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Comment by safety1st | Hacker News Reader

Meanwhile, continuing down the rabbit hole of corporate psychopathy:

Clicks link to view video

Confronted by blocked video with the message "Ad blockers are not allowed on YouTube," even though he turned off his ad blocker a week ago

Changes URL to onion.tube to view it there

Confronted by a message saying that YouTube is currently attempting to block Invidious instances, so this video can't be viewed

Clicks Switch Invidious Instance

Finally watches the video

...I guess the moral of this story is, soon we won't even need copyright law to stop us from watching all the things

View on HN

If yt-dlp works, you can also use Celluloid to watch videos from Youtube — choose Open Location and enter the URL of the YouTube video or playlist page.

=> https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp

=> https://flathub.org/en-GB/apps/io.github.celluloid_player.Ce...

you can also open Youtube on a computer without an ad blocker (e.g. a stock Firefox or Chrome instance), or pay for premium if you don't want to watch ads

I think it's just YouTube being buggy.

90% of the time they block me because I have an ad blocker that is _disabled for their website._ The other 10% they show me the video. This feels like a bug.

I'm not going to pay them because they have a bug, or if it's not a bug, pay them because they think they can tell me what addons I can run when viewing other websites. That would be like Stockholm syndrome.

YouTube is a highly optional part of my life, so if they are going to fuck around and be shitty, fuck em I'm out. Happy to instead do my small part in breaking the monopoly and just reduce my YouTube consumption, plus encourage other people to reduce it as well.

The lengths people go to to escape an easy and affordable option is curious.

When subscription prices get too high and the service lackluster, I can understand. Every production company tried to build their own subpar streaming service, and value delivery just doesn't scale like that.

When every one of a million different news websites has its own individual subscription, I can also understand. Nobody has time for that, and the service offered is never worth the value.

But YouTube premium is dirt cheap. And you're paying for legions of engineers to make the service rock solid. And it has everything. I think it's the last service I'd ever cancel, and I don't even watch YouTube that often.

I pay for it myself, but I Don't think I'd call it dirt cheap? 14 a month isn't much cheaper than streaming services used to be. Netflix used to be under ten dollars a month so maybe that anchored the price a bit in my head.

14 dollars a month is more than i spend on internet access and transportation put together, because i live in a third-world country in an economic crisis

right now i'm visiting my in-laws for the new year, and they have netflix; i think they pay 8 dollars a month for it

I'd rather just be able to own the pixels that hit my screen. They gave me the information and it's now mine - sorry!

I would tape rented VHSes back in the day too.

At least Blockbuster charged me for the original. YouTube just makes me "watch" an ad before I get my copy [1]

[1] A computer watches the ad for me

in this case what it's providing you is (instant, seekable) access to (recoded versions of a falsified version of) a public-domain video which it attempts to prevent you from storing a copy of locally

it's ridiculous that we're even considering depending on those legions of engineers given that most of us have at least ten-megabit internet service at home, but decentralized alternatives like lbry/odysee and even bittorrent are getting lobbied out of existence, in large part because they are resistant to censorship

Dirt cheap? And when combined with all the other services? Which ones do I get?

I don't like the bait-and-switch. It's evil and scummy. I feel dirty paying for evil and scummy.

Youtube was built based on work of a creator community -- much more so than Alphabet engineers -- who viewed this as a sort of open platform. Once there was network lock-in, the paywall hits, the mandatory obnoxious ads hit, and the user-hostile JavaScript hits.

Alphabet holds the legal contract, and the army of lawyers, but there was a social contract with a community which it simply broke.

It tried (with mixed success) to do the same with the free GSuite service (once they have all your email, bill you for seeing it). Remember how Alphabet originally won by using unintrusive adwords instead of flashing banner ads? All these things might be legal, but they ain't right.

I pay for subscription services, but yes, I'll go to great lengths to never, ever pay a penny for Youtube.

this is why free software and peer-to-peer network architecture is important. centralized network services and proprietary software inherently make users vulnerable to such abuses, and the companies that engage in them will be more profitable than their competitors who don't

No! Absolutely not! This is war now: either YouTube goes ad-free for free or YouTube goes bust!

i'm skeptical that google will continue to operate youtube as a public charity indefinitely; perhaps we should switch to decentralized systems with higher reliability instead of locating a single point of failure on sundar pichai's desk

Other than the bullshit computerised systems behind the scenes that are the bane of creators on the platform… it’s hard to think of a more reliable website than YouTube…

I’ve heard Google employees/engineers make jokes (not entirely sure how much is a joke and how much is real) about how YouTube might be the first website back online after WW3 assuming it didn’t destroy the internet (seeing as the internet originally was designed to survive such a thing it’s not entirely far fetched to imagine global chaos and heavily degraded services but still operating in some capacity)

the reliability of centralized systems is like the reliability of the farmer's generosity toward the turkey: unfailing until the inevitable thanksgiving

the year youtube ceases to be profitable is the year it deletes 100% of its videos and you discover that your extrapolation of its reliability into the future was based on an incorrect understanding of the world

if you've been paying attention, though, you know that a substantial percentage of its videos have already been consigned to the memory hole, so its reliability as a repository of human culture is already observably poor

You can run Piped or Invidious locally without needing to worry about Google blocking the IP.

Or download Freetube desktop app.

yeah, i watched it with yt-dlp

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