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Comment by steve19 | Hacker News Reader

I know I am flogging a dead horse here, but the constant retiring of Google apps makes me reluctant to adopt anything beyond Gmail and Youtube. I am a heavy Google Keep user, but I worry I am going to be kicked off that eventually.

> And stop changing your UI. It

The Youtube UI just gets worse and worse. I can only imagine what it must be like for non-Youtube Red subscribers. The add playlist button now defaults to your last playlist, which for me 75% of the time is not the playlist I want. Then I have to wait a few seconds for a popup, click a button, then unselect the last playlist and tick a new playlist. Just to add a f'ing video to a playlist.

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Im surprised you manage to be a heavy Keep user — i had a few thousand notes, and then they rolled out some update that meant they would all be re-downloaded every time i opened the web client, which made it unusable for me. Switched to apple notes because why not and havent had any problems since.

Google Keep is at least now a core G Suite service covered by their terms of service, SLA, etc for G Suite customers. It also just got integrated into the new Gmail UX. So that's unlikely to vanish too quickly.

Youtube is even more fun if you don't want to make a channel. They've made the website "add to playlist" button redirect to the channel creation page. I can't even put things on "watch later", the one playlist youtube has deigned to allow me to have.

My ‘watch later’ seems to have a problem catching videos. I add videos and they are gone from there. I created my own ‘Watch Now’ playlist, which consistently works.

This might be due to the fact that corporate shitheads decided to take down one of the videos you added.

I've seen such videos transform into [video removed] in custom playlists (which is infuriating to no end, you can't even know what the video was about to look it up somewhere else), maybe it causes videos to disappear from Watch Later entirely.

If you want to really be able to "watch later", I recommend downloading the video.

Right, for normal playlists YouTube leaves a placeholder saying that there was a deleted video. The frustrating thing about how they do it is that there’s no indication what the video was, unless you remember. Does it handle Watch Later differently? I do know that it seemed to have odd or buggy behavior which is why I stopped using it.

I freaking HATE youtube so much.

Its such a vile POS of a service.

Its hardly even worth my packets to type out all the ways its so bad. I feel like nobody in charge of YouTube actually even uses it for anything.

im using newpipe on android and adding the rss feeds to newsblur so I can watch on desktop. its actually really good since you get away from their suggestions side bar and autoplay (and the UI).

newsblur let's you organise things into subfolders too which is helpful

the other thing in going to start using is youtube-dl to download my watch later videos and then use something like emby or plex to watch them. maybe do the same with videos that I want to keep so I don't have to worry about then disappearing every second day

Personally I like the suggestions (everyone complains about clickbait and such, but I'm lucky that I never get those), but Newpipe is definitively a better app than the official.

So if I’m reading you right, “YouTube is great, provided you work around their UI, feature set and arbitrary limitations by replacing it all with 3rd party software.” Yeah google’s really nailing it. /s

Well youtube has a lot of everyday person content that nobody else does. This is mostly inertia - they got big years ago, and it is hard to switch. There are other good alternatives, but none have the users or mind share.

Movies are better served elsewhere, but there is a lot of things that you just can't find elsewhere.

Yeah, I use youtube-dl a lot. They other thing I do is open a youtube link in VLC.

But given that VLC can open a youtube link and yt-dl can grab most content, I'd love to build an app that has a proper UX.

I keep designing one in my mind - I should get around to at least proposing it to see what others think

Yeah, popcorn time for youtube would be wonderful.

> The add playlist button now defaults to your last playlist, which for me 75% of the time is not the playlist I want.

You can hold the button down ("long press") to get the playlist list instead of waiting for the popup to appear and pressing the button. It is of course still worse than it was before.

Problem is that it defaults to the last playlist I added to, making it unpredictable and inconsistent. It might make more sense if it always defaulted to "Watch Later" but still prompted to change it.

I only have around 5 playlists anyway (basically variants of "Watch Later" but sorted into vague categories).

One “issue” I have with Keep is there is no way to list notes or search notes without a label. And it’s from a search company. It must be hard for them to implement:-) or there is no more resources on Keep, waiting to be out like Inbox.

There are two good youtube clients on FDroid. SkyTube allows you to subscribe to channels without having a google account. Neither has ads.

There are a few glitches, but nothing you can't live with.

The way to use YouTube is as nothing more than a video hosting site, watching videos and managing playlists through other (offline) means. I wrote some shell scripts to do this years ago on my HTPC.

I'm not alone in this; others have made far more polished applications like https://github.com/mps-youtube/mps-youtube

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