Well, I really hope that doesn’t affect Vinegar
( Safari extension that replaces YouTube’s horrible video player with the system’s default.
It’s great, it also allows you to force Best Quality, very useful on platforms where YouTube defaults to 480p for no reason like iPadOS )
Removed by mod
Damn, I got my setup so perfect on the TV with SmartTube. But I will not be able to tolerate ads. Then I’d rather only watch on Firefox with uBlock on my laptop.
Then pay for premium?
I did for many years. But then I moved to Korea and they don’t allow family plans and paying 4 individual ones is just not in our budget. Then probably just no YouTube for me.
Then youtube wins. No.
So you want to use YouTube to stream videos, but don’t want to pay or watch ads?
You just want people to give you shit for free?
That content does not belong to YouTube. And they also do not pay for 99% of it.
YouTube depends on people to use it for it’s existence. They also depend on those users to upload content so that YouTube can then treat that content as if it is its own and monetize it.
If I was in such a precarious position I wouldn’t go about making the experience crappy for those users that I’m desperately dependent upon.
Well, it seems like you aren’t part of the target audience.
Luckily there are other options out there for you!
Not OP, but heck yeah free stuff! Special thanks to the people providing us Lemmy for free :)
Yay free stuff for sure, but what happens when no one is paying for something?
How did Google manage to buy YouTube, and then make YouTube the video monopoly it currently is ? One of the pillars of that foundation is open source software used by Google, for free. Some of that open source software maintained for a long time by unpaid and sometimes burned out software developers. All the YT video watchers commenting here in this post wanting to pay content creators and wanting content creators live off that : Google is run by a few laughing billionaires who probably care most about shareholders and being able to make more money by exploiting ads on the billions of hooked end users. Besides paying YT and content creators consider supporting small scale open source projects as well. Help out wherever and whenever you can with open source software. Take back your digital sovereignty. Big tech is not your friend. Open source empowers and shares with others as in sharing is caring.
On one hand, I think that by now it is by far a public service, in private hands.
On the other hand, yes you do already pay by providing them information on your interests and other personal matters.
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.
I would love a federated network of video platforms as long as they can all be searched collectively. Would be great if videos could even be migrated to other instances if storage becomes too limited on one of them. Yeah, it probably isn’t ideal that YouTube is all one platform, but it certainly makes it easy to find what you’re looking for most of the time.
If the modern internet teaches us anything, its that everything is ephemeral even when you stringently catalogue every last byte of data. People just dont need access to 90% of YouTube’s library, yet Youtube has to pay big money to make 100% of that library available 24/7 365.
There’s already rips at the seams of these systems. Time is not on the side of YouTube.
Like which?
Google “Odysee”.
It’s currently my preferred YouTube alternative. Granted it obviously doesn’t have as much content as YouTube. But several well known content creators post to both YouTube and Odysee now.
Some of the ones I follow include: Louis Rossman, Anton Petrov, SomeOrdinaryGamers, and Zach Star Himself. Just to name a few.
And there’s also a browser extension called “Watch on Odysee” which adds a button to the YouTube video if the video is also found on Odysee so you can “watch on Odysee” instead of YouTube. Which can help you locate your favorite youtubers on the platform and let you follow them.
And there is also an Odysee mobile app if you like watching videos on mobile.
This is just one example, but I hope it helps ;-)
Video hosting is still rather expensive, live streaming even more. Not sure that even youtube is profitable. Until some new tech comes along I think only amazon would be able to support some kind of viable alternative - and not sure they will be much better.
That content does not belong to YouTube. And they also do not pay for 99% of it.
YouTube depends on people to use it for it’s existence. They also depend on those users to upload content so that YouTube can then treat that content as if it is its own and monetize it.
If I was in such a precarious position I wouldn’t go about making the experience crappy for those users that I’m desperately dependent upon.
youtube hosts, handles bandwidth, provides creator tools, deals with monetization, handles royalties, and creates the platform…
That’s nice. Do they also create the content for the platform that is by far the most costly part of it? Or have they simply found a way to monetize content that does not belong to them?
a) without youtube, creators wouldn’t have a platform b) they’re monetizing it to pay creators.
Does every single creator get paid for their work and the value that they add to the platform? Or does YouTube arbitrarily get to decide who gets a tiny piece of the revenue from the content that YouTube doesn’t own?
Also, use greyjay. It’s fantastic.
Hey Google, FUCK YOU.
why would you NOT get youtube premium? it’s $22 for 6 users and you get music and ad-free youtube it’s honestly the best streaming service
i do think that channel subscriptions should include ad free watching for that channel, similar to twitch subs. so if people want to subscribe to just one channel they can get ad free viewing for that channel
You dropped the /s
I have 3 friends sir. Where do i find 6 users
nah
Don’t worry, third party clients will rectify the issue.
I can’t wait for that platform to implode.
This is just ads. They know that people will fight back and found a solution.
They want some to think it’s dead.
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/
Man they’re fucking out of their minds!!!
I only care about how this will affect Floorp’s user agent spoofing abilities thought 😶🌫️🌫️
They’re not being sarcastic, they are repeating Google’s (bs) justification
They are being sarcastic, with the emphasis on “purely”, while saying Google’s justification. It’s exactly to point out it’s bs.
Sure, I guess I maintain its that’s not what sarcasm is but we do agree on the point
If it is not sarcasm then the justification is not bs. And OP agrees it is sarcasm.
yes exactly what sneezycat said. I was being sarcastic and pointing out that Manifest V3 was always a crackdown on ad blocking and nothing else.
Time to “revamced” chrome next and patch that out.
There are a ton of other WebKit based browsers to choose from! Safari, Vivaldi, Brave… not to mention good old Firefox and Gecko!
Are there any semi-popular alternative browsers still based on WebKit? I thought most of them like Brave and Vivaldi were based on Chromium’s Blink rather than WebKit.
Technically not really, I just said WebKit to avoid breaking down the whole fork situation in my comment. Blink isn’t that different in reality so, WebKit for simplicity. Safari and Chrome are much closer to one another than Firefox is to either, so 🤷♂️
Let’s be honest, none of them compare to Chrome for many different reasons. Might be UI, or data syncing, or one of any other reasons. Given the opportunity to switch or patch chrome, I’d patch chrome.
Firefox has had data sync for a long ass time.
Yes, I mean if I don’t like the mobile app, I can’t switch on pc and leave mobile on chrome and expect those two to sync between them (Firefox on pc and Chrome on mobile) so I’m forced to swotch both.
The mobile app is great.
I mean… yes? If you’re saying that Chrome sucks now, then why would you want to switch on some platforms but not others?
What the fuck? Can you sync chrome to edge and edge to opera? What kind of bad faith bullshit ass argument are you trying to pull here?
You’re claiming that you cant sync data on Firefox, when you absolutely can. Then you claim that what you meant was that you cant cross browser sync on multiple devices. Well congratufuckinglations, you can’t on any other browser either.
What is wrong with you?
What’s wrong with you? Are you unable to read my comment, or is it comprehension problems?
I’m saying if I switch to Firefox, I have to switch it on both PC and mobile, but I hate the UI on mobile. I can’t leave one as Chrome (mobile) and the other as Firefox (PC) and expect them to work together (sync). Thus, I’d rather stock to Chrome because the ui is better.
Vivaldi and Brave use Blink (Chromium), not WebKit
They are practically the same thing.
firefox!!!
firefox and ublock origin has existed all along cmon, ditch that spyware already whats the holdup
It’s the UI, and how long it took them to finally get tab folders as an example. They’re always playing catch-up.
Plus, the mobile app ui is terrible, and I can’t run FF on desktop and chrome on mobile and sync items between the two, so a switch to FF means a switch on all devices. I really want to but I always navigate back to chrome.
How is the mobile app terrible? I’ve been using it for years with no issues, and it has many extensions that chrome on Android doesn’t allow like adblocking.
The tabs in FF are great, for years now FF has been much better at handing huge accounts of passive tabs, and there are tons of extensions to provide any functionality you could want.
I guarantee you if you just install a few extensions that you like and use it for a week you won’t even notice any more.
ive been using it for a while and its always looked like a carbon copy of every other browser and vice versa
There’s only so much you can do on a mobile browser to be fair, they all look the same
My problem with Firefox comes down doley to the ui. I just can’t get over the blocky mess it is, but I really would switch otherwise.
I literally don’t know what people who say this mean. It looks totally modern, almost identical to the chrome and edge UIs, it’s fully customizable, and there are thousands of extensions to alter the appearance in a single click, not to mention custom css styling if you want complete control.
https://github.com/black7375/Firefox-UI-Fix
This won’t change your mobile experience, but on desktop this makes Firefox absolutely gorgeous. I’ve been using it for at least a year now and it still blows me away every time I happen to see the stock UI.
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
Will this change on YouTube’s side affect Invidious instances?
I wonder too.
If they go full “only google certified browsers and clients” I will just not watch youtube anymore
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.
I’m a prescriptivist and I think it’s fine. I suspect it might be a British vs American English thing.
As a native BrE speaker I’d say “I’ve X installed” is a little weird, fine in speech but written down it doesn’t look right. “I’ve installed X” is fine.
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.
Don’t worry, one day you’ll understand.
They can try, but it is unlikley to work for long. So my general reaction is:
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?
To be fair, one of the apps mentioned, [Re]Vanced, is literally just the stock app with extra features patched in and the premium features enabled for free (like no ads and downloads). It makes sense that it would be more user friendly. Allowing that modified version doesn’t get them any revenue though while still costing them to host and serve the content to those users.
At least with NewPipe it supports multiple sites and is its own app with their own code and UI.
I don’t understand this argument because NewPipe still gets the video from YouTube (primarily), costing them to host…
Some years ago ago, I was a happy subscriber to Google Music. But, they added it to the graveyard, and instead grafted on some music playing functionality to YouTube and called it YouTube Music. So, I went back to Spotify.
Then I started paying for YouTube Premium Lite. It wasn’t unreasonably expensive, although it was a bit annoying I couldn’t just have “YouTube” in the household, like with Netflix. So if wife would cast a video to the TV, it would play with ads.
It was about a year ago, when Google starting cracking down on adblockers, that they also removed an option to pay for the service. I think YouTube Premium Lite wasn’t a thing in the US (correct me if I’m wrong), but they removed YT Premium Lite, and the only option left was a twice as expensive YouTube Premium bundle that included YouTube Music.
Tldr: fucked up Google Music, then removed an option to pay for YouTube premium, leaving a fairly expensive alternative with the pile of shit they replaced Google music with. It’ll be a rough time if they manage to force ads. I won’t pay for it, out of principle.
I pay $4/mo, mainly for YouTube music (I’m part of a friend’s family plan).
It’s pretty convenient since you can use the background audio on an iPad as well - I don’t use it often but it’s nice when I do. And there’s no ads there it’s pretty insane seeing the level of ads when I try and use my work phone which I’m not signed into.
Also, you can make channels within your single goggle account so I made one for my mom and bro so they get no ads aswell. They have to sign in to my acct which can feel a little sketch but I trust them since they’re just using the YT app on their TVs. They stay in their own user acct. and it doesn’t affect my history or anything
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–
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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
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If they say like that, it means that’s now is allowed to make a third party youtube client with login support?
I’d immediately install an officially sanctioned third party youtube app without shorts and without the algorithmic feed, if all i would need to do is let the phone play ads when i’m doing something else
