I'm torn. I'm not a huge fan of Google and I don't have a lot of respect for the YouTube selection algorithm. However this culture of expecting Google to host the data then freeloading off it by blocking the tracking and ads is also a bit ugly.
There is an unwritten social contract here. Google is willing to host and organise a vast number of videos because that'll attract an audience for ads. If there are too may freeloaders resisting the ads then Google won't host the videos, and on the path to that the freeloaders are really just leeching off a system in an entitled way (unless their goal is to destroy YouTube in which case good on them for consistency and for picking a worthy target).
If people aren't going to be polite and accept that contract then fine, enforcement was always by an honour system. But strategically if Google's social contract doesn't work for someone then they shouldn't use YouTube - they'd just be feeding the beast. They should go make PeerTube work or investigate the long list of alternative video platforms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_online_video_platforms .
As a content creator with seven years experience, hundreds of videos and thousands of hours of content: just charge me a fee to host my videos. I'd pay $100/month, possibly more, to run a YouTube channel without.
Why is running ads the _only_ choice? Why can't a creator opt to pay to host videos on their channel with limitations? $10/month? That's 30 videos in HD max. $100? 300 videos in 4K... etc. ... or whatever.
As a content creator with seven years experience, hundreds of videos and thousands of hours of content: I use Freetube. Please use it until abusive adverts and practices aren't a thing anymore.
"However this culture of expecting Google to host the data then freeloading off it by blocking the tracking and ads is also a bit ugly."
"Freeloading" off a $2T company. Not really. What is really going on.
If Google was concerned about "freeloading" then they would not be encouraging people to store their data "in the cloud"; they would be encouraging them to store it on their own computers. Google wants people to upload data "for free" to Google servers. They design software and hardware to coerce people into uploading, e.g., "syncing".
It's not cool to invade peoples' privacy for profit. That is a social contract that has been broken.
Google could charge fees for storing peoples' data, these fees could cover the costs and allow for some profit, but then they would not be a $2T company. Only a relatively small number of people would pay. The Google customer is the advertiser not the uploader. Thus, this alleged "social contract" to allow Google to spy on people through their computer use, including surreptitiously sending data to Google, is motivated by greed.
>this culture of expecting Google to host the data then freeloading off it by blocking the tracking and ads is also a bit ugly
it's not ugly at all: parasites deserve their place in the ecosystem right alongside carnivores.
What I don't like is people like this who broadcast and evangelize as if google will allow it to keep happening. I'd rather it survived longer hiding under the radar.
"hey everybody I discovered a secret hack to get a free donut with your coffee!!!"... how about just keep doing it yourself, donuts for life?
I had a lot more sympathy for this argument a few years ago, but lately Google does enough short-term thinking all by itself that it seems fine to just take what you can get for as long as it does something that happens to be useful to you, amidst all the stuff it does that is useful only to itself.
Just be prepared for the good times to end at any moment.
Google can stop making the official experience terrible any time it wants. Until then they deserve nothing. Poor poor abused google definitely on the bottom of this abusive relationship.
Is this the same unwritten social contract which means we shouldn't use a mute button on ads? After all, the TV company gets paid to send ads to us, and muting those ads means less ad effectiveness.
Don't use the toilet during an ad break either.
Nor use the +15 seconds functionality on video recorder playback to skip ads.
You can see how the social contract for my entire life include the option to avoid ads, and even with 'freeloaders', the broadcast TV business model worked.
YouTube started long after Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc. ("the Betamax case") established time shifting as an allowed practice in the US. Their business model, based on any implied social contract, must therefore include that possibility, eg, that people may watch content via downloaders.
They could respond by, for example, placing ads directly in the downloaded video steam. This would mean less profit, but no social contract requires customers to keep a company profitable.
And it would be odd indeed if broadcast TV had a more effective business model in the face of freeloaders than online video.
Fortunately, YouTure offers the premium account for a small price I gladly pay. I want YouTube to be around, and I don't want it to turn to trash in a desperate attempt to turn a profit.
This also frees me from any qualms about using alternative clients, which are superior in certain situations.
Google itself is the leech and parasite. It has embedded itself into private correspondence, discovery of internet resources, and a ton of other things, going as far as vacuuming up offline credit card transactions to spy on people. Google and honor do not belong in the same sentence.
Hosting videos costs a lot of money and alternatives to Youtube will see only limited success as long as Google can subsidize the service with the money from the massive spy machine.
Causing maximum drain of resources for Google while providing as little as possible for their spy machine is the ethical choice. Let them bleed. Youtube is the largest obstacle to honest businesses that provide video hosting and viewing in exchange for money - instead of making money from spying on users in ways they are unable to fully comprehend and consent to.
But there is more content than there are people who can watch it. What do you think happens when the production curve grows way past the consumption curve?
It's not a contract though, its a dictatorship (which they have the right to do) but it's been getting worse and worse for the consumer, and is just another loss leader until who have consumers trapped and then start charging, abusing, etc... I'm with you in spirit, but google is not a good participant in this agreement as of late.
The social contract was to show ads. Gathering people's data even on websites they don't even own was not the social contract. Google broke the contract and to suggest otherwise is gaslightling. Google can either start blindly showing context-relevant ads with no tracking or they can eat the loss from those willing to use free services.
Don’t be torn. They could have offloaded the hosting using P2P tech, but they prefer to silo the world’s video library. Google is the parasitical leech.
Hey, you want a monopoly on information while at the same time operating the largest ad network in the world?
Then don't complain if people block your stupid ads and count yourself lucky that the government didn't split your megacorp into several tiny companies
The only morally wrong thing here is NOT blocking Google's ads
YouTube is similar to a free museum where the gift shop as the only source of revenue. How does the museum handle people who deliberately show up without money and exit via the main entrance?
From a business perspective the building is a shop. Anyone without money is provably there to just wander around looking at things. Doing this a lot is weird, especially given that 99% of visitors buy a coffee or a pencil to keep the museum going.
From a user perspective it’s a museum — the whole point is to wander around looking at things! Should it be required that you buy something, or at least be forced to exit through the gift shop?
Google just hosting the data is exactly what I want. Making them a monolith gives them too much leverage.
All we need is hosted APIs and frontend frameworks to wrap content as the user desires.
Charge API users for their bandwidth.
I don’t want Google also deciding what to boost to help them gobble up more human agency.
Reduce redundancy by making HR its own thing.
At the end of the day Google’s core engineering competency is load balancing date center use. The rest is behavioral economics research influenced gamification of our agency
Exactly. But I would like to take it a step further -- anytime you visit a page anywhere on the internet, there is an unwritten social contract that you will not block ads or trackers. For this reason, adblock in itself is unethical and basically equivalent to piracy. Additionally, actors like Mozilla who build tracker-blocking tech into their browsers should be held accountable for encouraging this disgusting behavior.
Don't like the ads? Don't visit the site then. Simple as that.
In the age of LLM's, I with there was some way to automatically pull videos about particular topic, extract the information out of the transcript (skip the clickbait as well) and deduplicate. I spend so much time watching videos just to conclude "ah right, it's actually based on the same info previous 3 videos"
this is my dream for AI to help with. "I read all the news you showed me yesterday; from now on, just show me anything that I didn't already read [referring to content, not sourcing]"
It definitely is. I switched to it primarily because the main website just takes up so much memory, needlessly.
I have no moral issue with this either. If Google wants money then they need to be more legitimate in their business dealings. No ignoring DMCA abuse, no ending user accounts with no appeal, no dark patterns period.
When I made a comment on one video about the Ukraine war, Google instantly deleted my Youtube channel (that had nothing on it), citing the comment was against their community guidelines. After that I'm hesitant to use any of services that I pay Google for in the future, and taking steps to move away from them.
Let's try it. 20 seconds to first start on a M2 mac mini, not amazing. Search takes about 3-5 seconds. Navigate to video another 3-5 seconds. No 4k. No casting. Can't change the playback speed. Can't jump on timeline with 0-9 keys. Doesn't sync to my other devices. Doesn't know about my membership perks, of course.
After a few minutes I would say this is easily the worst way to watch YouTube short of printing the videos out.
Exactly this. I also expected the app to have the shell UI downloaded locally and only fill it with fetched data, but the slow load times and blank pages make me think it really just is a browser. Somehow worse than your typical Electron app.
Or if you don’t want to see ads you could pay for it instead. Like an adult. Works great.
They present a perfectly valid choice to you, and it works great. It’s a reasonable enough price (not great but reasonable), but it supports the creators you watch with part of your subscription money.
Plus it has other benefits if you care, like free TV shows and movies and YouTube music. I don’t use that stuff but it is there.
And it you don’t want to pay, and can’t handle ads, don’t use the service. I don’t understand why people think they are entitled to any content they want, when they want it, for free.
The problem is that I don't care. I've had it with everyone wanting "just" $9.99/mo. I watch a few random two-minute videos a day, that's not worth as much as Netflix to me. I don't want the TV shows, I don't want the music channels, I just want to watch my little videos without ads. How much are you making from me on ads? Just charge me that and remove them.
The best way to watch YouTube is via the official YouTube site or app, because everything else is a potential DMCA violation and, if it blocks or skips ads, is tantamount to theft of service.
yup been using for 3/4 months now.
tho it is filled with bugs.
if you use extended screens, good luck.
and a few more like app crashing, unable to handle multiple app launches at once, and so on.
I am looking for a better open-source alternative tbh.
[+] [-] roenxi|1 year ago|reply
There is an unwritten social contract here. Google is willing to host and organise a vast number of videos because that'll attract an audience for ads. If there are too may freeloaders resisting the ads then Google won't host the videos, and on the path to that the freeloaders are really just leeching off a system in an entitled way (unless their goal is to destroy YouTube in which case good on them for consistency and for picking a worthy target).
If people aren't going to be polite and accept that contract then fine, enforcement was always by an honour system. But strategically if Google's social contract doesn't work for someone then they shouldn't use YouTube - they'd just be feeding the beast. They should go make PeerTube work or investigate the long list of alternative video platforms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_online_video_platforms .
[+] [-] movedx|1 year ago|reply
Why is running ads the _only_ choice? Why can't a creator opt to pay to host videos on their channel with limitations? $10/month? That's 30 videos in HD max. $100? 300 videos in 4K... etc. ... or whatever.
As a content creator with seven years experience, hundreds of videos and thousands of hours of content: I use Freetube. Please use it until abusive adverts and practices aren't a thing anymore.
[+] [-] 1vuio0pswjnm7|1 year ago|reply
"Freeloading" off a $2T company. Not really. What is really going on.
If Google was concerned about "freeloading" then they would not be encouraging people to store their data "in the cloud"; they would be encouraging them to store it on their own computers. Google wants people to upload data "for free" to Google servers. They design software and hardware to coerce people into uploading, e.g., "syncing".
It's not cool to invade peoples' privacy for profit. That is a social contract that has been broken.
Google could charge fees for storing peoples' data, these fees could cover the costs and allow for some profit, but then they would not be a $2T company. Only a relatively small number of people would pay. The Google customer is the advertiser not the uploader. Thus, this alleged "social contract" to allow Google to spy on people through their computer use, including surreptitiously sending data to Google, is motivated by greed.
That's the ugly culture.
[+] [-] fsckboy|1 year ago|reply
it's not ugly at all: parasites deserve their place in the ecosystem right alongside carnivores.
What I don't like is people like this who broadcast and evangelize as if google will allow it to keep happening. I'd rather it survived longer hiding under the radar.
"hey everybody I discovered a secret hack to get a free donut with your coffee!!!"... how about just keep doing it yourself, donuts for life?
[+] [-] akkartik|1 year ago|reply
Just be prepared for the good times to end at any moment.
[+] [-] amelius|1 year ago|reply
Sounds like they can't really complain if someone took that information and made it universally accessible :)
[+] [-] Brian_K_White|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|1 year ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] eesmith|1 year ago|reply
Is this the same unwritten social contract which means we shouldn't use a mute button on ads? After all, the TV company gets paid to send ads to us, and muting those ads means less ad effectiveness.
Don't use the toilet during an ad break either.
Nor use the +15 seconds functionality on video recorder playback to skip ads.
You can see how the social contract for my entire life include the option to avoid ads, and even with 'freeloaders', the broadcast TV business model worked.
YouTube started long after Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc. ("the Betamax case") established time shifting as an allowed practice in the US. Their business model, based on any implied social contract, must therefore include that possibility, eg, that people may watch content via downloaders.
They could respond by, for example, placing ads directly in the downloaded video steam. This would mean less profit, but no social contract requires customers to keep a company profitable.
And it would be odd indeed if broadcast TV had a more effective business model in the face of freeloaders than online video.
[+] [-] ethanol-brain|1 year ago|reply
No one has the right to control my client just because I visited their server. If Google doesn't want my client, they can easily block me.
Acting like people running custom clients are thieves or something is ridiculous.
[+] [-] nine_k|1 year ago|reply
This also frees me from any qualms about using alternative clients, which are superior in certain situations.
[+] [-] mopsi|1 year ago|reply
Hosting videos costs a lot of money and alternatives to Youtube will see only limited success as long as Google can subsidize the service with the money from the massive spy machine.
Causing maximum drain of resources for Google while providing as little as possible for their spy machine is the ethical choice. Let them bleed. Youtube is the largest obstacle to honest businesses that provide video hosting and viewing in exchange for money - instead of making money from spying on users in ways they are unable to fully comprehend and consent to.
[+] [-] cen4|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] ProAm|1 year ago|reply
It's not a contract though, its a dictatorship (which they have the right to do) but it's been getting worse and worse for the consumer, and is just another loss leader until who have consumers trapped and then start charging, abusing, etc... I'm with you in spirit, but google is not a good participant in this agreement as of late.
[+] [-] gray_charger|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] create-username|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] pixxel|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] Vampiero|1 year ago|reply
Then don't complain if people block your stupid ads and count yourself lucky that the government didn't split your megacorp into several tiny companies
The only morally wrong thing here is NOT blocking Google's ads
[+] [-] gorgoiler|1 year ago|reply
From a business perspective the building is a shop. Anyone without money is provably there to just wander around looking at things. Doing this a lot is weird, especially given that 99% of visitors buy a coffee or a pencil to keep the museum going.
From a user perspective it’s a museum — the whole point is to wander around looking at things! Should it be required that you buy something, or at least be forced to exit through the gift shop?
[+] [-] portn0y|1 year ago|reply
All we need is hosted APIs and frontend frameworks to wrap content as the user desires.
Charge API users for their bandwidth.
I don’t want Google also deciding what to boost to help them gobble up more human agency.
Reduce redundancy by making HR its own thing.
At the end of the day Google’s core engineering competency is load balancing date center use. The rest is behavioral economics research influenced gamification of our agency
[+] [-] toastercat|1 year ago|reply
Don't like the ads? Don't visit the site then. Simple as that.
[+] [-] eurekin|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] fsckboy|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] stavros|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] dreadlordbone|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] walterbell|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] ruthmarx|1 year ago|reply
I have no moral issue with this either. If Google wants money then they need to be more legitimate in their business dealings. No ignoring DMCA abuse, no ending user accounts with no appeal, no dark patterns period.
[+] [-] hackit2|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] thisislife2|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] WarOnPrivacy|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] rcdemski|1 year ago|reply
https://dearrow.ajay.app/
[+] [-] igornadj|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] ClassyJacket|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] jeffbee|1 year ago|reply
After a few minutes I would say this is easily the worst way to watch YouTube short of printing the videos out.
[+] [-] simjnd|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] VogonPoetry|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] MBCook|1 year ago|reply
They present a perfectly valid choice to you, and it works great. It’s a reasonable enough price (not great but reasonable), but it supports the creators you watch with part of your subscription money.
Plus it has other benefits if you care, like free TV shows and movies and YouTube music. I don’t use that stuff but it is there.
[+] [-] pkulak|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] stavros|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] toastercat|1 year ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] ethanol-brain|1 year ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] hnburnsy|1 year ago|reply
https://smarttubenext.com/
[+] [-] codedokode|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] ethanol-brain|1 year ago|reply
Some of these are open source and easy to run, like https://github.com/iv-org/invidious
[+] [-] 2-3-7-43-1807|1 year ago|reply
https://github.com/FreeTubeApp/FreeTube?tab=readme-ov-file#d...
[+] [-] bitwize|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] cozzyd|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] dreamymoon|1 year ago|reply
I am looking for a better open-source alternative tbh.
[+] [-] HKH2|1 year ago|reply