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Comment by Dylan16807 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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