FreeTube – The Private YouTube Client | Hacker News Reader

FreeTube – The Private YouTube Client

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312 pointsakyuu400 comments

I see there is lot of dilemma in comments here regarding blocking ads. blocking ads is not piracy, blocking ads should be norm. I am ok with seeing ads, until they don't track my behavior, they don't try to manipulate my decisions based on age,region,sex,location, earning status. I am "ok" with ads shown in TV channels, because they show the same for all above mentioned categories.

let me make a simple analogy, how do you feel if a circus publicizes as free, has a billboard to show ads, and in background they hires a detective to follow your every move 24/7 , note down your interests/dislikes so they can show you personalised ads based on the interests. creepy right, That how i feel these companies do.

just because someone/company spent money and posted a billboard on public space, doesn't mean you have to read through it. It is the risk they assumed, just like youtube/creators made the decision to host videos for free on a public space. it is a bad decision from their part and they have to live with it and not gaslight people.

I hate to see youtube die, It is a wonderful archive for society. if you want you can buy premium/see ads so that society wont lose some thing valuable. but not because of creators/YT losing revenue.(that's the risk they assumed when they started the business).

and then there are people who say, you can turn off ad personalization, I did since last 5 years and you know what I see. Some Scam apps/NSFW ads content. and there is no way to report the ads unless I turn on ad personalization.

I would like to repeat statement from louis rossmann , don't accept the premise of the corporates when the premise itself is shaky.

> I am ok with seeing ads, until they don't track my behavior, they don't try to manipulate my decisions based on age,region,sex,location, earning status.

How do they try to manipulate you? Appeal to you, sure. Not wanting them to have your data, absolutely. But manipulate?

Much advertising is psychological manipulation.

The creation of a vacuum that didn't previously exist but now needs to be filled.

Or the pointing out of a vacuum that previously went unnoticed, but is now noticed and therefore must be filled.

How don't they manipulate you?

They are designed to get you to buy things you don't need, and they do that through manipulating human traits. They make you feel you will be lesser/incomplete/not as good as unless you have such and such product. This is not "appealing" to people - it's stone cold corporate manipulation with only one goal in mind.

People have way less control over how they react to what they take in then they think they do.

2 instances I would like to share from my personal experience.

when I am in freshman year, I wanted to host a website and started looking online for best service, I was bombarded with google cloud ads across all websites. I thought google cloud is the best service.(I was never shown results of AWS/IBM watson, when they are far better than Google Cloud at that time). you always use web for exploring options and these ads can manipulate to pivot to one service, when it is not always the best.

after that I tried an experiment with my friends from my collage dorm. we have a proxy for our university. so only tracking I assume is done through respective google accounts.one of them has an Iphone (buys a lot on amazon), others use android. we searched for "best watches to buy", the recommendations/ads(top results) for iphone user is ~1k$(premium brands) and we were shown results of watches around 100$ etc.

I would say above results are manipulative because they will pivot our further searches, the search is not showing best watches/blogs about it. but showing results that the AI think will have higher rate of ads - buy conversion.

The above results definitely will have an impact on further searches, The iphone user will pivot his search to the top results he see which might not always be best.

Abso-fucking-lutely they do.

I recall at the time of the EU referendum in the UK, I was being bombarded with video "adverts" about how Turkey was about to enter the EU, and if they did, it would be a corridor for terrorists, we'd had some incidents around that time, and so it was targeted to play on people's fears.

If only for a second, it gave me pause for thought.

I'm not here to comment on any of that, but that was the time when I realised, we _are_ being manipulated by targeted "advertising"; in what I consider the most underhanded and disgusting ways.

I'm much wiser to it now, I was always cautious before, but now I've seen the manipulation of others, and their fears; I'm constantly shooting down bullshit that family, friends and acquaintances are being targeted with on social media etc.

Fuck advertising, and targeted advertising even more so. I'll block it, and if I can't I won't use the platform, it's that simple.

The entire point of all advertising is to get you to think or feel a certain way about something or someone. If that can't be described as 'manipulation', then I don't know what can?

As other's have said, they hire highly skilled psychologists to increase patterns associated with consumption. It's an unfair fight, like throwing a civilian in the ring with Tyson. I guess you've got a chance, but why is that fight even allowed in the first place?

Edward Bernays manipulated the populace into smoking by branding cigarettes as 'Torches of Freedom' for Feminists who were eager to push back against the social taboo.

He did a whole lot of other manipulative tricks, his wiki page is intense.

Ads are known to exploit and enflame insecurities and doubt to garner sales.

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotional_branding

>*Emotional brands have a significant impact when the consumer experiences a strong and lasting attachment to the brand comparable to a feeling of bonding, companionship or love*. Examples of emotional branding include the nostalgic attachment to the Kodak brand of film, bonding with the Jim Beam bourbon brand, and love for the McDonald’s brand.

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays

>Edward Louis Bernays (/bɜːrˈneɪz/ bur-NAYZ, German: [bɛʁˈnaɪs]; November 22, 1891 − March 9, 1995) was an American theorist, considered a pioneer in the field of public relations and propaganda, and referred to in his obituary as "the father of public relations".[3] His best-known campaigns include a 1929 effort to promote female smoking by branding cigarettes as feminist "Torches of Freedom", and *his work for the United Fruit Company in the 1950s, connected with the CIA-orchestrated overthrow of the democratically elected Guatemalan government in 1954*.

If you don't consider deliberate induction of emotions that imitate love, fear or hatred in order to sell product manipulative I don't know what to tell you.

I am fine with unobtrusive ads to the side, ad banners, etc. But not with peacefully watching a quiet video about the greatest one-shots in Golf history and being interrupted by a blaring loud ad for a crap mobile game. It really is the loudness that bothers me the most. Newspapers didn't used to shout at you. If ads go back to being as unobtrusive as newspaper ads and didn't siphon your personal data, I would unblock them. Ironically, I think 4chan is the only site I visit where I have all ads allowed, because it is still only showing simple quiet banner ads.

I think there was a company doing that (Carbon?) I first saw them on Laravel’s site. And I did read their ads. Like I read the ads in the few magazines I read, because the products are themed with my current activity. I don’t think someone would complain seeing cars ads on a blog centered around cars if it is done in a calm way

> and then there are people who say, you can turn off ad personalization, I did since last 5 years and you know what I see. Some Scam apps/NSFW ads content.

I don't want my personal data to be in the wrong hands and that's why I disable ad-personalisation. But I don't agree that seeing ads for scam apps, NFTs, gambling or get rich quick schemes is better than personalised ads. The reason you are seeing those ads when personalisation is turned off is that they are the only kind of scheme which can scattershot their advertising while still remaining profitable. I'd much rather live in a world where the ad system knows exactly what I need or want and shows me appropriate ads. That way advertisers waste less money and there is more money available for the service provider or the content creators to provide value back to me. The only reason we don't live in that world is that Google and other companies have been shown to be untrustworthy when it comes to handling their customers' personal data.

true I agress, I hate facebook/google a lot for developing tools to track users and target ads based on their personal data. yes, it optimized advertisers money but at the cost of our privacy. I know, If it is not fb/google someone else will develop the tools. I wish world governments will establish some doctrine on targeted ads and ads in general.

I am ok with seeing scam ads on shady small website, but for a company of google/FB scale . No. they should be more responsible. they have tools/money to be more responsible and yet they are not. the only reason I think is they are forcing people to turn off ad-personalisation this way.

by responsible I mean, we should have ability to report scam-ads even if we didn't sign-in/opt out of ad-personalisation.

every time , i try to report a scam-ad on youtube, it asks me to turn off ad-personalisation to proceed.

>I'd much rather live in a world where the ad system knows exactly what I need or want and shows me appropriate ads.

Er...just fucking no thanks.

Can I ask why? Is it because you find ads for things you don't want easier to ignore? Or is it because you'd prefer to see no advertising at all?

I prefer not to have my children psychologically manipulated into unhealthy behaviors for the financial benefit of others.

assumed in your logic is the idea that we should care about being fair to people who pay for advertisements.

I don't mean to make that assumption. I'm only interested to know why people would prefer to see ads for things they are not interested in vs things they are interested in.

people don't want to be spied on, if they have to suffer ads they'd rather suffer generic ads than be spied on.

If I'm truly interested in an ad I probably already knew about the product category and would look up the information I need without an ad. If I didn't know about a "need" the ad has effectively induced a demand in me, which means that it probably did one of (a) emotionally manipulating me (by inducing subconscious fear, or FOMO).

If anyone in my personal life did that in order to achieve a self-serving goal I'd call them emotionally abusive. But suddenly I need to accept it because someone paid for it? What?!

Fantastic summary of why advertising is inherently immoral. And if they just stuck to the facts that would be that but they just can't help themselves on the manipulation front and it's so incredibly obvious that they are doing that. Guilt tripping people and making them feel bad about themselves is apparently perfectly ok if you are in advertising.

I like these points. Would you expand that to talk about targeted vs untargeted advertising? For example, does a targeted ad feel more manipulative or less? Is a targeted easier to ignore or less?

Personally, I find untargeted ads more obnoxious but perhaps that's because of the point mentioned earlier that they tend to be for more obnoxious services such as gambling.

> The reason you are seeing those ads when personalisation is turned off is that they are the only kind of scheme which can scattershot their advertising while still remaining profitable.

Do you know this for a fact, and if so, how?

I could state my claim more precisely and say that the services you are more likely to see advertised to large audiences are those with broad appeal or with high profit margins. In my experience those services tend to be things like banks or morally questionable things like gambling.

Or ads, like many online ads were originally, could be based on the content surrounding them rather than the person looking at them. Ads need not be scatter-shot without personalization.

Every HN thread about YouTube and ads, we see the same ads/tracking/Google apologist fallacies:

1. Equivocating adblock with stealing

2. Using adblock deprives content creators of funds

3. Users of adblock are entitled whiners who just want free stuff

4. Without ads, YouTube cannot exist

It is getting tiring.

What's tiring is trying to figure out why people just don't use sites/services that show them ads. It's extremely simple and from my experience pretty effective at avoiding the ads those sites/services display.

Or just use an ad blocker. Also extremely simple.

How simple is it for a normal person to use an ad blocker on their TV, where they want to watch YouTube?

And don't "just pihole" me, mister!

At least for Roku, I recently found and had good luck with https://github.com/iBicha/playlet

Very cool!

Smarttube is one of several apps that work just like YouTube but without ads.

Also skips sponsor Blocks

Who says people who use adblock don't do that? I certainly avoid those sites, that's also why I self-host Invidious and often use youtube-dl.

But no, people have a problem with those things too, because at its core, they disagree with allowing users being able to choose what their browsers download.

Who says people who use adblock don't do that? I certainly avoid those sites, that's also why I self-host Invidious and often use youtube-dl.

If you are using a different front end for a service, you aren't avoiding using that service...

Why can't you just choose to use a different video sharing platform if you don't like what Youtube offers? Why bother using Invidious and youtube-dl?

Yeah, I kind of anticipated that argument hence the second half of my comment.

I would use a different streaming platform (and I do for some creators like Louis Rossman). But at this point, and you may already know this, YouTube has a monopoly on the video sharing/streaming market and mindshare. You simply can't avoid YouTube in 2023, else you forfeit watching 98% of all video content produced on the internet.

The maintainers of frontends like Nitter/NewPipe/Invidious/Scribe.rip know this. And I'd bet most of them wish their applications had no reason to exist. If YouTube or Twitter were simply good, privacy-respecting and performant products, there would be no reason to use these (or adblock).

> don't use sites/services that show them ads

Cable TV shows ads. Spotify Premium shows ads. Paramount Plus shows ads.

Roads have ads (billboards), but so do the subways.

Even paperback books often have an ad in the back for the next book in the series.

If you think it is possible to avoid ads, it is because you are so surrounded by ads that you are tuning them out.

Cable TV shows ads. Spotify Premium shows ads. Paramount Plus shows ads.

I don't use those services. Problem solved. See how simple that is?

Roads have ads (billboards), but so do the subways.

Sure, that is a problem. But I don't consider a roadside billboard to be a "website or service" as I mentioned in my original post. So, I don't see how that comparison applies.

If you think it is possible to avoid ads...

I didn't say it was possible to avoid all ads, I asked why are you using a service if you don't like the service itself? Just don't use it. You haven't stated why you feel that's so difficult to do.

> why people just don't use sites/services that show them ads

The point I'm trying to make is that everything shows ads.

Most content is only available on services that show ads.

How do you consume media?

Because they're a monopoly. Finding creators without using YouTube is very hard, at least for me. It's hard even inside YT.

But most creators are exclusively on YT because that's the only choice that matters.

There is Nebula now that does have some nice content, but they're orders of magnitude smaller (plus their UX is very rough) so it's hard to even call them a competitor.

That's why monopolies - capitalism's inevitable end goal - destroy everything they touch. In order to argue "you can choose to not do X" requires the choice part to be true. Sure, we can argue people can completely forego X. But that's basically a nuclear option that even if they wanted to do, will be hard. People will still send you YouTube links.

One example of this is WhatsApp. I hate it and don't want to support Meta, but 100% of my peers use it so I have to use it.

Having said all that, when YouTube starts to price hike subscriptions and/or showing ads even for paying users (inevitable because of profits), I'll force myself to stop using it.

In fairness, there’s also the misguided assumption that services cost nothing to host and ad revenue cannot possibly offset the costs.

In fairness, there’s also the misguided assumption that services cost nothing to host and ad revenue cannot possibly offset the costs.

No see, you can't bring that up because they already called that reason "tiring". Thus it is invalid now and you need to come up with a different one.

Disregarding your sarcasm, I did not call it tiring, and I've also never seen anyone make that misguided assumption.

4. Without ads, YouTube cannot exist

In my view, you did call it tiring and were thereby stating that you had seen someone make that assumption.

Saying "without ads, YouTube cannot exist" is not the same thing as saying "services cost nothing to host" at least in my view.

https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/3/21121207/youtube-google-al...

YouTube us very profitable. It’s just that they want even more and they believe forcing users to turn off their adblockers will get them there. Smells monopolistic to me.

Your link says nothing about the profitability of YouTube, just about the revenue.

They don’t publish that number, but you know it’s in the billions.

Here’s alphabet’s gross income (155b USD): https://www.wsj.com/market-data/quotes/GOOG/financials/annua...

And here’s an estimate of YT’s profit margin: https://mannhowie.com/youtube-valuation#youtube-profit-margi...

My point wasn’t about the specific number, it was a qualitative one: people in this thread claim that YT needs to kill Adblockers to pay for the service and survive. They don’t. They’re already making billions without crippling web browsers to disable Adblockers.

I certainly don't know that their profit is in the billions. Neither do you, unless you're a high level Google executive.

The source you have for estimating the profit margin is just total guesswork. It's estimating the costs purely by taking the operating costs of other companies with different business as a percentage of their revenue, and then applying that same percentage to YouTube. That's an absurd methodology. You could just apply it to any business and show they're profitable.

(As an example, for years AWS was profitable and GCP wasn't. But applying the methodology from your link would have resulted in the belief that GCP was wildly profitable. And those business were far more similar to each other than Netflix and YouTube are!)

Also, you are making a point about a specific number: You are claiming the profit is greater than 0. It could be true! It could also not be true. We just don't know.

Yes ad-revenue offsets , I want to point out, premise it self is wrong. their business model itself is not sustainable (as per my understanding)with present free +ads/paid model. you are just subsidizing their bad decisions forgoing your privacy/time/money.

even with ads, hosting free video content is not sustainable. just look at the trajectory, internet users are stagnating, time of a day is limited. which means all users watch-time is constant. it is profitable now, but not forever(if above premise is true)

but youtube has to host all the data since its inception, and new content is added everyday. (maintenance cost increases day by day + but income is stagnated)

only way out is to charge/limit content creators. or else it will be (never ending increase of number of ads/price increase).

I have never met anyone (or seen a comment on HN) that has purported that. Sorry, but this seems like a strawman.

> Every HN thread about YouTube and ads, we see the same ads/tracking/Google apologist fallacies:

If I'm understanding your comment in good faith, it appears to be dismissing a number of viewpoints that don't advocate for adblocking and labeling them as "apologist".

The intent of my comment is to call out that there are a number of viewpoints that do not consider the costs of running services and equate adblock as a binary "good" vs "evil".

My intention wasn't to dismiss viewpoints, my intention was to highlight what I view as fallacious arguments.

I can agree that there are those who do not consider the costs of running services, but I have never seen someone suggest that services "cost nothing to host".

Google aren't exactly a struggling small business

Just as tiring as everyone pretending that YouTube doesn't offer a directly paid solution to the ads problem.

true, but they bundle with youtube music and other services that i don't use. I don't see value paying for everything. there is no option to buy just youtube - ads(atleast where I live). it is a manipulative tactic. you are gaslighted for not seeing ads on internet (public space) and when you want to buy the service, they bundle it with other services.

Premium is $24/m here!

Maybe I am dumb, but it does seem that if they offered a dirt cheap "just no ads" plan for like 2-5$/m they could probably get a higher conversion rate, maybe the actual 10x they'd "need" to match the current price.

I think a lot of people watch youtube as a "second screen" thing like people historically left the TV on for some kind of connection, or when going to sleep, etc. That kind of content is probably not worth 24/m to most, but 2$?

Where is 'here'? It's $22 here in the US, but that is for the family plan (6 people, so just under $4 per person).

> but 2$?

Yeah, I highly doubt that covers the cost of serving up videos ad-free while also being able to provide anything of substance to the creators (which earn more per user from premium viewers than from ads).

Au, 15usd/m.

> but 2$?

>> Yeah, I highly doubt that covers the cost of serving up videos ad-free while also being able to provide anything of substance to the creators (which earn more per user from premium viewers than from ads).

Well if 2$/m with a 12x conversion rate doesn't cover, then neither does $24/m at a 1x conversion rate, so the current wouldn't be sustainable either?

Of course you also have to pay for Youtube Music which is inferior to Apple Music and Spotify.

If they'd bust YouTube Premium apart from YouTube Music it'd be cheaper and a more inviting proposition.

YouTube Music is hilariously bad. I doubt there's a person alive who is using that out of choice.

And it costs more than the amount of revenue my viewing of ads generate them.

Youtube actually got rid of their directly paid solution to the ads problem and now forces it to be bundled with other services, because (and I can not stress this enough) Google does not want you to pay directly for content.

Youtube Premium exists so that Google has something to point to when it wants to say that paid services aren't viable. That's why they charge way more than creators get out of ads, that's why they force it to be bundled with other services, that's why they introduce restrictions like simultaneous viewing limits and login requirements and app restrictions that make the service tangibly worse than the experience of anonymously blocking ads.

Youtube does not want you to pay for content. It wants to monetize your data and serve you ads. It wants your consumption to be a passive habit, it does not want you to be actively engaged with funding the creators you care about.

Youtube doesn't offer a paid alternative to ads. It offers ad-free viewing as a side-perk when you buy other significantly more expensive Google services.

YouTube Premium is the ad-free offering that they keep adding stuff to. I've been on it since it was Red, and I've enjoyed it the entire time. The price has gone up from the original $9.99, but not dramatically so. YouTube Red originally launched with music, so that's not new, and Premium has other nice features beyond ads, like video downloads and what not. So, I'm not sure what "bundled services" were added to YouTube premium that you are talking about.

Oh wait, I can watch some movies for free, on YouTube.

Oh wait, I can share my membership with my family for less than the original cost of YouTube Red... the horror.

Those all seem related to watching YouTube videos, and not other services, so not entirely sure what you mean.

I don't know, honestly, it feels like you don't want to pay for the ad-free experience at the price point they set. And that's fine. They have a price point, and you don't want it cheaper. 100% fine, but that's all there is to it.

I subscribed to Youtube Premium when it came out, back when it was still called Youtube Red. I've written a couple of times in the past about why I eventually gave up on the service. I can dig some of those comments up if you want me to but the short version is: not only am I willing to pay for content, I have subscribed and paid for content through the exact option you describe and it wasn't the cost that drove me away.

I will also point out, Youtube Premium is not primarily an ad-free Youtube service (and neither was Youtube Red, it also came bundled with Google Play Music). It is a paid video service and music service that happens to also contain ad-free viewing. Youtube Premium Lite did exist as an ad-free Youtube service. Google axed it.

They axed it because Google doesn't want that -- it does not want to have a service that is priced around specifically the cost of removing ads from Youtube. Of course they axed Youtube Premium Lite, because Google wants to have a cable package, and then to be able to point to that cable package and say "see how expensive ad-free viewing is?"

It would be a long conversation to talk about why that bundling is problematic, both from a competitive standpoint (see Amazon Prime) and from a "support creators" standpoint (the amount of money going back to creators is much lower than they'll get from direct support). But I'm going to keep going back to -- there is no option to pay specifically to remove ads from Youtube; Google killed that service and it's now only available as part of a bundling system with other services.

I'd like to pay less money and not get music. Just no ads. YouTube Red launched with Google Play Music, which I enjoyed. But that's gone now, and I'm paying for YouTube Music which I do not use.

There are a lot of claims in there with pretty much nothing to back them up. From my perspective, Youtube Premium is the shining example of a "streaming service" done right. One tier, all the features. They aren't upcharging you to a second paid tier to remove ads, 4k streaming, unlock more videos, etc.. like a lot of the other streaming services do.

If I had to cancel all of my streaming services except one, Youtube Premium would be the one I keep. And that's say a lot given that it's the only one that makes all of its content "free" (with caveats of ads, tracking, etc..) for unpaid users.

> One tier, all the features.

That is literally my complaint with it, that's exactly what I said. You can not pay Youtube specifically to remove ads.

What do you want me to back up here, you're agreeing with me about what the product is: it's a music/video streaming service that contains ad-free viewing on the side. Do you want evidence that ad-free viewing through Youtube premium is worse than with adblockers? That's pretty straightforward to provide; just look at the experience of Youtube's official apps vs NewPipe, interruptions between computers, lack of anonymous viewing -- it straightforwardly factually supports fewer viewing options than adblockers do.

I'm not saying you shouldn't be happy with the service if you like it, I'm saying that if a company is bundling a Spotify alternative with their ad-free option and requiring you to pay for both, then they're not offering an ad-free option on its own.

And that's especially the case if the company did offer an ad-free option in the past and then stopped offering it. I think it's extremely reasonable to theorize about why a company might make that decision.

> is bundling a Spotify alternative with their ad-free option and requiring you to pay for both

It's literally just youtube without the video component. You can find everything song ever on youtube as a video. This is just saving you bandwidth and battery. It would be more expensive for them to offer ad-free youtube without the music-only component, because people would still use it to listen to music, but now with video attached to every song.

> lack of anonymous viewing

How is anonymous viewing possible with paid accounts? They need to know if you're a subscriber or not. Even services that aim for anonymity like Mullvad require you to login with your user id to use it. Should there be a "trust me, I'm a paid subscriber" button? You can just delete watched videos from your history.

> This is just saving you bandwidth and battery. It would be more expensive for them to offer ad-free youtube without the music-only component, because people would still use it to listen to music, but now with video attached to every song.

I think you're oversimplifying Youtube Music (and ignoring that Youtube Premium does include exclusive content), but assuming it is just Youtube without a video stream -- does it strike you as odd at all that the inclusion of a cost-saving feature would cause an increase in the price of the service for customers? Does that make you doubt at all whether or not this product is priced around the actual cost of ad-free content?

> How is anonymous viewing possible with paid accounts?

There are ways to do this using things like blinded tokens, but to fair they're complicated and Google is unlikely to pursue them. It does get at the inherent tradeoff here -- the way Google has structured Youtube Premium it is impossible to use it in a privacy preserving way.

And I think even ignoring the other problems with Youtube Premium and even ignoring the bundling issues, there is a little bit of a disingenuous nature to these arguments of "don't like ads, just pay" when everyone understands that by the very nature of the product, paying does not remove many of the negative aspects of Google advertising that people are trying to avoid.

In a way, I'm being overly charitable here; Google bundles ad-free viewing as part of an extended package, but the other problem that I didn't complain about is that buying that package literally doesn't get rid of entire problem and in fact requires you to use Youtube in a way that makes the problem worse, because at least when you're signed out your data isn't getting quite so explicitly linked to you as an individual.

Shining Example???? Holy shit...

I have paid for premium for years and my youtube experience is still utter garbage.

I still see ads because they are baked in every video now as well, not to mention I can't always use my account (other people's devices), not to mention my expensive Premium home screen is now blank because I don't subscribe to channels and I turned off history (neither of which are needed to be able to populate a feed of non-random stuff, since they were already doing it fine for years), and when it wasn't blank, it was utter shit the last few years showing me the same 11 videos I already saw every day), but somehow, only the last few years, somehow, before that, it was able to do at least reasonable feed of new stuff with no subscriptions and no history. And Then we have their capricious censoring and dmca strikes which impoverishes my landscape by deleting half of the actually interesting content and stunts all the rest into avoiding any possible topic that might get their livlihoods killed, because practically anything could possibly be painted as either dangerous or someone else's copyright. But the trashiest of the trash stuff, but which sells ads, that shit flows never ending. Half of my favorite creators have Kafkaesque stories like Fran Blanches. That's what I get for my Premium dollars, infuriating stories about how the people I just paid fucked someone nice and terrorized everyone else they haven't fucked yet.

The value of Youtube premium is exactly this: It's pulling out 8 of your fingernails instead of 10.

I recently ended my YouTube premium sub because they started...... showing ads.

I think this is the long play that most people aren't seeing, or are willfully ignoring.

Just like Netflix did, eventually youtube will jack up the price of the ad free option and introduce ads to the basic subscription.

Enshittification ad infinitum.

here is the thing, I have yet to see any proof that by paying to removing ads from YouTube that they are removing the main problem and that is the constant tracking.

If the root of the problem exists its not fixing the problem and its just fixing it for non technical people, since most don't understand the real problem or how it works.

Youtube Premium is a joke, it's priced at probably 50 times the revenue that Google gets for the average user.

I'm even wondering if they feel like it's a real option internally and not just a small gimmick to capture the most paying customers.

It doesn't solve the tracking problem, which is something adblock does.

uBlock Origin unironically provides a better value and experience than YouTube Premium does.

Would anyone be condemning people who paid for youtube premium and also blocked tracking with ublock?

That is a good question. I would hope not, but I suppose an argument could and would be made that you are still violating the TOS by blocking trackers, and by blocking them, you are depriving YouTube (and its creators) from another means of compensation by stifling the effectiveness of adverts.

I actually did this for a while (not condemn people :) -- I paid for Youtube and then never signed in and continued to use 3rd-party apps and uBlock Origin).

One big issue is that your payment then is basically just to Youtube -- and it's kind of impossible to avoid because the point is to stop Youtube from obsessively tracking everything you view and do, but in the process you stop Youtube from knowing which videos you're watching, so the creators are no longer getting their piece of that pie.

It's a tricky problem, I'm not sure how to solve it using Youtube Premium's model (that's not true I can think of ways to solve this using some kind of anonymous token system, but Youtube's never going to do that).

It's part of why I advocate now for supporting creators directly (and by extension not caring about Google's profits, although that's secondary). But you could still buy Youtube Premium on the side if you specifically want to support Youtube; it's just if you're using 3rd-party clients I don't think that gets rid of the obligation to help the creators themselves.

They killed their most reasonably-priced ad-free option (without bundled music service):

https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/25/23889917/youtube-premium-...

Everyone in here wants to have their cake and eat it to. The proper channels are political, but half the folks here want to have laissez faire government and also the free to violate contracts they don’t like.

I get it, but it’s not actually a sensible way to run a society.

It’s not something I’m going to fall on my sword over, because I’m actually very sympathetic to privacy concerns, it just rings a bit hollow when we’re talk about the convenience of YouTube verses more open alternatives with less content.

"I am ok with seeing ads, until they don't track my behavior, they don't try to manipulate my decisions based on age,region,sex,location, earning status."

I think you have not tried to view pages without an adblocker. Nearly impossible to navigate, they blur news and ads, nasty pop-ups etc. I have no idea how someone without an adblocker is able to use the internet. And in Europe you also need the "I don't care about cockies" plug in.

True (i am not ok with those ads(I am taking about youtube ads above), I forgot about the irritating ads/pop-ups/redirects . I have firefox+ublock on all my devices/even on incognito.I recommend the same for all, no allow acceptable ads nonsense etc.

When I see someone raw dogging the internet, it physically hurts me. It's gotten so bad.

I agree. There's a certain amount of personalization I'm willing to accept - like if I'm in the market for a 3d printer and I start getting targeted ads. Where it goes off the rails for me is if I search for information on a certain cancer, and then I start getting targeted ads for medicine and services. At that point the veneer of innocent advertising is blown away and I don't have to accept it.

Yes! I want to ask the people who believe this, if they would also assume it's piracy if I turn off my television when the commercials come on.

One aspect you didn't mention is the ability to not look at the ad billboard.

If I see a giant ad billboard, I can not look at it, look away, close my eyes, block it with my hands, etc. In a distant future I'd buy glasses that blur ads from my sight (if that could be done without a company seeing everything I see).

For me ad-blockers are the same with some automation. It's a way for me to not give up my time and attention for something I never asked for in the first place.

Moves like this one from YouTube are one step closer to that dystopian nightmare depicted in Black Mirror where you have to watch the ad no matter what. You close your eyes, and the ad pauses and only goes away after you finish watching it. It's absolutely insane.

We somehow got gaslighted into believing there's something good with advertising and there are just a few "bad actors" (where did I hear that before?). I firmly disagree. The entire world would be a better place without ads.

A funny edge case of those glasses might be accidental blurring of people's faces, if their face is prominent enough in advertisements.

Hahaha, haven't thought of that! I'd probably call that a feature and not a bug.

To add another example,

I arrive late to the movie theater, I'll arrive anywhere from 15-30 minutes late.

why?

Because I paid to watch a movie, I did not pay to watch advertisements of movies. There's typically 15-30 minutes of ads in front of movies nowadays.

When I was younger I didn't have this policy because there were far fewer ads, but they keep cramming more and more.

YouTube use to have a single pre roll of just a handful of seconds. Now there are multiple which take 10 seconds each, unskippable and also ads on top of the video an in between segments. They have just become to greedy, like a Pythagorean cup, take too much and you will end up having nothing.

Thanks for Pythagorean cup analogy, interesting read. I didn't know such thing exists.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythagorean_cup

Ok cool but this is the real world and companies need money to stay in business. This open source free internet principle works great, until nobody wants to do the work for free, which is accelerating due to global recession.

Mark my words, by the end of this economic downturn you’ll just be happy that you’re not getting charged for a web browser… if you’re lucky.

oftopic but. yes, I agree. Software development costs a lot.

but I think you missed something important. The thing is, we are collectively paying for internet-infra through broadband charges/taxes.(we collectively own it). we don't have to subsidize greedy companies making bad decisions with our time/money/privacy.

the business models/decision of the companies is at fault, they made it monetarily free, and when they find they can't make money, rather than fixing the problem with their model, they try to own/charge internet which is not theirs. (drm etc)

I argue otherwise regd economic downturn, if it is not for selfless opensource developers the internet/business we see , will not exist. even many of these so called businesses use their work and make unimaginable pool of profits of their work, with zero concern for society.

In a more reasonable world, web browsers would've been more-or-less done once we had xhtml/xslt and flexbox, and they wouldn't cost $500M/year to maintain. The insanity we have today is largely thanks to the influence of... the ad companies.

Well no, web technologies have evolved for the better, and browsers enabled that. Security patches have to be shipped. That takes resources to build.

I would be perfectly happy paying for a browser (60% or more of my computing) if it was aligned to my incentive (better extension than safari’s and no third party like pocket)

Google makes money, but shareholders believe in a fantasy of infinitely increasing revenue.

Personally I think he dilemma is justified, just because I use an ad blocker doesn't mean I necessarily agree with it on principal.

However like you said, the problem is not the ads themselves it is the tracking that comes along for the ride.

There isn't any inherent reason that ads have to be so privacy invasive (I guess it is hard to not have ads at least log your requests when they go to a different server but that alone is normal I guess).

It is unfortunate that is seems the ship has sailed on actually privacy focused ads and instead of being tailored to the user they are just tailored to the content on the page/video/whatever. I would allow those ads if they existed.

It sucks since I do think ads are important, website operators need some way to make money and it is clear that most people are not going to pay for the things they have grown accustom to getting for free. But the current solution is so privacy invasive that you have to block it.

We have no moral obligation to be advertised to just as we have no moral obligation to be advertised to in order to consume content we didn't pay for.

> It sucks since I do think ads are important, website operators need some way to make money

They can sell physical goods and services, no one is preventing them from making money.

> They can sell physical goods and services, no one is preventing them from making money.

Youtube does indeed offer a way to pay to not see ads. That you're still talking about blocking ads would imply that you're only theoretically in favor of Youtube selling services.

If you are going to quote me, maybe quote the entire line?

> and it is clear that most people are not going to pay for the things they have grown accustom to getting for free.

The unfortunate reality is that many people have been conditioned to get content for free. We can complain about it all we want but the vast majority of people are not going to suddenly going to start paying for something that was once free.

You're right nothing is stopping them from selling physical goods and services, but wether or not that actually turns into making money is another story.

I feel like if you are getting free content an ad is a fair tradeoff. IF that ad is not invading your privacy.

> the vast majority of people are not going to suddenly going to start paying for something that was once free.

Then they didn't really want it did they?

People used to run websites for non-monetary reasons, the ad model completely changes the landscape.

I don't know if that is really a strong argument, I feel like there are likely a lot of people that just simply couldn't afford to subscribe to all of the content that they get online.

It isn't reasonable to expect that you would pay every website when you go to it.

However if we are really going to make the argument that they didn't want it... well why are they going there? If they didn't want it, they would have never gone to it, they would have never seen the ads, and this entire conversation is moot.

I also don't really buy that websites were run for non-monetary reasons except in the very very early days of the internet. Running a website isn't free, sure you can easily enough stick some static content in S3 and it's dirt cheap to run. But it's still money that you are spending putting something out there. That is before even looking at the time you spent working on it.

you're not hearing me.

people used to build websites for reasons other than money, people would just be consuming different content.

> why are they going there?

because it's free.

> Running a website isn't free

Making money is not the only reason to spend money on something. That's the point.

so what you are saying is the only people that deserve to put content on the internet are those privileged enough to be able to afford to put it out for free while they pay to run the servers?

Or privileged enough to have the technical knowledge to be able to run it very cheaply?

Or have the privilege to spend the time making content with out any concern of finances? People that can chose to spend time making free content instead of needing to work another job or some other source of money.

I'm sorry but it is a fantastic ideal that people would just do things without any concern about making money but that isn't the world we live in. If I were to make content I would at least like to break even so I am not spending money for nothing.

Privilege is the word of the times, 10 years ago you would have couched it in different language and in 10 years it would be yet another set of wording.

Apparently it's a fantastic ideal that people will do things for motivations other than money. I'm going to suggest that if you believe that you either hang out with the wrong people, or people just don't like you.

> However like you said, the problem is not the ads themselves it is the tracking that comes along for the ride.

Not only tracking, ads can carry malware and viruses from malicious sites. They also can bog down the browser like Fandom wiki for example. Ads company are part of the problem since they don't screen them for malicious stuff.

I don't mind ads in general. I don't like it when they are in my face, lagging my mobile browser (Fandom wiki), demanding for notifications (redirector sites), autoplaying twitch stream (Fandom wiki), plastered the front page of search result (Google), and misleading games ads (mobile games).

I do have a few site that are whitelisted in uBlock because those site uses ads that are reasonable. Unfortunately, the rest of them are blocked because they can't keep it in moderation. I understand they need to make money to provides free contents, but that didn't mean they can use the ads like it is a wild wild West.

> Not only tracking, ads can carry malware and viruses from malicious sites. They also can bog down the browser like Fandom wiki for example. Ads company are part of the problem since they don't screen them for malicious stuff.

Very much this as well, I know that when I first started using ad blockers it was because of just how obnoxious the ads on IGN were.

Most mobile game ads, and similar ones are just insane.

I guess I should have been more clear that I am more thinking the old google Adsense like ads from 10 (more?) years ago that were just simple text or maybe an image. No popups, new tabs, annoying videos (YouTube I would give an exception since you are already watching a video), etc.

> I am ok with seeing ads, until they don't track my behavior

Once again, people blaming sites for things browsers should handle. It's not YouTube that does the tracking; it's your browser allowing it to happen. YouTube is not fetching data from you. YouTube is using the data you send it. This comes from the browser, allowing it to happen. The misplaced blame is why we are in this state.

Maligned usage is what they’re doing. Cookies is good for storing state as HTTP is stateless. Bu if you storing some marker so you can track me around the web, it’s in bad faith. Just like a program can use 4 GB of RAM if that’s needed but something that is just greedily taking memory is what we call a malware.

This can be solved in the browsers while still keeping cookies. And it's not the sites forcing this, it's the browsers allowing this.

I don’t like advertising because it doesn’t even pretend to be informative firstly and secondly it’s not entertaining. Just inform me of what the product or service does and then if that is impossible just do a joke. I haven’t seen a YouTube in ads in years that doesn’t show some aspect of our society I don’t care about such as medications, crypto, how stupid a consumer who doesn’t buy their product is, etc.

That’s what I am avoiding with ad blocking. My life is better without all these things. I’m actually living a better life without ads.

> I hate to see youtube die, It is a wonderful archive for society

The actions of the past few weeks have proven it's a terrible archive for society. If there is anything you enjoy on there I'd suggest you archive it from there while you can because they'll be putting the same effort into blocking yt-dlp before the end of the year once people start taking advantage of that to bypass the ablock-block.

I agree that some of the content on YT is of great cultural and useful value.

The usual answer when the profit motive enshitifies something that is considered culturally valuable is to serve the public through a non profit organization instead of a publicly traded company.

I realize I am saying this on a forum created for technical folks who hope to win the startup lottery so I don’t expect much…

To be precise, this is not "blocking" ads, this is simply not making HTTP requests for ads. It is the web user's choice whether or not to send an HTTP request.

Servers "block" HTTP requests, not clients.

The biggest issue with generic or burnt in ads is that they're not targeted ads. The value of an ad which isn't targeted is more than an order of magnitude less than one which is targeted.

Traditional free-to-air broadcasting (mostly) works financially because they pay once for the transmission, it's a largely fixed fee to cover an area, and then they get paid for the audience they potentially reach. Even still the broadcasters have to pay to have market research agencies run surveys to figure out what's being watched and by whom. When pay TV providers became able to get telemetry from set-top boxes the value of the addressable market rocketed because the audience was no longer hypothetical, it could be measured, analysed and segmented.

The reason you get crap ads when personalisation is turned off is because the advertisers who have money want their advertising dollars spent on addressable market, not on random NPCs. A non-addressable ad is cheaper, so that's the market for who's buying the ads. I hate ads, so I have YouTube Premium Family, that works great because I can see content without interruption and I support the independent content creators. I also run PiHole because some sites and services are just so loaded with advertising that it's annoying, so I might well be hypocritical here.

But the biggest issue that people don't understand, or think they understand but totally under estimate, is the technical challenge of delivering every video on YouTube everywhere in the world with fair quality. I build streaming infrastructure at scale (not for Google) and I'll tell you that it's really expensive to do what they do and yet people take it for granted. They feel entitled to watch YouTube because Google represents the evil establishment, without recognising the challenges they face.

I don't agree with the idea that it's good to write apps that mooch off YouTube just because they're a big corporation. Yup, it's not piracy, it's probably on the lighter side of the grey area of unauthorised API abuse. If you want to build a competing service to Google that comes without personalised ads and has great content, I wish you all the best but when you get the CDN bill, you'll understand. There's a cost per viewed minute that's probably unsustainable. Heck, even traditional broadcasters who have launched their own streaming services have struggled to make money, and that's with targeted advertising enabled.

Right of computer owner to access public network resources and display it in the way he wants is above profit incentives of resource provider and above any other proprietary rights for that matter.

For instance, if I receive a HTML/CSS data that displays a trademarked design (which should be kept as a whole), I am able to mangle the presentation part any way I want for personal usage. If I publish a site that's a mangled copy of a trademarked site, that's gray area. For my PC usage, no gray area. Same with disassembling, reverse engineering, etc.

Then, I have a right to publish any tools that perform any customizations over owner's items, be them hardware or software. Customizing proprietary software and reselling it is illicit. Customizing for one's own purposes isn't (the proprietor may choose to drop support for owner on his prerogative).

Most important point is that YT and alikes want to freeload in the middle area. They want to be free and public, but they want to force the way you consume them. That is a no go. YT can choose to make a closed system, but then they would lose all random people without accounts finding YT links and watching them. Really, tie the google account, and set up watching quotas, direct payment or any other system where YT directly gets "paid back". The user can use his tokens to access streams from wherever he wants, youtube-dl or whatnot.

The right to general purpose computing should be part of the constitution in any country that claims to value free speech.

Freedom of expressions

And who is obligated to provide these resources? There is a big difference between the government not being able to restrict you in some way, and some party providing you with something (general purpose computing in this case). Presumably someone should have provided printing presses as well.

You pay for drinking water, it's still a human right. You have the right to free speech, but aren't entitled to somebody else providing you with a platform. These things aren't incompatible.

This would be more about putting a limit on the degree to which this right can be impeded in the legal system and by regular laws which happens to be the main point of a constitution.

What right do you think is being violated, though? It’s not like anyone is arguing that you must use YouTube so I don’t see freedom of association or your control of what you do on your computer being impacted. I would support claims if, say, a public school required students to watch videos but that would be against the school for having picked an unsuitable vendor rather than YouTube.

Rights aren't necessarily added to the constitution because they're currently being violated. They're added to secure the rights into the future.

There are many developments that are moving in the direction of this being violated, the most recent of which is Web Environment Integrity[0].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Environment_Integrity

I'm not sure if you're arguing a positive right to general purpose computing (where somebody has to provide you with) or a negative one (where somebody can't stop you from having). Could you please clarify?

I'm arguing a negative right: "This would be more about putting a limit on the degree to which this right can be impeded in the legal system and by regular laws which happens to be the main point of a constitution."

So what precisely are you asking for?

As I said, "The right to general purpose computing should be part of the constitution in any country that claims to value free speech."

Yes, but that’s not related in any way to using a private service without paying for it. You have that now and if YouTube shut down tomorrow you’d still have it.

I believe my comment is perfectly clear in the context of the comment I was responding to.

That’s probably why you aren’t getting much support: if you can’t specify what you’re saying in enough detail for anyone else to even know what you mean it’s going to be hard for us to talk about it.

At this point GP has made clear higher up in the thread. GP said they are arguing a negative right, which means that it's not something somebody has to provide to you, it's something they are prohibited from doing to you. For example, Freedom of Speech in the US Constitution is a negative right, meaning that the government cannot prevent you from your freedom of speech. It doesn't compel anyone to do anything to "give" you that right, it means that it can't be taken away from you.

What you are arguing against would be a positive right, in which case I would agree with you. And to be clear, there are others arguing for the positive version vs. the negative version[1], so it's very easy to get cross threaded on this topic, but is ultimately a very different philosophical thread

[1] For example, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37899830

I’m fully aware, but they’re unclear about what specifically they believe should apply here. There’s no right to access someone else’s videos and the example they gave of drinking water doesn’t remotely fit this situation since that’s both a necessity and in most cases provided by a regulated utility rather than a normal business.

We typically think of these kind of rights in the context of governments or natural monopolies because you don’t have a choice about using those but that’s clearly not a valid position here. The closest I can come would perhaps be a government privacy regulation limiting the types of tracking which a company is allowed to perform or perhaps some requirement that things like DRM not be restricted to a single option, but they have specified anything in enough detail to know if that’s what they had in mind.

For hardware, the government could subsidize manufacturers for units sold in the country that meet requirements. Or provide a tax rebates to citizens who purchase them. Nobody is saying "A car in every driveway, and a server farm in every basement." Just ensuring a general purpose computer is affordable for families earning some fraction of the poverty line.

For software, The government could give grants to developers of FOSS operating systems and essential software, similar to how the US encourage the arts through the National Environment for the Arts. The grants would come with a requirement for distributing the works online to any citizen (e.g. download link on a public page). For people with crappy or no internet, the gov could mail USB sticks or CDs for cost plus shipping.

The battle for general purpose computing (as opposed to locked-down content-consumption devices) is already lost.

I wonder if you'll keep your free rights opinion the first time some bot abuses your service, causes a few 100.000$ in AWS costs and then goes away without paying for it.

What part about Google accounts and tokens did you not understand? Bots can’t freeload if your services are protected by service credentials and fees.

A significant part of the fees Ticketmaster charges goes to mitigating bots reserving seats and then reselling them on the secondary market. This problem can be easily addressed by requiring reserves and purchases to be made only from registered accounts. They choose not to do this because they’ve determined the cost of combating fraud is offset by allowing non-account holders to make purchases for events.

The person they are replying to confabulated a “Right of computer owner to access public network resources and display it in the way he wants”. If such a right to private property existed, it would lead to exactly the problem the person you’re replying to asked about, which is why it doesn’t exist.

> Right of computer owner to access public network resources

This misunderstanding is the basis of your entire argument: YouTube is not a public resource. It’s a private company providing access to mostly private content in exchange for payment under certain terms.

Currently they have the right to deny access as desired and even to pursue legal charges against people who don’t follow their terms. The only way to change the situation is to change the law, such as what some countries have done to limit the amount of tracking they’re allowed to perform. Client portability would be an interesting but challenging argument to make since they would have raise not only the past estimates of revenue lost due to unauthorized redistribution but now would almost certainly make the argument that creators need to be protected against unauthorized AI usage, too. I’d like to be proven pessimistic but it seems unlikely that we’re going to see much political will for IP reform with relatively little public demand.

> in exchange for payment under certain terms.

What terms?

I can go to youtube.com right now without an account, without accepting any agreement or contract, click on a video and it will send data to my computer. How I process that data on my computer is entirely up to me and not anyone else.

Your use of YouTube is contingent on the terms of service offered: https://www.youtube.com/t/terms

It’s true that you aren’t required to create an account but also true that you have no standing to complain if they start blocking access when they detect that you aren’t following their terms. It’s private property so it’s their rules.

By reading this comment, you agree to my Terms of Service.

My Terms of Service are that you must send me $100.

Oh, fuck. Where do I send the $100?

Okay, now try to construct something which is actually a valid comparison:

If you don’t respond to this comment politely, I won’t reply.

Nobody is saying YouTube can arbitrarily bill you - only that they’re entirely within their rights to stop giving you free things if you don’t follow their terms of service for use of their private property.

Is there any example of a court case where they ruled that users are bound to those types of terms when they didn't explicitly opt in? Can I really set up a blog, put an obscure Terms of Service link somewhere, and legally obligate anyone who reads a single blog post to follow those terms - even if they never clicked the link?

I somewhat doubt it.

There have been a number of cases holding that it’s not criminal as long as you aren’t knowingly impacting service to others (e.g. Oracle v. Rimini). Similarly, I can’t put in a “you owe me one million dollars” clause and expect to collect unless I can prove that you knew about it and agreed.

That’s not what’s being argued here, though: YouTube isn’t taking people to court, they’re just enforcing their terms better. Some people don’t like that and are trying to invent some legal right to continue accessing that content, but that simply doesn’t exist.

Yes, but google doesn't have to send you anything. EG, they can decide not to, if you aren't looking at ads, or in their workflow, or using their app, and those may be their terms.

Sure, but as long as they offer public access to their data I will keep consuming it the way I want to, without any ethical, moral or legal issues.

> YouTube is not a public response

> providing access to mostly private content in exchange for payment under certain terms.

Confused frown. That doesn't match any description I've previously come across about what YouTube is.

I thought YouTube content was pretty much entirely 'public'.

If they removed their website and access to the content was limited only to those who paid a monthly subscription via an app then that'd be slightly different.

But then they'd lose all the foot traffic.

Private doesn’t have to mean “locked down to subscribers” - only that the owner has no obligation to give you access except on the terms they picked. In this case, it means “available with ads”. They’ve made the decision that more people watch ads than buy video, which has clearly worked well for them but also means that they don’t have other content available when the creators don’t like that (for example, movies generally aren’t available without an additional payment).

It's not public in that you must enter a legal agreement before you can access any of its data. That's what the terms of service are when you first load up the website. The TOS will specify terms under which they are free to withdraw your access.

There's a TOS?

Since when? Do I need to click OK to agree to it before I can watch any videos? Do I need to do this each time I load up the website?

I don't think I've ever seen a TOS for YT (although I must admit I'm very good at not actively being and to remember actions that have become habitual).

Here's the YouTube TOS. I believe they ask you to agree to it along with the cookie policy banner that shows up when you don't have cookies stored:

https://www.youtube.com/t/terms

Edit: actually you're right they don't explicitly ask you to agree to the TOS, but the TOS contains this paragraph.

> If you do not understand the Agreement, or do not accept any part of it, then you may not use the Service

So I guess the agreement is implicit rather than explicit.

Something that I'm not even asked to read, just shown a link to alongside the link to the privacy policy, doesn't seem like any kind of "agreement" If it's necessary for me to read something as part of an agreement then I need to be told of this, i.e. for any "meeting of the minds" to have happened.

You absolutely are not entering a legal agreement, without commitment by some means.

TOS is not a contract. It's them saying why they may choose to stop serving you.

I guess you're right in that it's not a contract because nothing is being offered in exchange on your part as a user. But it certainly reads like a "legal agreement" to me. I'm not sure what difference that actually makes:

https://www.youtube.com/t/terms

It usually comes down to enforcement: they can’t expect to get money from you without proving that you knowingly agreed to the deal but this kind of thing will probably prevent a lawsuit if you see something you don’t like or they block your access – if you weren’t paying anything, a court probably won’t accept an argument that you deserve any compensation for loss of a free service.

> But it certainly reads like a "legal agreement" to me > I'm not sure what difference that actually makes

Funny that. Almost as if by including a lot of "legal sounding words", normal people instinctively defer and back away because they don't understand it. Which is entirely intentional to make you think the rules go one way, when they in fact do not.

Another example is "Not responsible for broken windshields"

See https://www.venable.com/insights/publications/2022/08/are-yo...

I believe that they ruled you must be forced to click a Consent notice to be bound by those terms, and even then it is not enough. Read for details.

Ad-impressions as payment is one of the most accessible means of service monetization in the world. You only need eyes or ears to be granted access. Cutting that off, or somehow ruling it illegitimate to require, will raise the bar and cut off less affluent and less educated communities.

This is true. Maybe the deal just needs to be negotiated in a more formalized way. I kind of like how Brave handles the problem, where the browser itself shows you ads (in a much less obtrusive and more privacy-preserving way than how sites do it) and then distributes the resulting funds to the sites you visit. If advertising were structured that way, instead of how it is now where sites will serve up ads and get aggressive if your client chooses not to display them, then you could retain advertising as an option for those who want it while also allowing alternative payment methods for those who would prefer that, and preserving end user control over the software running on their machine.

I haven't seen anyone else with my perspective on ads, so I thought I'd share it.

I believe ads actively make life worse. Modern ads are based on creating wants, rather than addressing needs. The more wants you have, the less satisfied you will be with your life.

If I needed to do some home improvement and went to the hardware store, and there were ads for certain brands in the store, that's not a problem. The ads are giving me information about a product that I might need.

But that's not how most advertisement works. Car companies don't advertise to people who need a car to commute, they show you an ad with a hot guy driving a car in a beautiful landscape and make you want to be that guy. You can't be the guy without the car, so you want the car. The goal of the ad is not to inform, it's to create a desire.

I don't want to want. I want to be content, and I can't be content if I'm always wanting. The only way around it is to not want in the first place.

If you're a Buddhist monk then you can do that already, but I'm not. Human nature is to want things, so the way I have to prevent myself from wanting things is by not exposing myself to superfluous ads.

Completely agree. Ads make everything worse. Ads in public spaces are bad enough, but I absolutely will not have ads in my own home.

Ooof, accepting Bitcoin/currency donations for a product that explicitly strips out monetization of another 3rd party service is going to be a problem for longevity of this project on GitHub.

Receiving $2000 of donations is pretty good for a small opensource project too.

What's wrong with that?

Crypto is only used for non legitimate and speculative purposes and mostly scams. [1]

Instead Patreon or Librapay is a better way to support them.

https://www.stephendiehl.com/blog/crypto-is-a-scam.html

I despise crypto and nft and all of that but to say crypto is only used for scams is ridiculously reductive and absurd.

And in this case it's actually being used as a direct payment method for a good/service - so actually one of the rare cases where crypto is being used as a means of exchange - which is kinda what it was invented for.

Using it as a means of exchange is not rare. It's far from the majority use-case, but something that happens to the order of many billions of USD worth of exchange a year isn't rare.

Many people do not care about cryptocurrencies and they are not confident in its safety and reliability, that even North Korea drove most of the hacking activity in 2022.

This is something that only criminals would be happy that exists.

I don't think creators would want to use any form of crypto or have their wallet becoming blacklisted at any time because they 'bought' or received bitcoin/monero from someone else that is associated with north korean hackers and criminals.

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/04/10/majority-...

https://civicscience.com/paypal-now-sells-cryptocurrency-but...

https://www.chainalysis.com/blog/2022-biggest-year-ever-for-...

Wanna move the goalposts some more? Don't you think the authors should be able to choose what is the best funding method for their project? Earlier you cried about crypto being ALL a scam, now you are the concerned citizen fearing from wallets being blacklisted.

While crypto has many downsides worth discussing, there is no reasoning to be had with anti-crypto zealots like you..

> Earlier you cried about crypto being ALL a scam, now you are the concerned citizen fearing from wallets being blacklisted.

It's both. It is yet another reason why nobody should use crypto. Why should anyone use a wallet that is associated with a blacklisted address?

It is simply not worth the hassle, especially when the stats shows that people are not confident in the reliability or safety crypto even if they have heard about it, here is a direct link to this so that you can print this at home:

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/04/10/majority-...

> Don't you think the authors should be able to choose what is the best funding method for their project?

I hope you're not suggesting that crypto is the best method because we both know it isn't.

It would be like busking for donations in Chernobyl. You can technically do it except nobody is or will be there to give it to you. The same can be said for crypto.

You might as well use the payment systems that everyone is using rather than a volatile Rube-Goldberg machine appeals mainly to criminals.

> While crypto has many downsides worth discussing, there is no reasoning to be had with anti-crypto zealots like you.

Yes. There are only many downsides, no upsides.

It's far quicker not to bother with crypto than to try and use it. Only criminals are bothered with it because it fits their use case better, illegitimate and criminal activity.

Yeah, it's also used for drugs, cybercrime, and gambling/speculating

So is real cash-money.

Wait until you find out fiat is still the top method of currency used for all of the above.

Crypto trades full transparency of transaction history for making it impossible to debank. It's literally the worst thing you could use to try and do something illegal.

But, if a central authority is invested in being able to shut down any commerce it doesn't like but can't make illegal, and it does so by leaning on private parties, and you see that alliance of central government authority and their corporate donors/clients as legitimate, I suppose crypto is indeed used for non legitimate purposes.

Patreon has openly debanked people for investigating human trafficking rings tied to the European migrant crisis. At least use subscribestar if you bought the slander against crypto.

So Librapay would be a better choice here, as state and as the author of FreeTube has already setup.

https://liberapay.com/FreeTube

No need for crypto or Patreon.

I don't know why this crypto adage is so commonly beat out. Have illegal funds deposited into wallet. Send wallet funds to a large crypto exchange that doesn't play ball with regulators commingled with a bunch of people's currency. Send currency to new personal wallet. Wash trade complete. You're now using crypto anonymously to perperuate crime. Where did I go wrong?

'Comingle'. The transaction chain is always visible even when the exchanges don't play ball with regulators. The chain records who recieved every subunit from the initial illegal funds, you'd be painting a target on your entire laundry infrastructure. A few project like Monero can do what you're describing but they're a minority.

Crypto is used all the time by criminals. The entire ransomeware industry takes hostage payments in crypto [0]. Just this morning, I read in Number Go Up [1] about Chinese gangs using Tether to steal millions with pig-butchering scams.

They don’t care if it’s traceable, they care that it’s irreversible. They can just run the money through a tumbler anyway.

“Criminal activity” is one the things crypto is best at, and it is disingenuous to suggest otherwise.

[0]: https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2021/06/08/state-of-crypto-r...

[1]: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/05/02/pig-butchering-scammers-make...

Crypto is only used for non legitimate and speculative purposes and mostly scams, except projects like this one which are using crypto to fund an open source project, but we don't count those.

Mind your confirmation bias.

Except it is the worst way to fund an open source project and this use case is dwarfed by the 77 billion lost due to crypto scams and hacks.

Every time a legitimate project accepts crypto donations, some HN commenter feels compelled to chime in with this tired narrative of "Yes this might be legitimate but everything else is a scam".

So rather than advocating for 0% fee, true peer to peer donations, your first alternative is to inject a VC-backed parasite in the middle - why?

And your 'alternative' is a volatile token backed by nothing, that nobody is interested in (as cited by Pew Research) has properties that exhibits a pyramid scheme at best and a ponzi scheme at worst, and doesn't even do recurring payments and it is still slow.

If you want to talk about 0% fees, this doesn't exist in any widely used crypto token so I don't know where you got that from.

What is being suggested (which is any crypto token) is even worse than Patreon, we just had major price manipulation on Bitcoin which tells you everything you need to know about how unstable this token is that creators will not use.

ICYMI there is also Liberapay which I stated earlier that you purposefully glossed over if you don't like Patreon. In any case, any payment system is better than crypto or bitcoin, especially for creators.

> And your 'alternative' is a volatile token backed by nothing

All that matters is that there are enough people willingly using it to make it worthwhile for the project to accept these donations. Furthermore, it's not "my" alternative, I'm not trying persuade anyone to use, or not to use different avenues of accepting donations.

I'm just questioning HackerNews' collective tendency to publicly shame projects that accept crypto donations. It's a shining legitimate use case for cryptocurrency, and rather than applauding it or at least ignoring it, you feel compelled to deny its existence and remind everyone that crypto is "only" used for scams and drugs - why?

It comes across like the vegan stereotype of vegans reminding everyone they're vegan and trying to convince them that they should become vegan too.

> If you want to talk about 0% fees, this doesn't exist in any widely used crypto token so I don't know where you got that from.

You're mistaken, high TX fees are an exception, not the norm. Both Monero (which this project accepts) and Litecoin transactions cost less than $0.001.

> All that matters is that there are enough people willingly using it to make it worthwhile for the project to accept these donations.

And the price comes crashing due to market manipulation and the project loses money, this isn't appealing for anyone that wants to accept donations with crypto and is the absolute worst way to do it and is the best way to lose 'money'.

You can keep ignoring my stats but people want stability with their money not instability and crypto isn't it.

> You're mistaken, high TX fees are an exception, not the norm. Both Monero (which this project accepts) and Litecoin transactions cost less than $0.001.

Whether they are high or low they are still fees and you said absolutely 0% which is not true, and we are not even counting the exchanges, conversion fees, etc.

> I'm just questioning HackerNews' collective tendency to publicly shame projects that accept crypto donations. It's a shining legitimate use case for cryptocurrency, and rather than applauding it or at least ignoring it, you feel compelled to deny its existence and remind everyone that crypto is "only" used for scams and drugs - why?

Because the bad heavily outweighs any (alleged) good crypto "has".

Because it is an even worse system than what we already have today.

If someone gives me $200 I expect $200 in my account. With crypto someone can give me $200 and the next minute in my account I get $2. This doesn't make any sense and will further discourage creators.

There is nothing special or anything unique that crypto has solved or done better than the current financial system.

> Litecoin transactions cost less than $0.001.

That is because almost nobody is using Litecoin, hence:

> If you want to talk about 0% fees, this doesn't exist in any widely used crypto token so I don't know where you got that from.

You're just repeating the same disingenuous talking points, as if I'm trying to persuade YOU to use crypto - I'm really not. If those are your conclusions, then you're perfectly entitled to just stay away from it.

The only thing I'm really interested in is why you're making it your business to shame projects for accepting crypto donations?

Just for completeness sake, before you accuse me of disregarding your points:

> And the price comes crashing due to market manipulation and the project loses money

Anyone who sees this as a real threat can convert to another currency immediately or in regular intervals, making it a non-issue while still being able to transact using cryptocurrency.

> Whether they are high or low they are still fees and you said absolutely 0% which is not true

We're talking about fractions of a cent per TX. That's essentially free for all realistic scenarios. All centralized systems carry a 2-50% + fixed ~30c fee.

> Because it is an even worse system than what we already have today.

Situational. Neither system covers everyone's needs.

> With crypto someone can give me $200 and the next minute in my account I get $2

This just doesn't happen in reality. Normal fluctuations happen in both directions just as with any other currency exchange market.

> There is nothing special or anything unique that crypto has solved or done better than the current financial system.

Blatantly false, the current financial system doesn't have any privacy and is susceptible to government interference, e.g. account freezes.

> That is because almost nobody is using Litecoin

And that's a shame, but regardless, it's one of the most secure chains (w.r.t. 51% attacks) with ubiquitous support and one of the longest track records. It's a perfectly adequate way to accept donations.

Where are the sources backing each of your claims?

Since you don't have any I have disregarded and ignored all your spurious points as you have no credible up to date (2020/2023) sources backing them and yet I have.

Technically, morally or practically?

Technically nothing.

Morally, you are depriving the content creators and Youtube of revenue (if they rely on Youtube ads). You could argue that they aren't somehow fundamentally entitled to make money, but you are also not fundamentally entitled to consume their content. The content creator had to do work to produce the content and YT has to do work to provide a platform where it can be disseminated. Naturally, they want to be paid for doing this work. We can argue about how much they should be paid, but again nobody is forced to watch YT. It's a voluntary transaction. If you don't like ads, buy a YT subscription. If you don't want to support YT, encourage your content creators to provide their content elsewhere.

Practically, some companies have been historically willing to shut one or both eyes over open source/free projects as a gesture of goodwill (or marketing exercise). The moment money is involved, the lawyers tend to be unleashed and the whole "this is just a free hobby project with no monetary incentives for the developers" goes out the window.

> You could argue that they aren't somehow fundamentally entitled to make money, but you are also not fundamentally entitled to consume their content

i don't know. take radio for example. The advertiser has paid real money to the voice actors, scripts, etc, and the radio company for hosting their content and for propagation, this is real cost. so what happens if you turn off your radio and don't hear the radio commercial? are you obligated to listen to adverts on a radio? what happens if you make a manual hardware sponsorblock?

can the advertiser sue a manufacturer of this manual hardware sponsorblock machine that is an addon to radio? the original selling point of the hardware machine would be to block explicit songs and adblocking would be an added benefit.

could radio companies sue radio makers or this hardware machine maker for selling this addon? knowing full well that this maker is earning money.

>but you are also not fundamentally entitled to consume their content

here is an alternative answer argument. when you publish on a public website, you give away this "right to prevent consumption". youtube is a public website meaning anyone without login can access content so youtube and content creator and advertisers are forfeiting their right to demand remuneration. the alternative? well look at netflix. It is a paywalled service where only paid users access the content. There isn't much of adblocking on netflix or tracking protection and other stuff.

What i am trying to say is, only netflix by their nature of a paywalled gateway can expect this "no payment, no content" rule because they have put technical roadblocks. if tomorrow netflix goes open, they will be treated like youtube.

> If you don't like ads, buy a YT subscription.

Why?

They can block non premium users if they don't want non paying visitors to view the content. And I am free to switch virtual desktop, browser tab, mute it or turn my head away and put earplugs when they want to show an AD. This is just the same, but made with software.

Just be honest and say you think you should be able to enjoy those artists’ work without paying. You know how this works: they get paid either from your premium subscription or when ads play. There isn’t a third option where you can watch their work and they get paid.

Direct donation ?

That’s called YouTube premium. If you don’t like their business practices, I’d also try to buy directly from the artists or see if they have something like Patreon.

> There isn’t a third option where you can watch their work and they get paid.

That's the point there are other ways ...

Not legally. That’s the entire point here: you can use YouTube’s content without following your part of the deal but you don’t have any right to complain when they start blocking that. Nobody is saying you have to like them, only that you don’t have a right to use private property without the consent of the owner.

Don't know your point was:

>Just be honest and say you think you should be able to enjoy those artists’ work without paying.

If we go back to legality then as others mentioned I believe in the right to transform what data is served to me.

That’s the same point: artists put stuff out where you can see it on the expectation that they’ll get paid. If you don’t want to keep your side of that bargain, you don’t have much standing to complain about being blocked.

The artists sign a contract with youtube. Non subscribed users don't. The same way promises only apply to those who believe in them, terms of services only applies to people signing a contract for them.

If a physical shop decide their terms only allow the customers with a membership card to look at the window from outside but decide to not put curtains, those terms do not apply to bystanders who could see inside. Same when my neighbour is naked with all the lights on. If she doesn't want me to see her, she knows what to do.

It's like a bookstore that allows anybody to walk in from the street, browse the shelves and read books on a couch, but then says that you're only allowed to do any of this if you also make a purchase or politely listen to one of their employees give me a sales pitch. Well unless they get the cops to arrest me for trespassing, I don't care about their rule. I'll browse their books, read a few, and walk out without buying anything if I please.

If they don't like this, they can turn me away at the door. But they don't, they let me and I'm not signing any contracts with them, so fuck their rule.

There is no deal, no contract signed. So there is no deal to follow.

The terms of service still apply. If you choose not to follow them, don’t complain when they stop allowing you access. Nobody _needs_ to access YouTube so there’s no harm in not having access to their service.

Nobody signs any terms of service except the subscribers of a membership accounts. Nobody is bound to terms listed in a small link hidden somewhere in the page.

Besides, I checked the terms of service in this page[1] today and nowhere is it written that people are forced to look at the ads and can't turn away. And rightfully so it would be illegal to have such terms in most juridictions. So even those that are aware of those terms because they actually looked for them ought to see the ads.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/t/terms

> Not legally.

Call the police, nobody cares.

I am honest: I don't want to see ADs nor be tracked, and removing ads is not worth paying 10$ a month to me, especially as I will still be tracked. I haven't signed any contract with youtube, nor with its content uploaders. If Youtube or the people uploading content to it wants to force me to pay to view it, they have a simple solution: make it subscription only. The fact is they do not, so I still retain my rights to use my own client, configured the way I want to and view it with my rules the same way I had the right to switch channel, go for a pee, walk, drinks during adverts when I was still using a television.

Besides YouTube content is not comprised only of artists.

If you have a principled objection to being tracked, don’t use YouTube. They do that either way so all you’re really arguing is that you want to use someone else’s work without paying them. That’s a position but don’t expect much respect for it.

> That’s a position but don’t expect much respect for it.

The same way they shouldn't expect much respect from ad viewing.

It's kinda like the F2P and P2W. Looking away is F2P. You get the delay, in a 5min vid you spent 6mins. Getting premium is P2W.

My problem is not the $10 per month, it is that those people will STILL collect and sell my data to anyone who will buy it. $10 don't keep my data 'safe'. $10 is just to avoid ads. I wonder if they will ever make a PremiumPrivate subscription that will cost $20 where you get to avoid ads AND keep your data pritave. (easy answer --> no)

The problem with that argument is that that ship has long sailed.

Today it is next to impossible to securely use the internet without having an adblocker installed and enabled (or using something like Freetube, which is essentially a specialized ad blocking browser), otherwise you are exposing yourself to drive-by malware installs. Ads were and are a major vector here, including Google ones, given their market size. Heck, even FBI recommends it for exactly these reasons!

So if someone is arguing that I have to make my computer less secure only to make sure they can monetize my eyeballs, that's a no, full stop.

I would happily pay and support the artists or creators (and I do so) - but not by removing adblock and opening myself to an indiscriminate onslaught of insecure and poorly made ads.

And lets not delude ourselves with these moral arguments here - this isn't and never was about funding the creators of that content. Most Youtube video creators don't see a dime for their work from Google - and yet Youtube wouldn't exist without them and Google directly profits from that work.

The choice of business model - provide free video supported by advertising - was also Google's. Nobody forced them into it and they are free to make YT subscription-only.

However, if YT was a paid service from the start, they wouldn't be anywhere near where they are today.

And don't get me started on the evolution of ads on YT - I have no issues with watching an ad or two per video. But these days you have unskippable pre-roll ads, you have (often multiple) mid-roll ads, you have ads at the end of the video and all that in addition to whatever sponsor promotion is directly in the video itself (and which actually pays the video creator). So out of a 10 minutes long video there is often ~6 minutes of just ads.

No,thank you.

> Today it is next to impossible to securely use the internet without having an adblocker installed and enabled (or using something like Freetube, which is essentially a specialized ad blocking browser), otherwise you are exposing yourself to drive-by malware installs.

This is incredibly overstated.

I don't run an ad blocker. I consider it immoral.

It's fine.

> This is incredibly overstated.

How do you figure that? It's been less than a month since simply loading a .webp image could result in arbitrary code execution in your browser.

Does it happen often? No, but it only needs to happen once to get screwed.

>So out of a 10 minutes long video there is often ~6 minutes of just ads.

I wish it were just this. In the past month, I'm seeing 30 minute "ads" on 10-minute videos for kids. These "ads" are stories with thin plots used to sell toys, like G.I. Joe of yore.

As I understand it most content creators rely more on revenue from patreon, sponsorships and being on content owner controlled platforms like nebula.

If you want, primarily, to contribute to the "free sushi restaurant" fund for google employees and financially support your friendly abusive global monpolist for purely moral reasons though by all means turn off that ad blocker...

> As I understand it most content creators rely more on revenue from patreon, sponsorships and being on content owner controlled platforms like nebula.

They really don't (which is demonetization hurts them every time YouTube does it). And they don't actually pay YouTube for infrastructure costs via Patreon either. And as many competitors to YouTube (one I worked for myself) found out, carrying video is very expensive.

If you're very very popular you can live off ads. Theyre the ones who can negotiate bigger cuts. Otherwise no.

A lot of the content creators I watch are demonetized but google still runs ads. I try to support them directly - morally speaking I think it's the right thing to do to stand up against both hard and soft censorship.

If you're in the mood to donate to Google's profit margins feel free though. They do have an expensive lawsuit to fight against accusations of being an abusive monopolist and I'm sure they could use your cash to help out.

There is nothing moral about how the market works. You only get as much money as your business model allows you to get. Someone invents a great mathematical identity, but oops, there is no business model, so no money. Also, if there was a way to unwatch content and get your money back, I bet most people would use it. But this doesn't exist and content makers greedily exploit this fact.

> Morally, you are depriving the content creators and Youtube of revenue

No, Youtube deprive the content creators. Like all publishers they give back only a fraction of what the content is worth by abusing their monopoly.

You know that YouTube is actually one of the few major platforms that are actually not fcking their content creators dry? They have kept their 50/50 split while other platforms have hacked away at percentages to keep more for themselves.

At least with YouTube's case, they actually allow effectively anyone to upload mostly unlimited non-infringing content to their platform without the expectation of a single ad view. You may call them stealing from artists by not giving 100% back to their creators, but a notable chunk of the money collected really does go to keep the lights on for the entire product. It isn't just rent seeking. Complain about the splits, sure let's have a conversation. Complain about YouTube stealing money from artists, I'd say you don't have a leg to debate here.

I feel this is setting up a false dichotomy, either you believe creators have a right to monetize views and thus watch the ads, or you don't. It's possible for an individual to believe in the right of a creator to monetize their own work but have other reasons (overly aggressive, quality, scams, fraud, and malware) for choosing not to consume the advertisements.

I suspect that if it weren't for the steep decline in the quality of advertisements or their overly aggressive nature, many users of content blockers would have never being pushed to seek out a solution that grants them reprieve from the punishing barrage.

No, you're setting up a false dichotomy. YouTube asks you to pay for Premium subscription if you don't want to watch ads. You're bloviating about some kind of moral highground where all you really want is to avoid paying those 15$ the service asks you to pay to use it.

It'not like Youtube premium stop the tracking ... And it would mean linking to identifying informations.

As opposed to using YT without any account or multiple ones, linked to a minimum of information, if you want to curate your recommandations.

I bet a lot that you'd refuse to pay for some other trumped up highground reason if Premium would prove that they stop tracking.

You all just want to get shit for free.

Don't know on the trumped up, but absolutely I will never trust any promise made by Youtube as long as it's a Google Entity.

As for just wanting things for free, well I'm paying a Nebula subscription so ...

YouTube has an easy way to ensure you never see an ad: pay for premium.

Remember, this is private media, not something you have a right to use. Not liking the terms offered by the owner doesn’t conjure up a right any more than my not liking the dress code at a restaurant means I have standing to sue when they kick me out.

Is it private? I think a lot of people put videos up because they want it to be public. The expectation was for the creators not to pay hosting/storage/processing fees because Youtube will add ads when the video is playing. I choose not to see ads then it’s Youtube loss. They can’t decide what I do with data on my computer. It’s their rights not to send me data, but not to say what I choose to do with it. Imagine buying a bluray and they told you to watch it twice a week at least or the data will get scrambled.

It’s private property unless the copyright owner places it in the public domain. Even then, you have no right to use Google’s resources unpaid so you’d have a right to host your own copy but not to use theirs.

Morally I prefer to support creators outside of the Google ecosystem. With youtube premium it's not like they stop tracking then selling what you do, you just gave them even more information with your paiement details ...

The tracking/advertising industry is a cancer, yes it allows some free content and remuneration but at the same times it kills competition from less established actors. Those actors can't just burn money to keep you there while they resell all they can on their own ad network.

So yes I'll block it and if it makes Youtube lose money then they will need to change their model and make it more hostile to users. Which can only help external platform such as Nebula and others grow.

And if those platform grows then creators might be able to leave Youtube.

I put a lot of effort into maintaining my network and various devices so that content that I don't want is kept on the outside of the boundary that I can control. I have thusly earned the nice, palatable clean feeds of public internet.

> Morally, you are depriving the content creators and Youtube of revenue (if they rely on Youtube ads)

In my 20+ years on the internet I have never clicked on an ad. I might have been made aware of a product that I went and purchased later when I actually needed it but never at the moment I saw the ad, meaning no affiliate revenue for the platform/creator. Am I allowed to block ads then, since there is a 100% guarantee that you won’t be getting any money from me?

(I pay for YT premium so it doesn’t directly apply to me but the point still stands)

Ads are also billed by impression, so you’re still removing revenue from the people who made the videos you watch.

More importantly, however, this is like going into a restaurant and saying that you should be able to order only a side dish while eating food that you brought with. You might have a good reason for wanting to do that but that doesn’t somehow create a right to use someone else’s private property in violation of their wishes.

Must I buy the product at Costco after I’ve tasted the sample or am I just a freeloader?

Am I morally obliged to acknowledge the sponsors for everything I personally don’t purchase?

To whom do I owe patronage when I accept something gratis?

> Must I buy the product at Costco after I’ve tasted the sample or am I just a freeloader?

No, because the owner of that property has set terms allowing that. Try to eat a dozen samples, though, and they’ll probably ask you to leave.

This isn’t actually a complicated concept: their property, their rules. If you don’t like YouTube, that’s totally reasonable – I don’t – but no amount of sophistry will create a right for you to use their private property on your terms. Just go somewhere else: there are tons of creators who’d love a better deal than Google/Facebook offer them but that’s never going to happen as long as people insist on paying them through YouTube.

By your reasoning, YouTube (like Costco) should ask the actual freeloaders to stop instead of imposing ads on every Costco member in a misguided quest to profit on every single free sample.

I’m impressed you saw what should really happen at Costco, but disappointed you could not extrapolate that thinking to the YouTube case.

That analogy doesn’t make any sense - the free samples are the ads! – but in both cases there’s a simple principle: your use of someone else’s property happens on their terms. If you don’t like their business, go somewhere else.

No! They want me to look at their videos because they need me to look at their ads. I choose the former, not the latter. There’s various way they could enforce their rules but they won’t do it because they want the maximum people they can get. I’m not asking for free content, they are pushing it to me. I just take the content and leave the ads out.

That’s a position, sure, but don’t complain when they block you.

I won't. Lots of news sites do and I just go back.

>If you don't like ads, buy a YT subscription

I won't buy a YouTube subscription precisely because I don't like ads. Buying a YouTube subscription is directly in support of ads. If you give Google money for a YouTube subscription you have just let Google know that ads are a great way for them to make money. They are now incentivized to implement more ads in the future.

Paying to remove ads only causes more ads in the world.

You mean doing what users want is bad?

Selling tools to commit crimes can be bad depending on the crime. Removing Youtube's ability to monetise probably doesn't do that much harm on a micro scale, but is problematic on a macro scale. This isn't like most piracy where the sales baseline remains the same and those who wouldn't buy will pirate, this is mostly just directly revenue negative to Youtube.

Where is it a crime to block advertisements?

I mean, we’re heading there.

You made me remember the scene from A Clockwork Orange where the main character is forced to watch television screens.

> commit crimes

Is this really a crime? The tool does not redistribute copyrighted material for example. It only reshapes video sent to your device, allowing you to decide which parts to view.

YouTube makes money by spying on you and serving you ads

So yeah it's theft

I'm not sure that's how the law works.

The fact that someone makes money spying on me doesn't make it illegal for me to take countermeasures.

If your business is taking pictures of people on the street and I decide to wear a baseball cap and sunglasses, you're just out of luck.

This is a weak argument because YouTube isn't a public street it's a private business

You aren't forced to use it, it is a choice

And this application (FreeTube) is for the sole purpose of circumventing their (YouTube) monetization for the sake of convenience

I don't have a dog in the fight and I'm certainly not a fan of YouTube or Google, but you can't argue it's somehow ok just because you dislike ads or lack of privacy on a "free" video streaming website

And YouTube as a private business can refuse to serve people using ad blockers or alternative clients. But that doesn't make it illegal to use an ad blocker as the parent post was implying.

I'm confused as to whether you're for it against the behaviour.

I'd say both of those things makes it ok to do whatever you can to avoid them - given that YouTube appears happy enough to serve ads for various obvious scams that wouldn't make it past television advertising standards bodies.

And if advertising doesn't influence you at all, would it still be stealing? I'm just saving them the bandwidth.

Is not playing the ads before the video a crime?

Is this a crime?

I'm free to pick and configure my user agent, YouTube is free to decide whether or not to serve me content.

As a user I also want to walk into a grocery store and walk out with everything and not paying. But is that bad, let's think about it?

Is stealing physical goods the same as removing parts of a video stream?

Yes, when the service asks for money to see that video stream without those parts. Especially when that money finances the video creator and infrastructure costs for said service.

Your point really isn't such a "gotcha" as you think it is.

Use this smartarsery to support Nebula or PeerTube instead.

so you never walk away or change station when there is advertising on tv/radio/billboards?

And? Some food places charge money for delivering the food to your home, it's not a crime to move the food yourself.

You've said nothing.

So if I close my eyes during the ad, walk away and make myself a coffee, or switch my focus to another window while it's playing - is that illegal?

When I visit a web site for the first time, I don't remember agreeing to looking at/watching or reading the ads.

You wouldn't copy groceries

You wouldn't shoot a policeman. And then steal his helmet. You wouldn't go to the toilet in his helmet. And then send it to the policeman's grieving widow. And then steal it again! Copying groceries is stealing. If you do it, you will face the consequences

I would have no moral qualms with doing that if I could make an identical copy of the products and leave with the copy.

That's the comparison that is most apt in this case.

That's what we do with fruits and veggies so go for it!

You can't copy an apple from an apple, they're not true breeding.

Even if that weren't the case, you couldn't copy an apple in a grocery store anyway.

In that case the grocery store is providing a service of aggregating and organizing all the products you want, and keeping them fresh. That’s not free. Even if the act of making a copy is free, there are a lot of expenses involved on the store side.

My example is a bit of a contrived stretch, but laws are hard to reason about as they're not binary:

Someone that designed a robot that goes to the movie theater, sits in your seat, and streams the movie to your computer so you can go to the movies from home.

And then it also ends up not showing or "removing" the ads that get shown in the beginning of the movie before it starts.

Just like not reading every advertisement in the regular paper was always considered a crime?

But no one said not watching youtube ads is a crime.

The more accurate analogy would be reprinting a newspaper without the ads.

No, it's more like cutting out the text of the articles with scissors. I did that all the time when I was a kid. Just like I used to record TV on a VCR and then fast forward through the commercials. Time shifting and content skipping has never been immoral.

You don't need an ad blocker to "not read the advertisement" genius.

As a human, I want to get healthcare from a hospital and then walk out without paying, but that would be evil.

Depends on the circumstances. Remember, moral reasoning isn't based on facts about the world, so anything goes if we elevate the right principles.

Just because you're thinking about morality doesn't mean it doesn't start in the world. The world always comes first. There's no void in which you float and do your thinking and then encounter reality.

Everything starts in public. That's where we learn language, how to live and how to reason, including about morality.

Try somewhere with socialised healthcare. I've done that a couple of times.

DMCA says so (and several such projects have been removed via DMCA takedown). youtube-dl also walked into that one.

In general, software engineers even on HN tend to agree with that - that using their paid service without paying is bad, yeah.

> using their paid service without paying is bad

Software engineers on HN or anywhere else certainly do not tend to agree that stripping ads from freely-available content is equivalent to using a paid service without paying.

(not defending Google here) I believe that YT costs money to operate. So when I use it without watching ads (which is exactly what I do), I kinda cheat a few cents from them per day/month/year.

Also, having built IOS apps in the past: I love the idea that people use them I hate the idea that people use them without paying for them

> I kinda cheat a few cents from them per day/month/year

You certainly do not. There is a very simple and legally-recognised way to recuperate costs associated with providing a service and that is to charge money for the service. Youtube is very happy to give you content for free; you're cheating nobody. Or do you think you're cheating if you watch the ads but don't buy any of the products too?

> I hate the idea that people use [my apps] without paying for them

Do you charge money for them?

> freely-available

It’s not freely available. It has very real costs associated with it, which is why YouTube was a money burn pit for the majority of its existence.

> It’s not freely available

It is made available to the general public without cost. It is freely available.

It's "free", but not without compensation, and why FreeTube exists: the user is compensated with a free video only after being forced [1] to watch ads, or they can pay [2]. I don't believe compensation, behind a required act, is involved with "free", which is why I would describe it to someone as "ad supported" or even "free, with ads" (which most marketing uses, probably through the advice of legal).

[1] https://cybernews.com/tech/youtube-crackdown-on-adblock-user...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/premium

I don't think the US has ruled over whether third party YouTube apps are DMCA violations yet.

The DMCA takedown of youtube-dl was complete nonsense, even if youtube-dl is violating the DMCA it is not copyright material subject to a takedown. And Germany has ruled that YouTube's rolling cipher is DRM, but that case may be being appealed and has nothing to do with the US DMCA.

That's probably not relevant to Github hosting - Github would very much like to continue to operate in the EU.

And yet it was taken down, never to return.

https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl

Why are we so dependent on GitHub?

Other origins are available.

>Why are we so dependent on GitHub?

Because a service like Github is an emergent property of a bunch of developers making similar decisions:

1) spend time & effort setting up a git on home server or Raspberry Pi -- or -- spend that time playing with my kids or riding a bike outside

2) spend $10/month for a shared hosting plan to run my git/Gitlab instance -- or spend $0 for a free account on Github

3) expose my self-hosted home ip address -- or find a networking workaround because my house is behind ISP NAT and/or I don't want to publicize my home ip address and keep it private so I use someone else's public network ... such as Github

Take variations of those 3 reasons and multiply it out by a million developers making similar decisions and you will inevitably end up with a "free automatically managed git instance in the cloud" ... aka Github.

Search engines. Search engines have a massive hand when it comes to centralising. Both Google and Bing prioritise centralised services no matter how irrelevant their pages are.

Just try an independent engine like https://mojeek.com and see for yourself how vastly different the surfing experience is. It's like you're back to the time when the internet was accessible and not centralised to a few Big Tech apps and websites.

Kagi is another independent search engine worth trying. They have added a “small web” search option, which prioritizes small indie web pages.

Regarding ad-blocking: it's pretty simple – no single person in the entire world goes on the internet to view ads. People come to get information/content and just don't really care about other fluff that interferes with that.

As long as it's possible to block ads, people will just do it, because it provides a SUPERIOR browsing experience than otherwise. I sometimes turn uBlock off by accident and instantly get reminded how screwed the browsing experience is without it.

Some people also claim that ad-blocking hurts content creators. This is mostly false. Most content creators have realized by now that relying on ad revenue as a considerable source of income is unsustainable in the long term, due to aformentioned reasons. That's why most have Patreon, Ko-fi, merch shops, donations etc., which is a far more solid business model.

I block all ads everywhere I can, I don't care if they track me or not, if they are "privacy-respecting" or other crap, I simply don't care. And I encourage everyone to do the same.

"I didn't request the ad"

That's why most have Patreon, Ko-fi, merch shops, donations etc., which is a far more solid business model.

Is it? Most of the times I've seen these things come up it's mainly in the context of those being additional, but much smaller, revenue streams for the vast majority of creators.

Are there many creators surviving entirely (or at least primarily) on subscription/donation/etc revenue?

There are, I also forgot to mention general product placement/integrations, sponsorships and stuff like that, although SponsorBlock has put a dent in that (primarily pre-roll type ads)

Creators make the most money doing direct brand deals where they advertise something for a brand.

If it had the ability to block videos that have that stupid mouth open and shocked expression of the presenter in the preview tile then I’d be sold.

You should maybe check this: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/dearrow/

The problem with this is that the thumbnails usually also contain helpful information.

As an example, a recommendation from ARTEde with the title "Poor despite job | ARTE Re:" where the thumbnail shows "Brits at the limit" and someone standing in an supermarket aisle.

Or the title "TSMC's First Breakthrough: The Copper/Low K Interconnect..." with the thumbnail "COPPER SEMIS" on top of a magnified semiconductor.

This is from the same person that made sponsorblock https://sponsor.ajay.app/

This means that it's the community that sees sensational thumbnails and changes them to some other thumbnail. By default dearrow shows random thumbnails if no other were provided by the community. But you can disable this and show original thumbnails, but if there is a community submitted thumbnail it will show the community submitted one. I think for example the arte thumbnails won't get changed to other thumbnails as they are not sensational/clickbaity/mouth open.

There are extensions that can swap the thumbnails with a frame from the video. It's not as good as a handpicked frame, but it's a lot better overall compared to the garbage youtubers are making now. The one I use on chrome is called "clickbait remover for youtube"

If people don’t want to pay for YouTube, then why not use peertube[0]?

I don’t understand the arguments here. If you don’t want ads, then pay for Premium. It’s fantastic that an option exists to solve the problem! If you don’t like the price, then don’t pay for it.

Somehow people have got it in their minds that YouTube owes them content for free. That’s a great mindset to make the shift to peertube and away from YouTube, but I don’t think it holds up as justification for getting mad at YouTube for forcing their preexisting paid plan to remove ads.

Either pay for YouTube Premium or shift to a different model of video sharing. Both options currently exist!

[0] https://joinpeertube.org/

If Google could take some value from me without compensation, they would. In fact they do, they monetize my data and sell it to advertisers.

Using a adblocker is just returning the favor.

Well, first of all, they don't actually sell your data.

If we accept "sell your data" as a shorthand for "allow targeting ads to you without actually giving the seller of the ad any information about you", it's still something you can control. In fact, the very first time you use YouTube you'd be shown a non-modal dialog about whether they're allowed to use your data for ad targeting or not, and have to make a yes/no choice

So it sure sounds like your objection is just an excuse.

You can use fastmail instead of gmail. Kagi instead of Google search, Apple Maps or OSM instead of Google maps. Firefox instead of chrome. PiHole to block Google trackers. Disallow the Google indexer in your website’s robots.txt.

If you don’t like Google, don’t use their products. Yes, they are hard to avoid. However, in the case of YouTube, it can be avoided by not using it. You can’t have your cake and eat it too.

Google has trackers on most websites, even if you don't use a single service, they track you.

Google can opt out of me watching videos without ads by sending a cease and desist letter, registered mail to my address. If opt out is a problem make the tracking opt in.

> Disallow the Google indexer in your website’s robots.txt.

Ask news publishers how this went last time they tried it.

You can avoid Google for a lot of services, and I encourage people to do so. I use Fastmail, it's great. It doesn't allow me to completely avoid Gmail given that messages I send to family members and business acquaintances with Gmail accounts are still ending up on Google servers, but it is an improvement. OSM is great, Duckduckgo has completely replaced Google search. I run custom ROMs on my Android devices. I'm bullish about Pixelfed as a replacement for Google Photos, although transitioning family members is going to be very painful. Some of this is possible.

But when we start talking about robots.txt, Youtube, etc... there are parts of Google services that are so monopolistic and so tightly integrated into ordinary life that they are unavoidable. You want to explain to family members why you can't view their kids' recital that they put on Youtube?

And I know when normal artists and creators come up in these conversations, the popular answer is "just don't watch them", ie "just don't participate in any shared culture, it's not that hard, it's not like media is a shared experience that connects us as humans or anything" -- and I've kind of given up arguing about that, but it is always worth reminding that there are entire communities where participation within those communities is practically impossible without being able to view Youtube.

Heck, even something that's actually gotten a lot easier to avoid, Twitter, is still basically impossible to completely cut off because if you participate in a community anywhere, odds are good you're going to start seeing Twitter links pasted into chats at some point. Without Nitter, there would be communities I couldn't participate in online and I would have to be regularly playing the role of the annoying guy on every server saying, "sorry, I can't view that link you just posted."

Youtube sets itself up as a middleperson in front of culture. Yes, people can pay for better services, we can jump through technical hoops and accept personal inconveniences in order to avoid abusive companies. And people like me are willing to do so, I am willing to make my life more annoying and more difficult to avoid Google. But asking people to walk away from communities and shared cultural experiences and to inconvenience family members and associates around them and to cut off their access to services that indirectly require participation in Google ecosystems -- that is a different ask entirely.

> You can’t have your cake and eat it too.

I'm fine with this. If adblocking caused Youtube to fail and go out of business, it would probably be healthier in the long term for creators and communities and for video hosting online.

It's not going to happen, Google wants to control the market and the instant anything threatens that they'll turn Youtube back into a loss-leader, because Youtube is not and has never been designed to be a sustainable business and profits are a secondary concern for the company. But it would be good in the long-term if it did fail (albeit admittedly very painful and negatively impactful in the short term for a lot of people).

If people don’t want to pay for YouTube, then why not use peertube[0]?

You won't get a direct answer for this. Only endless justifications as for why it's seemingly impossible to just not use Youtube.

> You won't get a direct answer for this. Only endless justifications

So... you will get answers?

That you disagree with the reasons give does not mean that they're not giving you reasons. It just means you disagree with the reasons that they gave :)

So... you will get answers?

No? I haven't seen any answers yet.

"Just use an ad-blocker" isn't an answer for why you can just not use Youtube. Neither is "They track personal information" or "I control my browsing experience". "Youtube Premium includes services I don't want." also doesn't answer the question.

If you're specifically looking for an answer as to why I haven't DNS blocked Youtube from my network even though I have DNS blocked other Google services, I wrote up a longer comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37901189

I agree that explanations for why not to pay for Youtube are not the same as explanations as to why people can't avoid Youtube entirely. But I don't think my explanation of Google's monopoly status is rare or uncommon and I'm surprised you've never run into someone saying it.

I got that big warning about having 2 videos left before being locked out of youtube viewing due to running an "ad-blocker", that was last week, I've not watched a video on the site since.

I just download it with yt-dlp or throw it in to mpv. If those stop working I'll probably just stop watching youtube altogether since I only watch maybe 6-10 vids a week anyway. This "app" does look quite good, but for how long it will work if g**e keeps making it difficult I don't know.

https://redirect.invidious.io/

This might be useful to you. Alternative YT frontend with many instances. Usually the only third party connection is to googlevideo.com, which is unavoidable, if you want videos from YT.

Sometimes a video might not play or might not be downloadable. Simply switch instance, maybe to an instance in another country, and try there.

I have logged out. Also tried yt-dlp but logging out and web is easier for search etc.

Anyone else think YouTube Premium is pretty reasonably priced? You are getting a music streaming service on top of ad free YouTube. I've been very happy with it since subscribing.

Probably not because I still get ads with YouTube Premium.

Do you mean sponsored ads in videos?

If it is sponsored Ads, then I presumre that parented comments thinks the price is not good enough to actually provide, as it does not provide enough money for creators to not have sponsored ads as well.

How much is "enough" money for a content creator to be satisfied? They are mostly driven by income, so why assume it will ever be a case at all.

It's not about the price. The whole UX is bad with their pushing of irrelevant clickbait content.

Yes, I do think it pretty reasonable. I don't watch "normal" TV, only YT, and I like it.

Obviously there are the increasing number of ads actually within youtube videos, but at least you can skip over them.

It's priced well, but does not deliver on its promises. You still get tons of ads even with premium. In-video sponsor blocks are still ads, should be clearly marked so, and optionally skipped. As such I don't see why I would pay for premium when I still have to install an extension on top of that.

(I can see it being worth for music, but I don't use youtube for that.)

Premium Lite for 6.99 eu was perfect, not sure if I will continue my subscription when they drop Lite and they will charge 11.99 eu.

Not really. I don't want the music streaming service, so they're forcing me to buy something I don't want. Also, it's not like videos have no ads with premium.

Not really, they're just not able to sell you the ad free product on it's own for less money than the bundle.

But enough people bring it up that I honestly think the product page should let you buy YT Premium without YT Music for the same price just so people get it...

Why do you think they wouldn't be able to do that?

Aside from pricing - the ad free experience is stretch. Basically all youtubers I used to watch push commercials inside their videos, have additional sponsors, some add Patronite support and so on. So I'm paying but still get ads served heavily. Not to mention abusing idiotic "shorts" that give them better income.

So instead of justifying Premium I started unsubbing even those that I respected, but currently became plain ad space. Also archived manually most videos that I valued in the past that are actual knowledge/art and tend to just try to ignore youtube. It's not a complete detox (due to lots of embedded videos on third party sites) but so far feels like a relief.

SponsorBlock (and casting equivalents) make Youtube a lot more enjoyable. I can't imagine paying for Youtube Premium without it.

Sure, but what's the point of that - paying not to have ads and then use addons to block... remaining ads.

The payment here makes little sense. None if you actually don't like/need youtube music.

Absolutely not. I only watch a handful of videos a month and don't care about their music streaming. $12/month is an absolute ripoff. No way my handful of ad views produces more than $1, MAYBE $2.

That's you, and power to you. I know of cafes that use YT for music. They make their own playlists of nice video clips, and they display them inside theirs shops while they play the song. So.. good music, nice video clips, and all that for $12. At this point I will have to admit that they are cheating as business (cafes/restos) that play music have a difference (and more expensive) setup that they have to follow for licensing/playing music.

Btw, this could be illegal in some countries. Streaming is for private use, and to play music in the shop the license for public playing could be required.

Protip. Sign up from the Philippines. You don't even meed to fly there...

Until your Google Account gets banned for violating the ToS. No thank you.

If you set your VPN location to Ukraine, you can buy Premium for ~$2.70/m

That's what I did.

That's fraud. Blocking ads isn't.

Yeah, it's a decent value for money. I wish Google would also allow paid customers a bit more customization of the websites (e.g. removing Shorts and all that crap) and enforced no sponsors inside videos for Premium subscribers.

Fucking shorts!

On the mobile app you can't even see the full title, and mostly it appears to have nothing to do with the content anyway.

Maybe I'm just a bitter old man, but fuck all those shorts for their waste of increasingly precious time.

Is that the entirety of what TikTok is?

Funny enough, I actually like TikTok because shorts have better content and they're presented in a different context. Not mixed with longform videos.

I'm not sure if Google product people actually use their products.

It costs more than Netflix in the UK, and you still get some ads (sponsors in many videos).

(If there'd been a £6.99 Premium Lite option, I'd probably have paid. But then again, I've been on a subscription-cancelling spree this year, first things to go when inflation/energy prices really started to hurt)

Shouldn't it cost more than Netflix? YouTube has superior content in both quality and quantity.

Yeah but I watch more YouTube than I do Netflix, it adds more value to my life. I don't know why people say this like Netflix should automatically be allowed to charge more than YouTube because it's making traditional shows.

YouTube Premium (bundled with YT Music) was a no-brainer when I subscribed given how much time my kids spent on YT.

Giving money plus being tracked as hell by the company you’re paying to sounds like a pretty bad deal to me.

It is exorbitantly priced. I would pay 2$/mo for it, maybe 3. Additionally, I have zero trust that "ad-free" will continue to hold. Too many services have promised ad-free and then reneged on it. Lastly, music streaming is the last thing I want, I just put my music on my music player (my phone right now).

Nope.

> YouTube generated $29.2 billion revenue in 2022. Over 2.5 billion people access YouTube once a month. YouTube Premium reached 80 million subscribers in 2022.

Src: https://www.businessofapps.com/data/youtube-statistics/

I suppose with $30 billions of revenue, and billions of users per month, you theoretically can create $2 per month Premium and still have big profits.

> you theoretically can create $2 per month Premium and still have big profits.

That doesn't follow. You're making three unfounded assumptions there:

- That YouTube is currently making big profits.

- That every user is the same value

- That ever user pays the same amount for a YT Premium subscriptions.

But in reality we only know YT's revenue, not their profit (or even whether it's a profit rather than a loss). We know for a fact that not every user is of the same value; the ad revenue from the average user in say US is far higher than that of the average user in Turkey. And in what is almost certainly not a coincidence, the price of YT Premium in the US is far higher than for those in Turkey.

Agree, I made unfounded assumption, but at least we could use it as starting point.

I don't want the music streaming service.

The price would only make sense to me, personally, in a world where it's the one and only streaming subscription a person could ever want. As it is, it feels like an $80-$100 per year service.

I see a lot of comments focusing only on the ad-free part of Freetube, however there are really good reasons to use it apart from that. I was a ad-blocker Youtube website user and I switched to only using Freetube (even before the "adpocalypse") because of changes Youtube has been making/removing. Here are some things that made me switch:

- mega fast compared to youtube website (especially for firefox users)

- separates videos/shorts/live on your subscription feed into custom tabs (can also hide any)

- search results are actually usable and shown in a grid (No "People also watched|For you|Previously watched|Latest" every 1/2 results taking your whole screen)

- can customize scroll over video player action (skip, volume, playback rate)

- set custom forward/rewind and playback rate intervals

- set default video quality

- >2x playback rate (up to 10x)

- distraction free settings (you can hide almost anything you want on each page, examples: trending/recommended videos, the likes/dislikes, the live chat, live streams, premieres, profile pictures in comments and much more)

- hide videos from specific channels

- display video titles without excessive capitalisation option

- easily export/import your subscriptions to any format

- multiple local accounts each with its own subscriptions

The "still needs some work" things:

- playlist support is not in yet (you can save videos but they all go to one place and you can't order them)

- some parts of the UI, although very usable/fast, need some love (looking at you settings page)

- tab support would be great instead of having to open new windows

I personally don't mind paying for YouTube Premium. It's a tiny tiny fraction if compared to the cost my rent and my (relatively exorbitant) car insurance rate. I would think most folks making a software engineer's salary wouldn't have a hard time with its cost. It eliminates ads, you get a "premium bitrate" on 1080p videos, so I'm fairly happy with it. Of course, in terms of ROI value, the YT Premium subscription gives you very little since the content is already free (when viewed with ads), especially if you consider that YT Premium is priced similarly to major streaming services which actually offer a significant amount of amazing original content (ad-free as well, at least in the case of Disney, Netflix, and Apple).

I'm also a subscriber. However, Google turning evil has me considering that it's unethical to give them money. As we speak I'm moving my stuff out of Google Drive and will just use the free tier if I need it for anything.

I love YT, but if I end my subscription I will stop watching it because of my complete hatred for ads.

Most people don't have a software engineers salary. I've got 1 euro in 58 cents in my bank account right now. I literally cannot afford YouTube Premium.

Great so they want to freeload off the laying users and content producers. The serving and production of this content has real costs.

This does not make the Internet a better place. Paying for stuff you like does though.

> Paying for stuff you like does though

great!

make it, put it on your website (using owncast for example) and I'll pay.

I won't pay YouTube though, sorry not sorry.

Why no mention of Patreon which is where most YT creators are asking you to pay them?

Does that also not meet your stipulations as to where and how you are willing to pay for a product you are consuming?

Freetube doesn't block anyone from paying a creator on Patreon.

> Why no mention of Patreon which is where most YT creators are asking you to pay them?

because it's not YouTube.

I do not want the platform to succeed, because it's killing the competition and it's also killing the creators.

> I won't pay YouTube though, [in that case I will unilaterally decide that I can consume your content free of charge], sorry not sorry.

For clarity, I just added the quiet part.

I'm on board with that.

Yes. I will watch it for free as intended, nobody posted the content to be YouTube premium only, so I won't pay for it, I will watch the sponsor segments though.

I won't pay YouTube and I won't support in other forms that will let creators keep posting content on YouTube.

I'm voting with my money, I don't want YouTube to succeed as a platform, unless it becomes more open about their algorithms and their suggestions. most of my creator friends saw their views diminish two folds for no apparent reason, their video have been demonetized after years being there, because some user improperly signaled them, maybe a competitor that wanted to harm their reputation or maybe just some troll, but there was no easy way to put them back, because YouTube has no support.

Should I really pay for that?

No, thanks!

Easy as that.

It's like paying the mall because the comic book shop I like is inside the mall, so that the mall can finance and advertise all the things I hate in life, while also killing the exposure of the comic book shop.

You won't guilt trip me with your misguided morals.

> Yes. I will watch it for free as intended, nobody posted the content to be YouTube premium only, so I won't pay for it, I will watch the sponsor segments though.

Fair enough, but the grandparent's point was specifically about circumventing the ads, no? At least that was what I was addressing.

> It's like paying the mall because the comic book shop I like is inside the mall, so that the mall can finance and advertise all the things I hate in life, while also killing the exposure of the comic book shop.

But you're fine with some percentage of whatever you spend in that store going back to the mall in form of rent? Seems like an accounting detail to me.

> But you're fine with some percentage of whatever you spend in that store going back to the mall in form of rent?

not my problem, that's for renters to handle.

I don't care if they pay for it or not, I simply care to buy my comics.

But if the mall starts asking me for a subscription just to enter the mall, I'm going somewhere else.

The Internet was a better place before YouTube though, so, as with anyone trying to make moral arguments, you're stuck between two principles with no clear way to reconcile them.

How is this any different from using TiVo to avoid tv ads? Just the fact that TV advertisers are more easily tricked/misled by the platform/viewers?

Very cool. It's awesome we finally have an independent YouTube player app which, unlike existing players (we could always use MPV and others), also has searching and specific video related recommendations.

But there is a room for improvement. E.g. its history appears forgetting a video's pause position as soon as I start watching another one. A handier speed change (wheel-scrollable perhaps, e.g. the YouTube Enhancer browser extension has it) is a necessity - I increase and decrease speed very often depending on how well and easy do I understand a particular part so using a pop-up menu annoys. The same about sharing - I want a single-click to copy the URL to the clipboard, not a multi-share pop-up menu. An option to pre-download full videos (in a per-video preferred format, together with the subtitles) then play from the file, then let me purge/prune this cache manually would be great (I usually prefer the "18" 360p MP4 format, 240p if that's a podcast with no interesting visual content, 720-1024p if its a coding lecture where I need to read what's on the screen, higher in some rare cases when there's something beautiful, all available subtitles and chapters should better be embedded in the file).

Blocking ads should indeed be configurable. To be honest, I personally can hardly imagine myself enabling ads (I rather donate when I really like someone, and that's much more than YouTube itself would pay them for my view), nevertheless just killing all ads for everyone without even an option to change this manually somehow feels wrong. And probably begging for trouble of Google and/or other corporations attacking the project. If I were the developer I would rather enable ads by default and let the users configure blocking the way they see fit.

I would consider adding these features myself as this fortunately is a free project on GitHub but Electron means that would require me to learn web frontend which is so complicated[1] it's not really my thing.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37895164

Let me putit out there, I don't like seeing ads and I like watching videos.

I know a lot of creators are creating for fun. They do not care about ad revenues. Youtube promise them of a safe place only to show some creepy ads to viewers like me.

Youtube needs to die.

I was a premium subscriber for 1 month and quickly cancelled my subscription, the reason is simple: I was still bombarded by ads, just not YouTube ads.

If YouTube want my business back they should simply find a way to force YouTube creators to provide two video streams, one with sponsored content for non premium users and one with their sponsored content shenanigans stripped out for premium users. This would make me subscribe asap even if I couldn't care less for YouTube Music as a happy spotify user.

I know I can use sponsorblock to get rid of this, but I just felt silly having to use an adblocker while still paying for youtube premium.

All these 3rd party clients and sites to watch videos should coordinate and define a protocol for creators with a youtube channel to cross-reference a google-free (maybe self-hosted) platform to get to their content as a safeguard to not fully loose their viewership if either the creator or the subscribers get booted off the platform for whatever reason google deems a violation of their policies. Then creators can promote these 3rd party apps. Of course any other platforms will not easily be able to replace youtube's monetization, but at least keeping the contact could buy them some time.

Surely google won't let this stand for long, right? As soon as it gets any kind of popularity google will intentionally break it.

They've been trying to do it with Invidious and youtube-dl already.

Right. And whenever I try to use youtube-dl, historically there's been a 25%+ chance that it's broken at that point in time. Either I have to update it, or download it from somewhere else or whatever. I think last time I had to go outside of the debian repo to get a binary or something.

> I think last time I had to go outside of the debian repo to get a binary or something.

Debian is certainly not the best option for those that depend on packages that change frequently. The fact that you got it to work 75% of the time is actually a positive surprise.

To be clear. I got it to work 100% of the times. What I meant was that 25% of those it required some digging around for the latest whatever-the-issue-was on my part, and 75% of those it just worked.

I think there is an additional issue here - which is if you want to pay to remove ads from youtube you have to have an account and that by definition provides your analytics and browsing history to youtube no? There is no way to remove ads without turning over your behavioral analytics to youtube.

It's worth pointing out that this hurts the creators who make those videos that you are watching.

bug report:

when you are playing a playlist and go to the "pop out" window, clicking on "Next video" button on the pop out player messes up the payback (moves to next video only in the main parent window to new video which starts playing simultaneously)

also, clicking "back to tab" on the floating player window ... does not return the user focus to the main plyaer window. you have to hunt for it in task bar and ppen the main window manually yourself.

related feature request:

it would be great if the floating popup player also had a time seek control

main playback controls on video should include next/previous buttons when playing from a playlist

Its ironic they accept monero; if youtube did (or something equivalent) I'd be able to pay for premium without them tracking my watch history.

At the end of the day that's all I want. No ads, no tracking.

Let’s be clear - just because you block cookies and javascript doesn’t mean google, who owns and runs the servers for YouTube, can’t track you.

Great thought but completely useless.

If you want to prevent tracking use Tor. This is not meant to be used to eliminate all tracking.

Impressive.

Is there a Andoid app with similar features?

Also, is there a equivalent for Coursera Videos? (Jut unhappy with Coursera UX) :)

Oh boy I can't wait to use the application that surely won't be nonfunctional in like 3 days

NewPipe on Android is actually really solid, and similar in premise.

There was a period of several months not all that long ago where they didn't work. But they're back now.

There was not, at least not on my phone (s10e/s23). I've been using it for years without interruption.

I’ve been using NewPipe for years, and have not experienced issues as you described.

Make sure you are using their own f-droid feed.

Freetube has been around for years and has been working pretty much perfectly since day one.

Few people had a need for it, so few people used it, so Google didn't care.

That's just changed as they try to bring the hammer down on ad-blockers and people are scrambling around looking for new ad-avoidance methods.

Having multiple profiles with separate channel subscriptions is a nice feature. Google should have added some way to organise/group subscribed channels long ago really.

There are:

+ Invidious, FreeTube, yt-dlp for music and videos

+ Internet Archive for loads more films, shows, music, University courses in their entirety, etc

+ Metager/Qwant/Ecosia for search, Duckduckgo for image search

+ Anna's Archive, Libgen, etc, for books

+ External hard drives for storage

People apparently so concerned about ethics, I suggest considering setting up a monthly donation that goes out directly to people actually working on behalf of the public.

Depending what you're into, that could be the Free Software Foundation, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Internet Archive, or any of I don't know how many other projects working on specific cool free software projects, operating systems, and the like. Tor, Blender, Guix, Debian, Arch, Freenet, MediaGoblin, Peertube, Mastodon. Whatever, there are tons of things.

If you give money to Google and Amazon (buying books on the Kindle) and tell yourself you're helping "creators", well, you might be falling victim to a vicious false dichotomy. Try this book, or a talk from Cory Doctorow about the book first to whet your appetite https://chokepointcapitalism.com/

i am not sure about how does it separate itself from piped or invidious in practice.

in fact it can use invidious api as a feature. plus you need to install an extension.

but if it is more reliable than piped then i am all for it.

Normie-friendly projects like this are going to get yt-dlp ruined.

Why do they like windows over tabs so much? :-(

What are some good iOS options?

uYou+ and its recent forks as long as you can sideload IPAs (ie, through AltStore)

Not sure there are that many. Last time I looked, there were no viable options via the app store.

Yattee

https://github.com/yattee/yattee

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/yattee/id1595136629

You can use it both with Piped or Invidious

https://np.reddit.com/r/Yattee/comments/13d3lj7/how_to_set_u...

Works perfectly on both my iPhone and apple TV. No jailbreaking nothing needed.

Invidious, cross platform since it is a website.

https://invidio.us

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