Instead of YouTube, use Invidious; Instead of subscribing to channels, use RSS | Hacker News Reader

Instead of YouTube, use Invidious; Instead of subscribing to channels, use RSS

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67 pointsbehnamoh64 comments

This is fine and dandy, and it's what I've done for a long while, but Google/Alphabet can and will pull the plug on it eventually.

Folks, it really is time for us to either adopt a federated alternative like PeerTube, or improve it until it becomes a suitable alternative.

You're welcome to go to Peertube right now, nothing stopping you. Content creators won't follow you, of course, because they (rightfully) want to get paid for their work. How do you plan to compensate content creators on Peertube?

It’s surprising how little people pay for content. Not saying they are obligated to, but take the instance of a channel you really like, quality content. When you see the stats you can see sometimes a 1000x difference in paying customers (take for instance a youtuber with a patreon or YTsubscription)

So you really like a channel, and I am assuming not all are poor, that is a big difference. I wonder what the friction is here. (As someone who is very aware of the effort some creators put in)

>” How do you plan to compensate content creators on Peertube?”

This task falls on the creators, not the viewers. There are already several options such as sponsorship, merchandise, patreon, asking for donations, et cetera.

Take an organization like Linus Media Group/Linus Tech Tips. He shared his earnings from Ads here[0] and a breakdown of revenue here[1] - it's 2021 vs 2022 revenue, but it should be fairly close.

18% of revenue being sourced from YouTube ads doesn't sound like much, but extrapolated from $4.6M over 9 months to a year is ~6M in ad revenue, out of a total of >$33M from all sources. It's not as simple as "flicking a switch" to replace that revenue with $3M of extra in-video sponsorships (those are already being bid on at market price, and they're in as many places in the video as the viewers will handle) and/or $3M of extra merchandise revenue, for example.

And no creator does good by asking for direct donations. Only patreon/a way to pay for early access to content does anything for revenue, and this is not scalable since the vast majority of <every> channel's viewers only watch it when it's conveniently shown to them via their recommended videos/subscriptions tab.

0: https://x.com/linusgsebastian/status/1609468262219403264?s=2...

1: https://x.com/LinusTech/status/1486918784401088515?s=20

Other options include Youtube Premium and Youtube ad views, both of which turn out to be far more reliable sources of income.

No, they aren't. Many creators are "demonetized", and if you ask the ones who aren't, they'll tell you they barely make anything from YouTube itself. They get all their money from other sources: Patreon, merchandise sales, sponsor segments, etc.

YouTube Premium pays out even on demonetized videos. And Premium watch time pays out a lot more https://x.com/LinusTech/status/1486935690315112455?s=20

I watched a couple of guides by rich streamers, and they consistently point out that the unofficial means make them the most money.

When they're very big, yes. Mid size and small channels, I doubt it.

Small channels make their money from super chats — a handful of $20 super chats will outweigh your ads until moderately large.

I don’t know about YouTube premium, but regarding twitch partnership they said that only the top streamers get good deals, but even then they are problematic because they require exclusivity.

Yeah, but then you're giving money to Google. Better to pay the creators directly.

But for sponsorship, aren't people using sponsorblock as well?

Moving creators might be easier than you think, it only take a few mess ups on the YouTube side to trigger it.

There is no real community on YouTube, you're there to watch videos, not making friends. And video hosting is flexible, one video can be hosted on different places.

Sure, YouTube was very smart that they changed how the home page worked, so now people rely on YouTube to explore and discover video for them, BUT it won't change the fact that you're still there to watch videos.

Now I through about it, maybe that's why YouTube is so careful about their public relationships.

YouTube recommendations are a huge source of traffic for creators. Even if they could move all of their subscribers to another platform they would be losing a ton of traffic (and therefore ad revenue). I think this discovery is the biggest difficulty in making a YouTube competitor.

Discovery has different modes, plus, it's not something only YouTube can have. That's to say, it would work for YouTube, but only to a point.

Plus, the recommendations engine itself is a limitation. I been using YouTube for years before knowing the existence of YouTubers such as Casey Neistat, Mr Beast and SomeOrdinaryGamers. Even through they are popular and talked the topic that I'm interested in, YouTube never pushed them to me, instead, I manually discovered them through the trending page, what an irony.

Content creators don't get paid (much) on YouTube either. That's why they all added sponsor segments, sell merchandise, ask for Patreon donations, etc.

They absolutely do get paid on YouTube.

Patreon/ko-fi/Paypal/Monero/etc.

Nothing stops you from having ads in the video directly.

I think creators lived in a sweet spot. I might be a minority, but I would rather stopa watching YouTubers. It is not that their content is worth my money. It may be worth my time, but not necessarily money.

Full federation would be nice, but just using alternative, smaller platforms makes a huge difference in reducing YouTube's stranglehold. About half the people I follow are on Nebula, which is a surprisingly solid platform that provides a lot of good redundancy for educational YouTubers.

As an added bonus, creators remove sponsorships from Nebula videos, so unlike YouTube Premium it really is completely ad free.

>but just using alternative, smaller platforms makes a huge difference

this does not scale. bandwidth costs will crush small platforms and they will eventually be absorbed into bigger ones.. the only exit is closure (especially from a rouge patent troll or DMCA lawsuit) or buyout. see justin.tv as an example

edit: all costs will crush you. you need a mod team to prevent runaway piracy and child porn. you need a security team to prevent attacks. you need a network team to try to minimize bandwidth loss. video delivery is not a cheap game, so i'm not really sure how free platforms will survive

Does everything need to scale? I personally quite enjoyed the web back in the day where most communities were running on tiny boxes managed by a single hobbyist.

> you need a mod team to prevent runaway piracy and child porn.

Nebula doesn't because it's an invite-only platform. The creators are all part of an old-school social network and can vouch for each other.

> video delivery is not a cheap game, so i'm not really sure how free platforms will survive

So don't be a free platform! Nebula is doing just fine at serving me and many like me. Most of the creators I follow make a solid living on Patreon, with Nebula and YouTube ads just layered on top. The idea that every app must be free and must scale to ~every human being on the planet is killing the internet.

> Does everything need to scale? I personally quite enjoyed the web back in the day where most communities were running on tiny boxes managed by a single hobbyist.

It's just not only matter of scale. I follow content creator that posted some of his content on his personal website. but man, the user experience is night and day compared to youtube. loading video is slow, cant fast-forward before hit buffering, also no content discovery either.

Paying for Youtube premium is no-brainer because i just get more value of it compared to even Netflix.

Scale isn't a binary switch—Nebula's UX is very comparable to YouTube's, better in some ways. There's a space in the middle—between one guy's personal site and Google—where the platform has enough resources to get a decent experience.

Everyone who is actually mad about the ad blocking is either a teenager (with no money) or won't pay for YT Premium anyways, regardless of how much value they get out of it. Why would these people pay for a Nebula/Curiosity Stream subscription?

Hi! I block YouTube ads and will stop watching YouTube if they disable ad blockers, but I am currently paying for Nebula. AMA.

Why watch YouTube with an ad blocker if you understand that those who make videos, and the one that hosts the video, require payment in exchange for access to the content?

For any number of reasons, I'm not willing to put up with Google's advertising or business practices. I also don't want to give google any money because a) they really don't need it and b) google only gives a fraction of the ad revinue to creators.

Why use YouTube then? There really isn't much of an option. Some creators I subscribe to don't post anywhere else. Some do post on peertube or LBRY, so I'll watch there if available.

I view it the same way I view piracy. I'd be willing to pay for more media if it were available, from a company that won't spy on me, without DRM, and my money went to the people that made the thing instead of some rent seeking business sitting between me and them.

I don't have a problem paying for stuff, I have a problem with paying Google specifically.

And ultimately my use of ad blockers accounts for an infinitesimal fraction of a percent of any one creator's ad revinue. It costs Google a lot of money to serve the video, and the creator earns only very slightly less. If there's a sponsored segment (as there always is these days), that more than makes up for the disparity.

It hurts Google and is virtually unnoticeable to the creator. Sounds good to me.

> is virtually unnoticeable to the creator

Only in some segments. Car videos have extreme CPMs, probably because it's all exclusively watched via iPhones (or at least people who don't want to delve into sideloading an alternate YouTube client on Android) - they probably won't notice. But the CPMs for gaming videos have historically been fairly low because of the percentage of users using an ad blocker.

And I illustrate here[0] how AdSense revenue is still a large chunk of a creator's revenue, and LTT's situation is fairly special with how much they really plug and invest in their "merch", with a lot of their revenue being custom products and not just cool design T-Shirts. They can't just get video sponsors to pay more for the same ad space, and putting more sponsorships in the video devalues all sponsors and hurts the viewing experience.

0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37938464

Because I have ADHD and YouTube's frequent ad breaks are extremely problematic for my ability to get any value out of the content.

I pay for Nebula to support the creators who I get the most value out of, and happily start watching any new ones who join that platform, but I don't want to spend money reinforcing the near-monopoly that is YouTube.

That's the nice thing about subscribing via RSS. You can seamlessly follow different creators no matter what platform they are on. This greatly reduces platform lock-in and over time makes it feasible for creators to move off of YouTube.

If everyone just uses YouTube subscriptions and the YouTube homepage (or push notifications) then they are not easily able to start following people publishing on other platforms.

My thoughts are the same. Take look what happened on Reddit and Twitter, where many people were trying to improve the platform by developing apps for them, then the platform steps in and slammed it all down (probably due to conflict of interest). My conclusion is that contributing to the "daemons" might just not be worth it for both the devs and the users.

Google/YouTube is a relatively good actor during the entire shenanigans, but they certainly got a high enough chair to bare the lost of few users. And if you look the current financial and employment situation, they and their employees/C*Os might even got motivations too.

The environment has changed, maybe it's time to go back to the fundamentals, and maybe something new and better can come out of it.

How is Peertube moderated ? I’d prefer not to have to watch gore and child porn occasionally to self moderate.

This is the hidden cost of all these platforms, the moderators have PTSD from this shit.

Rather than trying to fight a Pyrrhic arms race with with adblockers that will eventually outright require blocking anyone not paying, if youtube simply put a cumulative measure of what your usage has cost them at the top, I bet a lot of people would be more open to paying.

Offering a way to throw a dollar at various creators and have it guaranteed to get to them in full would also be something I'd find highly compelling. And it would give those creators vastly more money than if I sat down and watched multiple thousands of 5-15 minute videos, ads and all.

Also demonetizing creators because they said "kill" instead of "unalive" is fucking stupid, and makes youtube an adversary, not something I want to give money to.

If the linked vids on the default Invidious page show

> Can't load the video on this Invidious instance. YouTube is currently trying to block Invidious instances. Click here for more info about the issue.

switching Invidious instance seems to fix the problem.

Ref for that: https://github.com/iv-org/invidious/issues/3822

Who's winning, Invidious or Youtube?

I'm something of a fan of PeerTube for distribution, but that's used by so few people that my tech demo graphics videos with a few hundred views are at the top of the ratings. PeerTube is an OK distribution system, but a terrible discovery system. In the unlikely event that RSS for videos got some traction, it might be useful.

I posted this comment as a question on the last thread about Invidious and YouTube blocking ads but didn't get a response. I'd like to try it but for now when I get the blocker I open the same video in an incognito window. For which I have a different extension that I can just click on and it opens right away.

> I just installed, then uninstalled, the Chrome (Brave) extension that is supposed to redirect videos to some invidious instance. > I use Brave and am now seeing the "sorry you can't watch YouTube" anymore sign because Brave blocks ads. > I thought installing the extension from the website would just redirect whatever video I clicked on to the mirrored video on an Invidious instance, is that not the case?

Is my understanding wrong? I already uninstalled it but would give it another go if it "just works".

I don't really want to care about this or that "instance". The promise of the extension (from what I can tell) is to just automatically do it?

I wouldn't block ads on youtube if they weren't so incredibly invasive and frequent. They've had banner ads on video on many satellite TV channels in India for 30 years now (maybe longer). The ads are creatively animated to draw attention without being intrusive.

YouTube's ads are only valuable to advertisers because they have the viewer's attention for those 5 or 15 seconds. Banner ads don't pay the bills at YouTube's scale.

Bills need to be paid, but delivering 1080p video gets cheaper every year.

Delivering isn't expensive, but storing is. Estimates from 2019 were that YouTube ingests 500 hours of video every minute[0] - if we assume the most conservative bitrate for 1080p video, 4mbps, that's 900 gigabytes of video ingested every minute and 1.3PB every day - and a lot of videos are higher bitrate at 1080p or offer 1440p/4k options as well.

Even if they're getting the best deal on Enterprise drives ever at $0.009/gb or $12k/day in storage costs, that's still half an exabyte a year, and with real-world storage sizes including 4k video, chances are they were already buying over 1 exabyte of storage every year in 2019 and are doing a lot more today.

0: https://www.tubefilter.com/2019/05/07/number-hours-video-upl...

I should have been more clear that I was talking about the ability for big video sites in general to exist, not youtube in particular. A big video site doesn't have to store every random non-watched video forever for free.

Or just use Freetube.

https://freetubeapp.io/

And no, it's not a porn provider.

You can use whatever you want as long as you are happy with it. People will use other services if they are going to be happy with it. But are YouTube users going to be happy with alternatives that many people mention? Content creators will not bother moving onto other platforms as it seems at the moment.

Does someone know why there is only one iOS with not so optimal UI/UX?

On Android both clipious and libretube are really good piped/invidious apps with very active development and good UI.

Another thing I noticed is that sometimes videos just don't work. And then you spend time search for an instance where things work. Why is that?

Using a third-party YouTube client is against the YouTube Terms of Service, and YouTube does not offer official APIs for watching video content. Thus, Apple helps Google by proactively blocking apps that are a "YouTube Alternative Player" or "Free YouTube [/Music]" since it's a violation of 5.2.2 of the App Store Review Guidelines:

> 5.2.2 Third-Party Sites/Services: If your app uses, accesses, monetizes access to, or displays content from a third-party service, ensure that you are specifically permitted to do so under the service’s terms of use. Authorization must be provided upon request.

https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/#int...

I see, I had a feeling that was the case, but I never knew the exact policy. Thank you.

Here's me hoping that sideloading with one day be a first class citizen.

iOS is always behind when it comes to FOSS apps. The platform is just not FOSS-friendly—the developer needs a Mac in order to even build for it, and in order to host on the app store they have to pay a yearly fee, never mind that the app has no revenue stream.

Also, unlike Android, there can be no alternate app stores, so where F-Droid can exist to host apps that Google disapproves of, if Apple doesn't like it there's no good way to distribute.

I suspect it's because the people, who want more control over the usage of the services they use, usually see Android as a system that allows higher degree of that control. And because of that, iOS may simply have less people who is interested.

If not already, this could be shared as a comment on the large Invidious thread from 3 days ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37900458

1. Pick an instance near you

2. Search a channel, press the RSS button at the top

3. Follow favorite youtubers in your feed, together with news and blogs.

This helped me a lot with distractions on youtube and the fact that the official youtube website is quite broken.

I wish he/she didn’t tell everyone about RSS feeds for YouTube channels. I feel like Google will eventually get rid of it because it was an accidental feature

I will be devastated if RSS for YouTube channels ever goes away. I consume a lot of YouTube, all of it explicit (as opposed to just browsing or clicking on suggestions). It would be impossible with email or notifications.

I appreciate "alternatives" popping up.

I am not sure if its due new Youtube CEO, but it is getting very hostile recently. One example I can share – I usually did open youtube.com and see suggested videos list. Now instead of that I get 'dark pattern' information about how I don't share my history – therefore youtube cannot suggest me anything. I don't know, if it can't, why not show my subscriptions then? I still pay for premium, but I barely use it these days. Might state the obvious, its only because they have monopoly that they can get away with this hostility to its users.

I wonder if those community instances are trustable. Self-hosting invidious might solve the privacy concerns though.

I can certainly understand the concerns, and I host my own Invidious instance for such reasons (and because many public instances have some features disabled, like video downloads), but I'd argue that 99.99% of the time I'd trust any random Invidious instance over YouTube/Google directly.

What’s a kid-friendly way to do this on an AppleTV?

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.

There is educational, fun kid-friendly programming available from other sources. If there are specific YT channels that are a must-watch, you can do this with only the channels you know have safe content.

1. Post ad on Craiglist/FBMarketplace/etc. for AppleTV.

2. Sell TV, deliver to buyer, collect cash.

3. Buy a GoogleTV, and set it up.

4. Install app (instructions easily available elsewhere; you can't use the Play Store)

5. Enjoy!

youtube has native rss support.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com