Hacker News Reader

Comment by orliesaurus | Hacker News Reader

I decided to be a translator for this project - that's the best contribution I can do as I know nothing about android - it seems like a good cause for the following reasons:

- I know of people who live in countries where YouTube Red isn't available, I pay for YouTube red myself and it's life changing. I want them to be able to experience this too in a way or another

- I feel like Google might have done the right thing in their eyes by forcing Vanced to shutdown, but I also think they didn't address the problem in its entirety. You can shut down 1 app - 10 more pop up. Maybe the strategy should be, introduce better features instead of taking them away and think about monetizing differently?

- I really can't stand Monday.com ads btw ;) they're everywhere even in my sleep.

View on HN

My guess is YouTube is well aware of the fact that new ones are going to pop up. I'm guessing they did the math and realized that YouTube Vanced became big enough that it was worth shutting down and removing it from the limelight while minimizing the Streisand Effect.

> Maybe the strategy should be, introduce better features instead of taking them away and think about monetizing differently?

As a Vanced user, I do agree that the app is objectively superior than the YouTube app. Customizable toolbars, better dark mode, disabling thumbnails auto-playing, more video control options etc. But 99.99% of people used Vanced to get rid of ads without paying, and that isn't something YouTube can compete against. No amount of "good features" would've caused people to abandon Vanced and switch to vanilla YouTube (well, unless they reduced or removed ads, which would be detrimental to their business and creators).

Every Vanced user should've known that this was a fight club situation, where if Vanced got big enough it would have to die.

>No amount of "good features" would've caused people to abandon Vanced and switch to vanilla YouTube

Maybe for the majority of people, but surely I'm not the only one who would go back to Vanilla YouTube and pay for Premium if you could run Sponsorblock. I'm not paying 10 bucks a month to get rid of ads just to be bombarbed by "goofy" segways into mid-video commercials.

Sponsorblock - to me - is the killer feature of Vanced. It's crazy how much of a video is just stupid fluff that nobody has any use or need for.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com