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Comment by charcircuit | Hacker News Reader

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charcircuit

This is missing too many features to be useful for me.

- no live chat on streams

- no personalized recommendation feed

- no community posts

- no membership videos / community posts

- no notifications for streams / uploads / community posts / replies / reminders for upcoming streams

- no shorts on the home page

- no comment section

- no picture in picture mode

- no saving where I left off in a video

- no "My Mix"

- no way to make clips

- no way to watch clips

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Everyone likes different things. It's remarkable you've enumerated quite a long list of things none of which I want in my place-people-upload-video-to. Browser extensions exist to strip things like this out, and New Pipe follows a similar vein but as an app.

It has one very useful feature though, that it's not made by Google.

That is meaningless to me if the app can't do what I need it to do. I don't need every feature of the YouTube app, but there is some key functionality that I need.

Sounds like this solution is not for you then.

I see this snooty clap back every time someone dares give any criticism of youtube alternatives. "Lacking Google" is not a feature, nor does it make up for lacking features most users would call fundamentally necessary.

Lacking Google is indeed a feature. You may not find it valuable yourself, but that alone is the reason many people use NewPipe.

Lacking Google is the raison d'être of all of these apps and most of that list there is useless crap I am never going to use. The only things I would need out of that is saving my place in videos and picture in picture (maybe).

Plus half that is list is just copy cat implementations of other more well used sites.

Who is going to youtube for copies of tiktoks and twitch streaming?

For some people it is a feature. For you its not. You're one data point. You appear to have the same attitude as the people who leave drive-by feature demands on open source projects, then get hostile when they're ignored. The app isn't for you, and you're not entitled to features in a free, open source project. Its not a "snooty clap back", they're actually correct. This project isn't for you, and writing a manifesto of features they need to implement to add one user is pretty absurd.

Imagine downloading a free textbook and emailing the creator demanding additional content or else you'd stop using their free textbook? This sort of thing just reeks of entitlement and a misunderstanding of open source more than anything else.

I seems that you want all the features the official YouTube app has. Why not use it?

If you don't want to see ads, pay for YouTube Premium if it's available in your region. Otherwise you can certainly create a fork and add those features and nobody will be angry with you.

But, it's got my one 'killer' feature YouTube doesn't have: Background play. And that's enough for me.

Also, I have numerous YT alternative apps installed, plus official YT app, so if I need any of the missing features, then I use one of the other apps that has it. And begrudgingly fall back to official YT when all else fails.

Youtube has it, as long as you're willing to pay. They go out of their way to disable background playback on their mobile website as well.

It's not a missing feature, it's a paywalled feature...

That's why I point it out as a missing feature: It's so basic, and yet it's "premium". I'm also intentionally separating YouTube from YouTube Premium* in terms of features, in which context YouTube is missing the background play feature.

*It may be the same app that you open, but the features are distinctly different, so I treat them as separate apps in my mental model. I would do the same for Spotify, for example.

> It's not a missing feature, it's a paywalled feature...

Diner: "Waiter, this soup is missing salt!"

Waiter: "I am very sorry, salt is only part of the Soup+ package, but you ordered the Soup Essentials package. Would you like to upgrade to Soup+?"

> - no personalized recommendation feed > - no "My Mix"

Sounds awesome

The recommendation feed is essential for finding new videos / sorts / streams to watch.

My mix is useful if you just want to put some music on.

I don't see how lacking these features improves the experience. It just makes it harder to find videos.

Maybe recommendations work great for you. For me, the recommendations are worse than useless. I can't remember the last time it recommended something I actually wanted to watch. For instance: today the top 50 recs are all either things I've seen before or are videos that are from my subscriptions and I have decided I'm not interested in watching. Apart from that there are only two actual organic recommendations:

1) How to survivie outside in -25C weather. - I have no interest whatsoever in bushcraft and bouldering but youtube has decided I should be and keeps pushing these since someone in my house is into these topics which shows there is IP-based topic targetting going on

2) Why the Dutch government has the best graphic design - I don't even know where to begin with this one

My mix I actively hate and literally remove every single time I see it. I wish there was a flag to turn it off. When I put music on I want to put a specific thing on - I don't want youtube to decide for me. Doubly so since it is so profoundly and consistently wrong in its video recommendations.

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