s pause a moment and just appreciate how much money Alphabet actually make net (after expenses). $73,795,000,000 last year - higher than the GDP of entire nations, in profit.
The “bad” year, 2022 that drove all this change, they only made $59,972,000,000 net. Oh how terrible (!)
5 years ago, they made $34,343,000,000 net, so they’ve more than doubled profits.
Take a moment to appreciate that, and really consider if they “need” the money.
That’s the whole company. How much did YouTube lose for them?
I’ve Invidious hosted on my Little Raspberry Pi 4, and using it’s WPA app on every device I got.
Zero ad + Decent UI + Access to highest video quality
Heads up, “I’ve” is not grammatically correct when “have” is your verb. Using “have” in a contraction when you’re using past-perfect tense. For example, “I’ve been” is an acceptable shortening of “I have been”.
Is it actually incorrect? I don’t think it’s necessarily wrong, but it just sounds bizarre or Shakespearean if you use it when it’s not an auxiliary verb.
“I’ve no need for that.” is a perfectly cromulent sentence.
Yeah, not “incorrect,” just non-standard. The yardstick is: did your interpretation match the intended one? Clearly, he was able to get there so it’s firmly in “acceptable use.” Any further whinging about grammar is likely to just be construed as gatekeeping.
The yardstick is: did your interpretation match the intended one?
I think that’s just you. There’s a few examples of rules in English that aren’t required to get a point across, but sentences that break them sound grating. One such example is adjective order
I think you’re conflating correctness with comprehension. Even if it isn’t correct, you could still be understood.
Per your previous comment:
Yeah, not “incorrect,” just non-standard. The yardstick is:
Clearly, he was able to get there so it’s firmly in “acceptable use.”
I’m not the one conflating the two concepts.
I’ll give up on YouTube before I give up my ad blocks or 3rd party apps. Fuck off Google.
You could just pay for premium. Then you wouldn’t have ads
Weird to see this downvoted. Youtube is actually a good service that also isn’t cheap to run, and it also pays good(?) money to the people producing popular content on the platform so why not pay for using it? Or, you know, live with the ad infestation. Businesses need money to run, and if you don’t pay for the content, then either it’s the ads or eventually the whole platform needs to be shut down.
It is a separate discussion if Premium pricing is appropriate etc. But it’s quite horrifying to see people around the world having been taught into thinking that everything should be “free” even though at the same time everyone is complaining about privacy violation and ads being everywhere all the time.
But it’s quite horrifying to see people around the world having been taught into thinking that everything should be “free” even though at the same time everyone is complaining about privacy violation and ads being everywhere all the time.
That is exactly the issue, but you are placing quite a bit too much of your disapproval on the audience.
Google (and others) have built business models off of data mining because so many people didn’t give a shit for so long about it. They have monetized their users for the entire time they have owned the platform. They have trained their own users to feel like the product was free while using those people for advertising dollars.
People have always hated ads, but you had generations of folks who were born before the internet who mostly just accepted the ads were going to be there, and also have never given a single thought to privacy. That slice of the pie is getting smaller, for various reasons.
Now Google have decided since they can’t reliably exploit enough of their users, it’s time to start charging them directly. They are fighting against their own inertia. It is they who have trained users with “we aren’t asking you for $$, so don’t worry about how we’re paying for all this, trust me bro.”
The modern audience is increasingly made up of people with both the will and capability to set up ad blocking and/or privacy protecting measures. Sorry Google, we aren’t going down quietly.
You are absolutely right! Part of the horribleness is exactly companies like Google who were the ones teaching people that everything should be “free” as in usable without explicit money transaction, and now they are the ones who are (thanks to EU I guess) trying to revert that and make the business model viable through subscription.
So I do get why the problem exists and I feel no empathy for the companies that are to blame for that. But, I do worry that we have a whole generation of people who think that stuff should just exist and have no monetary value like it just materialized out of thin air without anyone working on it before and neither having to keep it running. That is not a healthy mental model and it will contribute to predatory companies being able to harvest data out of these people in the future meanwhile privacy-first companies can’t get them as customers because they have to actually ask for money for their services.
But, I do worry that we have a whole generation of people who think that stuff should just exist and have no monetary value like it just materialized out of thin air without anyone working on it before and neither having to keep it running. That is not a healthy mental model and it will contribute to predatory companies being able to harvest data out of these people in the future
I see where you are coming from there, and I don’t disagree with your opinion, but I do still think that while that may objectively be a mindset that is potentially harmful, I feel the net impact in this context is more likely to be increased contribution to and support of things that really are Free (gratis and libre), nudging reality closer to a place where a lot of those sorts of services are free or donation-supported, and less likely to be in corporate hands unless those corporations improve their behavior.
A hard to summarize version of that sort of path and mindset is what initially pushed me away from Windows, but over more than a decade I’ve developed lots more reasons than cost for why I’d never go back, and for why I’ve become a Free Software enthusiast and advocate.
Stuff should be free. We live in an age where every one of us could be living a life of comfort and reasonable luxury with a modicum of work. In the meantime those of us who aren’t being showered by the excesses of capitalism are fully entitled to stand in the splashes.
If the price was even relatively sane I would be okay with that honestly.
But no, they need to keep driving the price up and up. I have to pay my part so that little Jimmy can host 297 hours of white noise on his account that no one wants to watch.
They simply need to change their tactics a little. It cost you some small sane amount to host your videos there. If your videos don’t g gather watches and make money you should be the one paying for them.
I want to pay about nine bucks a month for a family account it’s just b-f rate content. You can pay less to get actual well rated movies from other services.
Also give me the option not to throw in Google music I don’t give a s*** about Google music.
OTA TV: with ads
OTA TV: if you record you are pirating
Cable TV: you pay a fortune to have no ads!
Cable TV: now with extra premium stuff!
Cable TV: now with ads!
Cable TV: if you record, you’ll be prosecuted
Cable TV: pray we do not alter the deal further
Cable TV: why is everyone moving away from Cable TV?
Youtube: your own videos!
Youtube: your own videos are actually ours
Youtube: our videos with ads!
Youtube: now pay a fortune to remove ads!
Youtube: pray we do not alter the deal further
Youtube: if you download or remove ads you’ll be banned
This isn’t the pattern you’re looking for. Move along.
Oh, we’ll see at that point I would just like stop paying for it. That’s how I deal with services that no longer meet my expectations.
That’s exactly what people are doing.
Kind of, people are not quitting YouTube, I’m off them are still using it, but bitching that their free video streaming service needs to get paid.
They are still using it and costing YouTube money in aggregate
They are still using it and costing YouTube money in aggregate
The poor company only making $31.5 Billion a year has to eat the streaming cost for someone using as ad blocker? Won’t somebody PLEASE think of the billionaires?!
Oh no won’t someone please think of the people so entitled they believe they should get everything for free.
Like, I just don’t understand the thought process behind people like you.
Do you ask for free everything else?
It will go the way of Reddit…
LOL what are you talking about? The users had a hissy fit but after that Reddit got everything they wanted. The users mostly all returned a few days later and it was business as usual. Since then they opened up about selling user data and IPO’d and still nothing.
It’s become abundantly clear now that there’s level of abuse these users won’t endure.
I’ve been using youtube on Firefox with ublock since the premium price raise. Even on android. The experience is not great, but that makes sure I don’t have ads at all.
Also discovered unhooked addon yesterday. Is desktop only, but great for going into less youtube rabbit holes that waste my time.
don’t make solutions popular.
It’s lemmy, world’s smallest social media platform. We’ll be fine :p
Howso? You think even in the event this wasn’t being scraped, that there isn’t a single dev from YouTube, or a YouTube adjacent team possibly here?
There’s a large (relative) tech worker user base on Lemmy.
It was a joke.
And I think they are very much aware of uBlock. Unhooked got recommended to me by a Youtube video.
They know.
If they’re going to find it on lemmy they’re going to find it anywhere. Also, they already know about ublock origin, and its unlikely they’d even care about unhooked, since it doesn’t block ads.
“there’s all this litter on the ground I’ll just throw my litter”
Not a remotely relevant comparison, and even if it was, completely ignores my second point.
If you suck at critical thinking sure
Edit I’m not obligated to address every point, this aint debate club
Yeah but things get popular here, we tell our family and friends, they go out and tell people…
We disdain to hide sauce that could benefit the people. We don’t bogart knowledge like a settler would.
I’m simply saying what happens. For good or for ill.
Please download and archive your favorite channels and videos!
Host them yourself to watch them locally.
Especially do this for educational material, share it wide and far!
We are entering a very dark age of techno-dystopia, we need to fight it with everything we have. Pirate, seed, screen-record, download, archive, share, never give up.
This is the way.
Quick shout out to yt-dlp. It comes everything you need to download, transcode, and even use Sponsorblock!
I also recommend NewPipe for Android. It lets you download in multiple formats and shows comments in a mobile format (you can get it through the F-Droid store or from github.)
NewPipe
FreeTube for Windows. Finally stable, download options, subs, history, ex-/importable data, locally, no ads of course. It’s awesome!
Btw FreeTube is not just available for Windows, it also works perfectly on Linux and macOS
Are they going to officially allow third party apps at all? The stock app is terrible, and not just because of excessive, unskippable advertising and bizarre restrictions around background play. When you search for anything, at least half of the results are completely unrelated to what you searched for in an attempt to increase user engagement metrics. It keeps trying to get you to watch shorts in its bad TikTok clone. Sometimes it recommends unrelated shorts with disturbing thumbnails in the middle of your search results. It keeps autodetecting that the video quality should be 360p on a connection easily capable of 4k, and resetting back to 360p at the start of every new video. The UI for live streams puts things on top of other things that are more important.
Youtube isn’t some one of a kind miracle. There’s at least a dozen already-established streaming platforms that would take its place. There are thousands of websites that have no problems hosting gigs and gigs of porn, so it’s not as difficult as people think.
It kind of is. YouTube has decades of history. Unfathomable amounts of video. No indie platform will ever come close to hosting more than a fraction of a percent of YouTube’s library and be as accessible and as fast. It would cost an unbelievable amount of money in servers and maintenance let alone moderation. The problem is this is a service, like many others that exist today, that does not bring in more money than it costs. YouTube exists because it’s a branch on a megacorporation tree, but even Google will eventually need to find a way to make it profitable. It is impossible to fund this for free or anywhere close to free.
No indie platform will ever come close to hosting more than a fraction of a percent of YouTube’s library and be as accessible and as fast.
The number of times I’ve heard “XYZ will never happen” in the area of tech from one person or another over the decades (or made the mistake of thinking so myself) is high.
Youtube will either become reasonable in their practices again (which could include a pricing adjustment for ad-free access), or will be replaced as the de facto video service. It may not happen in the short timespan we’d all like to see, but it will happen.
History would suggest that, but I’m starting to believe we’re in a tech service bubble that’s ready to pop. I touched on this in my comment, but it’s becoming clearer than ever that the vast majority of the services we use today are not sustainable on a number of levels. Economically, they’re all a mess.
Food delivery services are bleeding money constantly in the hopes that one day they’ll find a way to profit. They won’t. It’s an insane business model. The actual cost of the service is many times the price of the food you’re buying. Uber/Lyft already isn’t keeping prices low enough to be a cheap option anymore because they’ve coasted too long on VC funding and it’s time for them to start making money. But they still aren’t and if they charged what it actually costs to operate, no one would use it. Many online platforms can’t sustain themselves despite being major social media hubs. Streaming services spend more on buying up movies, shows, IP rights, and other streaming services than their subscriptions bring in.
The endgame of all this means everything will become unaffordably expensive for almost everyone, the services utterly nosedive in quality as companies cut costs and fire staff, or they go bankrupt and collapse. I think we’ve already had it as good as it’s gonna get and we’re going to go through a period of corporations slowly pulling back everything they’ve pushed into our lives with investor funding over the past decade. It’s not just Lemmy’s favorite buzzword “enshitification.” I think a lot of what we expect from the Internet is not sustainable and it’s not going to stick around in any form we would want.
The endgame of all this means everything will become unaffordably expensive for almost everyone, the services utterly nosedive in quality as companies cut costs and fire staff, or they go bankrupt and collapse.
While you’ve got some reasonable points, I’m about 14 years into using exclusively the OS everyone tried to tell me would never be viable on the desktop as my only desktop OS, and have been able to find opportunities to deploy it in my day job also. Haven’t used Windows except when paid to in all that time.
And we’re conversing here on Lemmy, which may be objectively “worse” than Reddit by some metrics, but not any metrics that matter to me, nor, I think, to the majority of its users.
When I’m done typing this I’m going to fire up my Jellyfin client to connect to my free and open source Jellyfin media server, and watch some content on that system which does everything I’d ever hoped a media server would do, even though I was confidently told by many people when it first forked from Emby (after Emby was enshittified) that it would be dead in two years, and certainly could never begin to compete with Plex. (I have never missed Plex for a single minute since moving to Jellyfin)
Those are just three recent examples that I could think of without much effort. As you may be thinking, all of them are far smaller in scale than youtube, and yet, all three of them are things that quite happily serve my needs without spying on me or requiring exorbitant fees to feed someone else’s greed. I can (and do) support them financially, and in other ways, because I choose to.
I’m not listing more examples because I’m too lazy to, not because lots more don’t exist.
More broadly, I grew up during the time when very nearly everything regarding using a personal computer really was controlled by corporations, and was exorbitantly expensive. I had a computer because I was privileged enough to have parents who could buy me one, but the only free or inexpensive things to do with it were: Piracy (via locally copying each others’ games in most cases), Bulletin Board Systems, and learning to program. Shareware and Freeware existed, but with some notable exceptions tended to be not so good for various reasons, and the selection was not especially broad.
There was no free/cheap equivalent like the Raspberry Pi to play with, but if you really wanted to pinch pennies you could build a PC with a kit from Heathkit or Radio Shack, for a fee that was still out of reach for a great many people due to cost or skill. There was not a global internet where people could collaborate and teach each other, and to whatever degree things like BBSs and Quantumlink (which eventually became AOL) might have been capable of providing those sorts of interpersonal connections, the critical mass wasn’t there in a way that it is today.
We have Linux. We have cheap and/or open hardware. We have a vast trove of Free (not just gratis: libre) software that anyone in the world can use to run on that hardware, and improve on their own without penalty. We can share knowledge with others at a rate unheard of for most individuals decades ago. We have numerous examples of users who keep such services and products going, and thriving, without needing to siphon money out of the public as fast as possible to appease shareholder value.
I predict that any such collapse as you describe will be transient, and it will pass far more quickly than it would have in the past. We (gesturing broadly) have the technology, the capability, and (I think) the desire to move past reliance on many of these services and corporate-controlled environments, and various individuals are already doing so. What emerges on the other side after such a paradigm shift as you predict won’t be Youtube, but that won’t mean it’s a step backwards, either.
we’re going to go through a period of corporations slowly pulling back everything they’ve pushed into our lives with investor funding over the past decade
I’m not convinced that’s a bad thing overall.
It’s not just Lemmy’s favorite buzzword “enshitification.”
Enshittification is a concept that has a little bit more depth than just being Lemmy’s favorite buzzword.
I understand where you’re coming from. I’m not personally a Linux user despite a lot of what I value overlapping with the Linux community broadly. I do think much of the technology we use today can and should be replaced by open source alternatives and I’m optimistic about growing interest globally in that regard. I’m not at all suggesting we submit to the new corporate-controlled Internet or go back to a pre-2000s lifestyle.
But I think we’re talking about different things, so let me just bring it back to YouTube. A lot of what we can do is limited by inescapable expenses: server costs and labor. We can say labor is optional because a lot of open source projects are developed and maintained by volunteers. But people do need money to live, so this project becomes the side gig, not the full time job. YouTube’s already a mess with moderation. Imagine a video platform with no full time staff to review illegal uploaded content, DMCA requests, comments, etc. But the bigger issue is the scale of YouTube, trying to make billions of videos play seamlessly at all times all over the world and just work. I can’t fathom the infrastructure needed for that. It would cost far more than it would make in donations if that was all it was accepting. No ads means the budget is that much smaller. If the small percentage of users with YouTube Premium doesn’t bring in enough to keep things running, the open source version wouldn’t either. And fewer people would be willing to pay for it.
This is what I mean by services that are unsustainable. Yes, clearly the technology makes it possible. But there is a cost to it and I think we’re entering a time when we don’t get those things for free anymore.
I think the primary difference in our views is that I don’t think Youtube needs to be replaced by something like it to be replaced. I don’t claim to have a viable approach in mind, but I’m certain one exists.
Honestly, huge shout out to the wave of enshittification crashing through Google and reddit and forcing me off their platforms. Decade-long debilitating addiction solved.
