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Comment by smashah | Hacker News Reader

Correct me if I'm wrong but I don't think the type of person who uses invidious is going to ever be convinced to buy something from an ad on YouTube, especially if they're forced to use it.

Secondly, imo technical measures is fair game - much better than their previously scummy tactic of sending legal threats to the stellar team at invidious.

Thirdly, adversarial interoperability is a human digital right.

Fourthly, godspeed to the invidious team, their hard work and story is important for the wider internet.

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While you’re probably right, this isn’t super relevant. From Google’s perspective, they just want to auction off the advertising slot and get that view, the actual click through rate on that ad is a secondary issue.

So many of the ads I see on youtube aren’t even products - they are scams.

The ad will be a clip of a celebrity with what’s clearly a separate ai-generated voiceover telling you “you can get thousands of dollars now if you do this one thing.”

I’ve seen the same style of ad nearly every day for the last month. The celebrity changes every time I see it and has had so many people. Oprah, The Rock, Steve Harvey, Joe Biden, etc.

I’ve reported the ads every time. They are always different companies from different countries. If YouTube is doing anything about it- it isn’t working.

And then YouTube is trying to stop me from blocking these ads? They can try. But I refuse to pay for premium.

> I don't think the type of person who uses invidious is going to ever be convinced to buy something from an ad on YouTube.

That user is using YouTube resources, without being of benefit to YouTube.

They still are a benefit to YT in that they’re strengthening YT’s network effects and not helping a fledgling competitor hit a critical mass of videos, comments and viewership.

MS and Adobe had similar logic for not going after piracy very hard in certain markets. They wanted users on their platform, even when they couldn’t get them all to pay.

Invidious is a essentially a fledgling competitor, which uses YouTube's video storage. Invidious users are not on the YouTube platform. Or maybe have one toe on the platform, or something like that.

YouTube is by far the dominant video hosting platform in the world; I'm guessing they probably don't feel they require the network effects from alternative systems that bypass their UI and API. They provide a site and app that are used free-of-charge by billions, and get all the network effect they need from those.

If going after piracy of locally installed software were comparably simple, easy and cheap, similarly to blocking an IP address, everyone would do it. Mainly it's not done against individual users because it's prohibitively expensive. Once the users have defeated the anti-copying measures in the software executables, they have gotten away with it. You'd have to send cops to their house to seize the warez.

I subscribe to YT premium and sometimes like to use invidious so you're actually wrong.

I don't think there is an easy technical way (even if there were a will) to make an exception for Invidious users who have Youtube subscriptions. Invidious doesn't even use the Youtube subscription model in the first place. I'm guessing it's the instances that are blocked, not individual users using those instances.

The hypothesis that Youtube Premium subscribers might be using any given Invidious instance, so it's a bad idea to block it, is rather weak.

Generate an API key for premium users, add auth-only API to pull videos, user pastes key into their client of choice.

Even easier, one click oauth to automagically give the key to the client.

It's trivial.

Yep, I think people have amnesia about the last 10 years where our API rights have slowly but surely been taken away and have a lack of imagination for solutions so fallback to authoritarian narratives.

API key so premium users can use invidious makes total sense - it makes creator revenue attribution more accurate also.

As a paying user to any service I should have the right to interop with whatever client or third party service I want.

>Correct me if I'm wrong but I don't think the type of person who uses invidious is going to ever be convinced to buy something from an ad on YouTube, especially if they're forced to use it.

One of the reasons I block advertising is that I think it works. I'm only human. I can be deceived and I can be manipulated. I don't see any reason to give people the opportunity to hurt me.

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