FreeTube – A Private YouTube Client
freetubeapp.io
freetubeapp.io
Lately, there is almost no new videos in my recommendation feed. It's mostly either the things I've already watched or new videos from the channels I'm already subscribed to. It really feels like I've exhausted the internet at some point. This can't possibly be true now, can it? :')
Where do I opt-in for more tracking?
I go to YouTube, see a whole lot of nothing, and then I promptly leave. It's an interest desert.
I always read and hear of YouTube being lauded for its recommendations, but to me it has always been the weakest video content site and social network. It doesn't do either job particularly well, at least not in a way that engages me for long.
I like science and geopolitical content, but the typical YouTuber treatment tends to pale in comparison to stuff you'd read.
From my perspective, HBO and TikTok win long and short form video respectively, whereas Twitter, HN, and Reddit win 1:n and n:m social.
Google has tons of information on you - way more than it needs, and yet it still doesn’t get recommendations as good as we expect (as you rightly point out).
So the issue is that it has tons of extra data than they need because it * doesn’t make their recommendation any better.*
Gathering data for the sake of gathering data in todays world of information privacy and hackers, leaks, etc. And that is what they are doing.
In my opinion (sample size of 1), YouTube is incredibly simplistic in its recommendations. I find it very hard to believe that they couldn’t achieve the same quality with much less info on me.
For instance, my IP changes when I travel, but I’m an American who speaks English, and yet YouTube insists in showing me local ads in different languages when I’m in foreign countries, despite having my home address (verified with my credit card no less!!!) That’s just laughable.
I bet those advertisers that are wasting money on ads that you don't understand aren't laughing
I never noticed it, until I moved to Spain for a while. Our place had slow internet, and I watched my roommates hit the ad multiple times a day on accident because it loaded right into where the search box was exactly as you’d naturally click there.
Active items that are already clickable that change location as a page loads drive me nuts, but these particularly convenient examples add another dimension to that.
Do you have any good sources about this? what do we know for sure Google know and track about us? I work for Google now, but speak for myself here. In my time here (not much, less than a year still) I've seen a huge focus on privacy and not storing user data. Then again, I don't work on ads. However, even before working at Google I was surprised that given my liberal sharing of information on the internet, ad targeting did not seem particularly more informed for me than "middle aged male living in Canada" ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
For start, your entire search history. After you search, Google tracks how much time you spend on those sites with AdSense. Google reads our emails to scan for flights and to add appointments to calendar. It knows the places we go because Google Maps and the videos we watch online.
Google has plenty data to make an accurate profile of you, and you can see it’s inferences on your relationship status, income, employer and so on in your Google account[1]. (IIRC it was more complete some years ago, now it’s showing less categories or there’s another link I can’t find.)
[1]: https://support.google.com/My-Ad-Center-Help/answer/12155964...
Regarding your point working at google, I don't think the entirety of google is evil. There have to be good people somewhere. But some parts are just evil.
For example, documents in Google court cases: https://twitter.com/jason_kint/status/1592380225064960002 and https://twitter.com/jason_kint/status/1592551401875734528 and https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/26/21403202/google-engineers... and possibly others
> NSA databank, with its years of collected communications, allows analysts to search that database and listen "to the calls or read the emails of everything that the NSA has stored, or look at the browsing histories or Google search terms that you've entered, and it also alerts them to any further activity that people connected to that email address or that IP address do in the future."
The list of Google handing tons of user data to governments or 3rd parties goes on and on. Clearly there is a lot for them to be handing over. Don't understand the surprise or confusion over what Google does.
...Access to Sci-Hub Founder’s Google Account Data (https://torrentfreak.com/fbi-gains-access-to-sci-hub-founder...).
Google handed over user data to the Hong Kong government (https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/google-handed-ove...).
Google Hands Over User Data For 94%... (https://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2011/06/27/google...).
Google Bypasses Privacy, Puts Users’ Data on the Map (https://analyticsindiamag.com/google-bypasses-privacy-puts-u...).
Google’s ‘deceptive’ account sign-up process... (https://techcrunch.com/2022/06/29/google-account-gdpr-compla...).
Funny, my experience with YouTube is the opposite. I'm Italian, but I've emigrated a decade ago. I've tried to purge my Google account of all traces of Italian, changed my languages in my Google profile, settings, and all the places I could find. Google also has my credit card through Google Pay.
And yet they keep switching my YouTube interface to Italian at least once a week. I set it back to English every time but within days it's back.
The Italian interface is perfectly fine, mind you, but they insist on auto-translating the titles of English videos, which a) often results in barely coherent titles and b) the videos are still in English!
My youtube ads are the same 2-3 casino/sports betting things over and over again. Tho I never have nor never will partake in any of those nor have I ever clicked on one, so it is just unbelievably stupid.
An example of YouTube insanity is their video quality settings. There is no clear manual setting (which should be labeled as such), to keep them at only a specific video resolution at all times (until adjusted by the user). Instead, users have to constantly battle with YouTube auto and resizing, to include when going to and from full screen, or make their own custom workaround.
> For instance, my IP changes when I travel... YouTube insists in showing me local ads in different languages when I’m in foreign countries...
The point is not the convenience of the user, but rather maximum data extraction from users and selling that data to 3rd parties (including governments). This is why users should not blink in finding workarounds for what Google is doing. Users should have no more concern or loyalty to Google, as they have for them, which is zero outside of how much money they can make.
The possibilities of having a truly open-source YouTube client is that users can configure their settings to exactly as they wish, without tracking and massive privacy violations.
I have no direct access to confirm this, but I have a theory as to why it happens. It’s a combination of greed and various ad buying semi-broken options.
1. Google shows ads which earn them the most money. “Relevance” only plays out in the mapping phase of finding advertisers who are willing to show their ad to your target group. The reducing phase is essentially just sorting by bid and selecting the top ones.
2. For many English speaking ad buys, I’ll bet there is an option that was checked to restrict which countries it’s shown too for the highest bids (maybe they have a separate campaign for RoW with a low bid, but doubtful). Advertisers have learned about ad fraud at least to some degree, so checking this box seems good to them.
3. Local advertisers in X foreign country aren’t given an option for “exclude English speakers here on holiday” and even if they did, some won’t click it and so there will still be some low bidding ad to fill the slot.
If it was about real relevancy to you and not “who will pay the most given this bucket of basic attributes”, folks like me would probably hate advertising less. The problem is it’s not and in a capitalist world I’m not sure it’ll ever change.
The same holds true for product recommendations, it’s my personal belief that on say Amazon, if a product is recommended for me, it’s because either the seller paid for the recommendation or it’s the highest margin item that fits my vagueish buying patterns. It’s not about real relevance there either, it’s “you brushed into this weird vẹn diagram overlap” and “now we can make money showing it to you.”
Most people don’t understand the degree to which advertiser preferences dictate what they see on YouTube.
Creators are incentivized to only publish content that meets YouTube’s “advertiser-friendly guidelines.” When we publish content that is not suitable for all advertisers, YouTube doesn’t promote it, which is a death sentence for the video. YouTube claims that a video’s monetization status has no impact on discovery, but according to YouTube, all of the factors that influence whether a video is monetized directly impact video discovery. It’s smoke and mirrors.
An overwhelming majority of views on YouTube come from recommendations and suggested videos, and YouTube has little incentive to suggest or recommend content that is ‘unsuitable’ for advertisers. Because it doesn’t make them money.
To put some numbers on that, ~95% of my views come from YouTube’s suggestions and recommendations. I have millions of subscribers, but subscriber count is all-but meaningless. For any given video, subscriber notifications typically account for a negligible number of views, usually less than 5,000.
Remember when YouTube introduced the bell you have to ‘ring’ in order to receive notifications from the channels you subscribe to? That is one of many actions YouTube has taken to remove your ability to choose what you see. YouTube does this because people don’t decide what to watch based on whether or not it’s advertiser-friendly. They would rather decide for you.
I publish news. And there are highly-newsworthy stories that I haven’t covered because of the above. I hate it.
The number of travelers in foreign countries are so low compared to local population that I don't think it even makes sense for Google to optimize ads for people like that
I wouldn't expect more data or better profiling to bridge that gap.
In my experience the 'suggested videos' next to the video you're watching is more than good enough to get recs.
I use newpipe and put all the videos I like in a playlist. So everytime I want new videos I just scroll through the list, click on a video and just try something from suggested videos.
>the 'suggested videos' next to the video you're watching is more than good enough to get recs.
Which is also an algorithmic feed which optimizes for the same metrics as the home page.
1) a 60 second video showing how to use wd-40 and a lighter to set the bead, or
2) a 7 minute showing how beads can be broken, things you might try, an ad, some bad ideas, a funny guy yelling, another ad, and then how to set a bead with flame
Increased time on the platform is a proxy for more ads shown. YouTube optimizes for maximizing ads, not minimizing time on the platform with short, clear, informative content.
The first result is 2:43 then 3:14 then a shorts drawer which are sub minute videos then 5:43 then 3:29.
It turns out that YouTube is not optimizing for showing 7 minute videos.
>YouTube optimizes for maximizing ads
While they do monitor for regressions of metrics like ad revenue improvements to the algorithm aim to improve the user experience as opposed to improving revenue.
You're going to see recommendations for monetized channels, channels that have long ads on them, and channels that you are likely to comment/like/subscribe.
It has very little to do with discerning your tastes and more to do with extracting value out of your time spent in the app.
That seems to contradict your thesis “aren’t based on what you want to see the most”
Of course the argument can be made that they have the data and aren’t using it properly, but that’s not the simplest possible explanation.
The simplest is that they have the data, it’s working perfectly, and showing what people are familiar with is what generates the highest engagement, at the expense of new material.
I find 2022 YouTube profoundly boring for the same reasons you do and their recent excess of advertising is atrocious. Instead of producing something valuable enough to subscribe to in the form of product innovation, the genius MBAs at Google have decided that annoying people to death with insane cable-television-style advertising is the value driver to bank the future brand of the company on. Seems like maybe the team that was responsible for the smash hits like Google Wave and the destruction of Reader have found new positions in the company, except this time they’re joined by a 30 year television advertising veteran who really gets the internet. But I digress…
But it also seems to me that both behaviors aren’t based on bad decisions, but more likely on the viewing habits of the majority and that’s what the algo has learned. It’s an interesting concept, even if a little dark and sad.
I do hope I’m wrong and they’re just bad at dealing with data to make recommendations, but it seems the less likely scenario since Google has had virtually unlimited resources and these are the specialized type data problems they are most adept at.
I assume that's why they made Google search results so bad, rather than send you straight where you want to go they drive you around the block to run the meter up.
Every damn time… for years… every time. It’s that counterintuitive to my brain.
But as sand in the lettuce as that is. The Netflix app completely stubbornly refusing to give me a “mark as watched” and blatantly refusing to use the AppleTV SDK features to integrate with the “up next” and TV app… I’m getting pretty close to just cancelling the subscription, because I’m sick of having to go and specifically check Netflix… they are not that special I want to go out if my way, I’m sick of them being slow to load my list I’m sick of them not fitting into my relaxation time in a smooth seamless way and most of all I’m sick of having to waste time specifically opening their app, waiting for my list to load, being reminded which stuff from my big watch list is leaving soon, seeing there’s nothing I want to watch right now from my current partially completed tv show list and then leaving the app. Im just really annoyed by paying someone to waste my time… If they didn’t have just barely enough interesting stuff I’d have dumped them, but it’s just teetering in the balance.
Why the Netflix rant? Easy answer. I can see an exit potentially in the future. YouTube is shit and pisses me off but it’s basically a monopoly on hosting video content which means everyone else who makes interesting stuff uses it and unless I want to ignore the wonderful array of diverse and interesting and intelligent cont I have managed to find on there… I have no exit in sight for all the dumb shit google cancels I don’t see them cancelling YouTube.
Which is why I force myself to be more zen about its failings… This bread sure sucks but it sure beats starvation!
It seems to me that Google is expecting more from ML/AI than the tech is actually able to deliver. That is, of course, hardly a problem limited to Google.
With those lists, FreeTube and Invidious would have the data for good suggestions.
If they use some form of ActivityPub to share and publish the playlists, there would be an existing infrastructure to moderate and annotate the lists.
To give an example. I want to watch scifi. Lately I've been spending some time browsing the last years of the Dust channel on YouTube. It turns out that the general mood of those videos is depressing so I quit after a couple of days. I searched Google and asked friends. I'm watching Missions now https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missions_(TV_series)
Your assumption is that it is in Google's interest to show you stuff that interests you. That is wrong. They just want to maximize the time you spend on their platform. These two are not necessarily the same.
This is a conversation that needs to be had. Or rather, it's a conversation that should have been had before YouTube/FB/etc. gained control over the world wide web.
Podcasts are, and have long been the freeiest medium. The protocol itself worked well. Hosting was cheap & simple enough (compared to video) that "free hosting" didn't give the likes of Google an angle to centralise it under their control. It was also marginal and unprofitable enough that they didn't try hard.
That said, podcast discovery always sucked. It still sucks. Blogrolls, BITD, worked well for me. Recommendation engines better or worse, are at least something. Monopoly's understand instinctively that recommendation/discovuery is the key to the kingdom. Open systems tend to see the pursuit as dirty.
In any case, discovery is like hosting. It's a ford. Control it and you control the stream. Neglect it, and be defeated.
The puritanical rejection of tracking, profiling, recommendation & discovery has and is placing a low ceiling on open media initiatives. It's ceding ground to monopolies.
We need open, consensual ways of having profiling... advertising even, perhaps.
If you aren't willing to signal to the market that this is a problem that you would be willing to pay real $ to solve, then it will never get solved. If there was any actual demand for proper search and recommendation engines, plenty of us around here would have created 3rd party tools to solve for just that. But the reality is, in spite of how dogshit Youtube's recommendation engine is, people are just not willing to pay for a solution.
The problem with "tech" companies is not simply advertising. It is control. If the user cedes control of their computer to the "tech" company, then the company may use it for advertising. But the user has no control over how the company exercises its control. There are no legal limits. The use being made of the computer is ultimately for the benefit of the company, not the user.
The company decides what to show the user. Given the monpolistic nature of how these companies operate, e.g., "tech" proponents will argue YouTube has no viable alternatives, if the user is not satisfied, then it's tough apples.
The company might decide the user is a sub-optimal target for advertising. Then what. This could affect what the user is sent as "recommendations".
The issue is one of control. Under the "tech" company model of computer and internet use, the user gives away control. In return, she gets "convenience". She can be passive and consume what is chosen for her, but there is no guarantee of satisfaction. The system is designed to benefit the company.
Sadly, broken fallacy. More tracking wouldn’t lead to better recommendations. I already wrote a reply to a child comment, but wanted to say same applies here. YouTube isn’t about “showing you videos endlessly”, it’s about “endlessly monetizing you watching videos”. The recommendations are geared around them primarily making more money, not around your enjoyment (which is a distant priority, just enough to keep you as a willing product to be sold).
If you accidentally clear your history while on a remote WiFi network, and want to restore your old decisions, then connect to your usual WiFi network and videos will be heavily weighted towards your original recommendations.
YouTube recommendations are not very deep and appear to use IP address as a significant feature regardless of whether you’ve cleared your history.
Here is a screenshot on YouTube mobile: https://photos.app.goo.gl/9zk4gaihuxu7WABF6
It'll truly become killer when I can save multiple playlists, like I can on Newpipe. Sadly right now you're stuck with one playlist of "Favourites", and then copy-pasting a playlist link from YouTube to queue things up.
You start looking at a video from vSauce and then some videos later you are seeing how zebras communicate and what we can learn from it (just an example)
Closest I have seen is an extension that adds an random button but I feel that also lacks what I feel I have been looking for.
Going through screenshots of this client, I couldnt find it (or maybe not listed on the page). Anyone has anything similar they have been using?
Found it: http://astronaut.io/
It also automatically skips all ads, even sponsor segments in videos.
You also avoid needing to have a Google account to keep up with subscriptions, and you avoid content suppression as the sponsor-prioritized advertiser-friendly algorithms are turned off.
"Google uses IPs to track you" has been theorized since 2010 or maybe even before, but I've never seen any study or evidence that it actually does so. So, so much of the internet is built on NAT, shared IP space, and short-lived IP addresses that it really doesn't seem like there is any ROI in having engineers keep their IP correlation tech in service and tracking its efficacy.
Imagine two people live in the same residence. One is extremely privacy conscious, doesn’t even have a Google account, and the other doesn’t even run an ad blocker. Both have the same phones on the same OS version, and for sake of argument, both are on the same ipv4.
Does this mean that, if the privacy conscious person opens a private browsing session on their phone and visits some websites, they start getting ads their roommate should be getting? At what point would Google know “this is the same person, show their targeted ads”?
/s point taken. :)
Tor Browser in Whonix in a Qubes VM is recommended when you need reasonable privacy while interacting with services purpose built to track users.
Also I do not use proprietary operating systems so I would be stuck using a webapp on my TV which is pretty awful UX.
Hard pass.
YouTube forces users to choose between privacy and supporting creators. I will not give up privacy, so it is up to creators to upload to privacy respecting platforms if they want my money.
CLI tool to download and mirror YouTube videos and audio to local disk.
For example, I've used:
$ yt-dlp -o - <twitch channel> | vlc -
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/musi-simple-music-streaming/id...
Can it limit video search to only the channels in my subscription list?
Youtube seems to have had this feature at one point but it was removed. The only option is to search each channel specifically (a tedious task if you hundreds of channel subscriptions).
If you can provide this incredibly useful but imposible-to-do-manually functionality (search all subscriptions), you'll have a UVP that will make people like me immediately switch.
I'd love to have plugins for various video services in there, to use the same client for other video services (such as Rumble).
This concept could also be used for creating a Twitter client, where it would follow people by scraping their feeds, support alternative platforms like Gettr, and send nothing but the bare minimum to the server.
I've also carefully cultivated my YouTube watching habits that it shows exactly what I want to see. No toxic or political things get through. I watch positive, uplifting, informative channels and creators.
I looked into a lot of alternative clients, including FreeTube, in an attempt to solve this. I use Tube Archivist[1], an open-source project that allows you to subscribe to and auto-download YouTube channels and playlists or download individual videos and watch them in a minimal web interface. It works fine on iOS as long as you set it up to download in an iOS-compatible format. I currently have it running in a Docker container on my Synology NAS.
I use the unhook add-on for that, it removes all recommended videos:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-recom...
There's also clickbait remover to get rid of those obnoxious thumbnails:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/clickbait-rem...
youtube-audio lets you disable the video-feed. Nice when you're using it to listen to what are basically podcasts and you don't want to waste bandwidth:
https://github.com/animeshkundu/youtube-audio
And while we're here, SponsorBlock skips sponsored segments:
YouTube is about the content creators, and people and advertisers will go, where they are at. So if there is a mass exodus of content creators and users, YouTube is pretty much finished.
People are told their only options are to consent to corporate behavior modification or be effectively ejected from modern society.
That is a bullshit choice and everyone should feel no guilt for opting to consume content anonymously. In fact many -need- to do this to protect themselves from politicians who are unfriendly to basic human rights.
The problem exists because these companies want to have their cake and eat it. They want people to pay for content yet they want it to be freely available to content spiders and for it to be spread on linking sites such as this one. It's like the old wallet joke: Get someone to crouch down to pick it up and then you yank it away.
If I see a link here from e.g. the washington post, I might read it, but I will never sign up for a monthly subscription. I don't even live in America so most of their content won't interest me. So a paywall in that case is only annoying. Bypassing it will not cost them a subscription which I'd never get anyway.
When you choose not to use Youtube, you are choosing to not be a part of a large part of society. This is isolating. Whether that isolation matters to the individual in question is highly variable.
You might be able to easily forego it. But a kid - ostensibly uninformed, not able to reason well enough and "not able to consent" - who's teacher sets an assignment to write about a youtube video has an overwhelming influence to "simply do it".
Should large parts of society including institutions know better and do better? Sure. But in practice they don't.
How would using freetube solve this problem?
YouTube isn't a large part of society. People use it to watch silly/educational videos far more than as a social platform.
based on watch time and the number of people using it, i'd argue it is a large part of society.
Sadly YouTube has monopolized a lot of content, has mandatory tracking, and also censors and suppresses things and uses algorithms to put people in maximally profitable filter bubbles regardless of mental health.
Ideally more creators will realize they can put censorship-free tracking-free content on alternative services that give them direct profits.
Until then I use Freetube and Invidious exclusively to opt out of tracking nonsense and avoid wasting my valuable time watching ads.
We should all starve adtech companies of revenue so creators are incentivized to learn how to monetize in a way that respects users rights and privacy.
It does not satisfy your anonymous requirement but very little does. Most content creators appreciate (directly or indirectly) the features a non anonymous platform provides.
Youtube Premium is not acceptable. I can use cash to buy a book or a movie at a store and not have to reveal anything about myself in the process. No targeting, no having my personal data and behavior collected in centralized systems and sold forever.
The only acceptable model I have seen is what LBRY does, where I can have an anonymous account and top up a wallet of tokens which are used to support creators with microtransactions. No tracking, no ads, but creators get paid.
You can use Ad Block while using YT Premium.
Ever heard of SponsorBlock?
Google will use this data to sort feeds and recommendations in a way that helps meet the behavior modification goals of their partners.
When creators upload to platforms that let me anonymously pay them with money, I will happily do so. LBRY has proven this can be done.
I think you misunderstand what YouTube is. YouTube's primary product IS its recommendation system. Other platforms will happily host video files for you for a marginal cost, but nobody goes to them because they won't see videos that appeal to them specifically when they visit the site's homepage.
I understand what YouTube is quite well. The product is providing the most addictive advertiser friendly content possible that ignores all mental health studies. The product is cigarettes and like cigarettes, their use will only be reduced when enough people are educated on the harms and reject the second hand smoke in our public places.
Humans are capable of simply searching for things and subscribing to things like RSS. RSS was peak internet and ActivityPub is the next generation of this. We can go back to that, while maybe adding unbiased, open source, and provably fair user voted topical discovery engines.
https://odysee.com/ is getting close with an open source system with community voted content discovery and creator support via microtransaction tips. You do not need to be advertiser friendly to succeed there, and we all get the same view of the world.
But I get it, why pay for the content or the service when you can just take it for free?
For now the only creators I can support with privacy are on LBRY.
I'm sympathetic to "I would pay for this if I could" argumentation when it comes to digital goods. But at some point the conditions you're setting become so unreasonable that nobody can reasonably fulfill them, and it becomes clear you're only doing it to get free stuff and stiff the creators.
You don't want to see ads? YT already gives you that option. You don't want YT data to be used for ad targeting? YT already gives you that option. But you additionally want to pay in gold bullion and only to the farmer rather than the grocery store that actually provided you the service. It's not very reasonable, is it?
What happens when your searches for a medical condition are sold to your insurance company? Or when your political searches are used to inform new gerrymandering lines? Or when an anti-choice state gives Google a warrant demanding the identity of everyone who has made searches for abortion information? What about someone in China or Russia searching for content that casts their government in a negative light?
Laws change and politicians change. History has taught us over and over that centralized personal data will always eventually end up in the hands of those who will weaponize it.
Those of us with influence in technology must demand privacy. Privacy is not negotiable. Content hosts will either offer privacy or continue to see tool after tool emerge to make it easy for people to circumvent their surveillance capitalism models.
LBRY/Odysee has already proven it is totally possible to support video creators online without with anonymous microtransactions.
I have hope more creators sick of ads and censorship will mirror their content to privacy preserving systems that allow direct monetization.
That's not a very principled defense of privacy, is it? It's just taking stuff for free because you can.
(If your real concern really is with search / watch history, those can be disabled. But two posts ago your real concern was with ad targeting, until I mentioned that it can be disabled. This makes your objections appear like excuses rather than the actual root cause.)
We either suggest people remove themselves from modern culture entirely, or we suggest they use tools that let them continue to partake in culture while rejecting harmful surveillance capitalism models.
In both cases the surveillance capitalists do not get any data or money, but the latter case at least privacy concerned citizens see the content, are still a part of society, and can buy merch or offer anonymous tips to creators directly in the instances they are given the chance via conventions, or anonymous tip-jar donation systems.
I choose the option better for users and creators. The surveillance capitalists get starved of revinue but if it hurts them enough they will be forced to change models just like the music industry did.
People pirated music to avoid DRM but still became fans and bought concert tickets.
I have YouTube Premium and don’t see any ads by Google/YouTube. I’m not a heavy YouTube viewer though so it’s possible I’m missing something.
Edit: just discovered sponsorblock and wooow am I impressed at the lengths some folks will go to skip ads. TIL
Though in general if there is a lot of sponsorship in videos it usually means the content itself is also really mediocre and spammy so I don't tend to watch those anyway. The people who really have a lot of technical knowledge don't monetise it very much because they don't have to. Being an expert in their field already nets them more than enough money.
I watch very little youtube anyway, as I dislike the video format and prefer written content. But when I do need to because what I'm looking for isn't available elsewhere, sponsorblock is a great help.
"Have you witnessed the requisite quantity of behavior-modifying media today, Citizen? Remember, we all have to do our part. I see you only internalized five minutes' worth yesterday. This is below target. Your beliefs and desires have not been sufficiently altered to meet corporate goals. We require greater acquiescence."
If a company wants to paywall something then they can do that. Maybe I'll pay for it. Advertising shits in your head. I don't accept the modification of my mind as an acceptable form of payment.
"So don't use it"
No. What are you going to do about it? Tell me I'm immoral?
A true third choice does not exist, so we are left with no choice but to create one. Strip the ads and remove the trackers until alternatives like anonymous micro-transactions are implemented.
This needs to go down like DRM. When enough people voted no to DRM by obtaining music via alternative channels, music sales portals started dropped DRM letting people have unrestricted copies of what they paid for.
The entire edifice of Capitalism, which we celebrate, is built on selfishness. And yet you use the word here as if it were a bad thing. I am confused :)
> If you have a problem with YouTube's tracking, simply don't use it
Why "simply" avoid a problem when with some effort you can improve it? In this case optimising the service to make it free from ads and tracking appears to be an improvement.
I'm not sure what's left to reply to once I exclude all of that from your comment.
Stealing a porche is illegal, regardless of the underlying motivation. Making a good product to sell is not illegal, even if the motivation is selfish.
Youtube doesn't have any competition at its scale, not using it isn't a rational choice. Even school assignments will have YouTube links to watch. I think we're at the point where your statement sounds like a "if you don't like the Standard Oil company just don't buy their oil" rehash.
If there were a controlling entity you'd have to stand up your own equivalent YouTube, and a load of government people to wine and dine.
The current way to compete against YouTube is to finance a cloud provider to rise at that scale or build your own data centers which will land you somewhere in the top owning entities in the world. Then you need to lure creators and pay them the same or more than Youtube, and you might be seeing users and advertisers finally coming to your platform in significant numbers. Which also means you’ll enter into talks with content rights providers, pass contracts, and build an army of lawyers to deal with the whole world (including as you say, wining and dining the biggest entities that you need to stay in at least a neutral position toward your growth)
Saving money on open sourced codecs is probably not your main concern.
The alternative being to start your service small and grow organically, but in a country where YouTube isn’t available (fun thinking time: where could that be ?)
Today I think it's morally acceptable to circumvent tracking, advertising, etc. for behemoths like YouTube, Google, etc. They are simply too powerful, and have too much mindshare. There's nothing close to YouTube in terms of ubiquity. I don't have any sympathy for a monopoly, and I hope that YouTube's days are numbered so that a more open alternative like PeerTube can take its place.
My only real concern is channel owners. I want them to be able to be reasonably compensated for their work today.
I wonder if it's possible to spoof viewing of the ads for the sake of channel owners without reducing privacy or being dusturbed by ads...
I wonder if this is a bit morally worse.
Not viewing the ads screws over Google. Faking the ad view costs the company running the ad money. A lot of smaller companies advertise on YouTube... but they often use pretty standard gross techniques like flat-out lying, deceiving, or playing to human psychology. It can be useful to dissect ads to understand how gross and manipulative they are.
I guess so.
>If you have a problem with YouTube's tracking, simply don't use it
You are yet to give me an actual incentive why I shouldn't. No, "it's immoral" doesn't work, because morals aren't real.
Yes, round of applause for google please, for being the inventors of sustainability in the business of art. Without all their benevolent stewardship we would all be starving for food and shelter.
You realize you're buying right into their communication strategy? This is just another instance of the age old "do dirty stuff and extract boats of money; pick a handful of lucky people; make them kings; show it off for everyone to see; now you're a good guy". Yes, i'm sure they "give away" tons, perhaps hundreds of millions or even more. The fact is that the majority of what people experience is unpredictability, dependency, unchecked and arbitrary strikes unless you're constantly running after what they consider is click-bait enough to be worth. In fact what most people experience is no money at all (or pennies) but for sure the occasional strike because you were too critical of something or because your sense of humor or parody is not to the taste of some IP lawyer. Yes "it's not google", "they just respect the law". Point is they (and their lookalikes) practically monopolized something as basic as video hosting and marginalized any non-giant alternative and are more than happy to hand over the keys to shutdown channels to anybody well-connected who is wearing a suit.
> If you have a problem with YouTube's tracking, simply don't use it
Yes, why don't people live without a smartphone, without a car, without eating industrial food, without fossil fuel? Why do these people keep funding these pesky crooked pharma companies and buying drugs? Right, maybe they don't have a choice, they don't have enough money (because you always pay, in a way or another, to get out of these things, that's what monopoly means, in practice). Sure youtube might be on the "easier to do without" part of the spectrum, but (1) this is not true for everybody (what if you want to watch some internet TV?) and (2) arguing on this is just moving the goalpost since there are services like these which you need to do everyday things. More and more people cannot work without zoom, slack, github, gmail. Yes this is stupid, but i did not choose it. Should i quit my job? Perhaps. Will it make any difference in the big picture? Not at all.
Personally my opinion is that they just privatized de-facto public infrastructure. Which is to say they managed to raise a private tax which is almost mandatory to pay in practice. Which is pure and simple extortion. It may sound radical, but there's really nothing qualitatively different. They just managed to turn this particular form into something seemingly normal.
> simply don't use it
This is not always an option.
Privacy, adverts, morality, monopoly and all the hand waving is just for show. They are valid concerns but you'll hear a lot of it as a veil for "me want free stuff".
[1] private for now since my instance ended up being very popular in Japan for some reason, this being rather odd given that I live in Sweden. I'll keep it private for a few months and open it up again to see whether traffic remains within reasonable bounds.
This is what I think. It could be different maybe others could explain differently.
What I really wish YT had was a creator recommendation system. A way to find creators with content similar to the creator of the video I'm currently watching would be much more helpful to me.
i ended up using this script that adds new videos into predefined playlists
https://www.google.com/url?q=https://github.com/Elijas/auto-...
this is one feature i wish more 3rd party clients had, instead of just sorting channels into categories, only do new videos in playlists which is easier to manage.
it is open source (for both client and hosting), and allows all the major features advertised here.
Their client takes a different approach, and it not only patches YouTube clients, but also Twitter, TikTok, Spotify and Twitch to name a few.
Android TV: https://github.com/yuliskov/SmartTubeNext Amazing client that completely replaced the official YT client for me.
but for Youtube its:
1. go to login page.
2. enter username, hit enter.
3. enter password, hit enter.
4. at the 2FA page hunt for the “other method” option and click it.
5. select “authenticate with Google Authenticator” (i.e. OTP).
6. enter TOTP code, hit enter
7. select either “use this method in the future” or “no” — they don’t take effect because no cookies.
sure, it’s self-inflicted on behalf of me not persisting cookies. but a 7 step login process? get real.
3rd party clients like this solve that. in theory i could also whitelist youtube cookies to be specifically persisted, but figuring out how to do that would be a lot more troublesome than just using a 3rd party client.
If you're on Android, a program like Tasker could and Google Drive could likely accomplish the same results.
I wish there was a BSD version though..
I think electron stuff is difficult to port though - Not sure what the problem is but I heard this recently from a maintainer.
I'm reading comments about installing SponsorBlock along with this FreeTube thingy. I don't understand why are some of you so anti-business here. Do you all work for free?
YouTube creators make their money with ads, so this takes money out of their pockets, too.
I'm intentionally not addressing the advertising revenue issue as that becomes subjective very quickly, just attempting to answer your question through my lens.
Having watch history and other data tied to an account is more convenient since you can access it anywhere and YouTube can recommend videos for you to watch which is a killer feature that FreeTube lacks.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sponsorblock/
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/sponsorblock-for-y...