Freetube is the best way to watch YouTube
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There is an unwritten social contract here. Google is willing to host and organise a vast number of videos because that'll attract an audience for ads. If there are too may freeloaders resisting the ads then Google won't host the videos, and on the path to that the freeloaders are really just leeching off a system in an entitled way (unless their goal is to destroy YouTube in which case good on them for consistency and for picking a worthy target).
If people aren't going to be polite and accept that contract then fine, enforcement was always by an honour system. But strategically if Google's social contract doesn't work for someone then they shouldn't use YouTube - they'd just be feeding the beast. They should go make PeerTube work or investigate the long list of alternative video platforms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_online_video_platforms .
Just be prepared for the good times to end at any moment.
Then don't complain if people block your stupid ads and count yourself lucky that the government didn't split your megacorp into several tiny companies
The only morally wrong thing here is NOT blocking Google's ads
On paper it looks something like a choice between one company with one shareholder or two companies with ... the same shareholder. It isn't clear what has really changed; the company was only ever a legal fiction anyway. If there were incentives to collude then they haven't gone away.
Don't like the ads? Don't visit the site then. Simple as that.
But now it's intellectually dishonest at best. We're not serving static images with hyperlinks anymore, either, but full-blown malware that tracks people against their will.
So who's really being unethical here? The amoral ***** who write this malware "because it's their job", or the people who are simply trying to protect their privacy from being raped?
> So who's really being unethical here? The amoral *** who write this malware "because it's their job", or the people who are simply trying to protect themselves?
No one is forcing you to visit sites with "malware", you are equally as free to visit an alternative site that doesn't have ads or trackers. And call it what you will, that "malware" is essential for the web as we know it to survive. How else will Google be able to maintain the monopoly on video hosting if they can't harvest and profit off the data off freeloading users?
Also, for YouTube there is a simple solution: it's called YouTube Premium. You see no ads and you get great perks to boot. And Google promises to respect your privacy so long as you use YouTube Premium.
I mean, only a Google search will reveal there's people still getting ads despite using YouTube Premium.
Google have provided an invaluable source of information all for free. The least you can do is watch some ads and let them harvest your data.
Source?
it's not ugly at all: parasites deserve their place in the ecosystem right alongside carnivores.
What I don't like is people like this who broadcast and evangelize as if google will allow it to keep happening. I'd rather it survived longer hiding under the radar.
"hey everybody I discovered a secret hack to get a free donut with your coffee!!!"... how about just keep doing it yourself, donuts for life?
The closest thing I am making to an argument is that, as a human, if you find what you believe to be a bug in a system and you choose to exploit the bug repeatedly for your own gain while keeping it a secret to yourself, this is, in fact, the least ethical choice you, as a human, can make. (More ethical choices include: not telling anyone but walking away and never exploiting the bug again, telling the system maintainers about the bug confidentially, exposing the bug publicly, etc...)
And I guess, in some way, my response is implying that wanting other humans to make the least ethical choice in these sorts of situations and displaying animosity towards those who make a more ethical choice is a little bit strange.
you assigned me "human", but I identify as a parasite
i follow the laws of logic, and if the logic of the system gives me a donut, I will take the donut. if the logic changes and i don't get a donut, i will not complain. It is not unethical to follow the logic of the system.
now, as to you as a human, are you saying that you have never downloaded a youtube video to a file on your disk?
Sounds like they can't really complain if someone took that information and made it universally accessible :)
Why is running ads the _only_ choice? Why can't a creator opt to pay to host videos on their channel with limitations? $10/month? That's 30 videos in HD max. $100? 300 videos in 4K... etc. ... or whatever.
As a content creator with seven years experience, hundreds of videos and thousands of hours of content: I use Freetube. Please use it until abusive adverts and practices aren't a thing anymore.
Conceivably an option for professionals with business models but hard to see it being a default for a service that wants traction.
There's no guarantee creators can collect as much income without Google either. Google has proven they can get way more income from ads than pretty much everyone else, and even bug channels with sponsorships still derive a very large income portion from Google ads (based on what I've heard from LinusTechTips videos)
They limit you to 2TB per month of bandwidth:
* https://vimeo.com/upgrade-plan
If a video goes viral and you shoot past that you'll probably get a call from them.
You also have a finite amount of storage space available with them, which depends on the account tier you're at: no infinite storage like with Youtube. (And with 4K video nowadays, that can be burned through quickly.)
Genuinely curious, would you still go for it?
For Google? You think Google get a monthly bill for their bandwidth?
Whether 100TB or 1500TB of data are delivered to one ISP at one peering point in a given month has minimal effect, that 10Gbps, 100Gbps or larger port is a fixed cost that will exist regardless of traffic.
It seems the problem is, with YouTubes monopoly, other services have almost no chance to succeed because of the "Network Effect"...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nebula_(streaming_service)
Also let me opt-out of the algoritm.
I watch videos from my subscriptions in reverse chronological order and that’s it.
$100 wouldn't even cover the storage mate. Let's say you've got 2 thousand hours of content (smallest amount that qualifies for "thousands")
At 2k resolution, that'd be around 30TB And you'll want to preprocess it to 1080p, 720p, 480p, so add another 15tb for the other resolutions.
And YouTube supports 4k, so if you're shooting at that resolution, you can add another 50tb on top.
Purely storage you're already looking at a ~$2500 monthly bill.
And then you're gonna have to host and serve it to hundreds of thousands of viewers, the bandwidth cost is gonna be astronomical. Every 100 hours of streamed content is gonna be another ~$100 on top. With a 15 minute video, that'd be 400 views.
And I significantly rounded down on every calculation as this is napkin math. If you'd use AWS S3 pricing for storage and egress you can safely double my dollar numbers.
Even if it's a vtuber/live streamer they'd still have to publish ~6 hours every day for a full year to get to 2 thousand hours
It's pretty much the peak of the iceberg
$100/month for 50TB probably isn't feasible but start compromising on resolution and something could be made to work.
Unless you want to be completely capped and unable to ever publish again you're gonna have to add at least a few TB (+10TB, 120TB total) and then you'll need a secondary storage for backup, so another 60 TB, 180TB total
At $320 per 16TB disk that can handle being active 24/7 (actually only ~14 TB usable, but let's ignore that) you're left with $3750 at the very least, ignoring that you'll have to continuously replace them, electricity is also pretty expensive with HDDs. House them in a server etc
You too are wildly off with your math, as I'm literally flooring every calculation. Realistic estimates by a professional are gonna be _way_ higher, especially because this kind of storage doesn't have the iops to serve video to multiple consumers. It'd be at best a NAS that can serve to maybe 2-4 ppl at a time
But your calculations are for a different problem. You're not solving for "what is the best I can do for $100". You're solving for "what do I need to clone Google's infrastructure for thousands of hours of video footage".
Eg, you doubled the amount of storage space to avoid rebuilding RAIDs when a disk goes down. There is an obvious alternative - don't do that, let the RAID go down and rebuild it while eating the downtime. That sort of thing isn't a big deal for discount video hosting. Maybe even force people to keep their own backups.
So yes, I'm basing my calculations on YouTubes service. What you're imagining is obviously an option for individuals that only want to serve to few individuals at a time, but is entirely offtopic to what was proposed here
He suggested $100/month for 300 videos and noted that he was experienced in content creating.
Literally the the first paragraph
He didn't actually say or imply what you think he did. In fact a later part of the comment ("10/month? That's 30 videos in HD max. $100? 300 videos in 4K... etc. ... or whatever.") clarifies that he meant what he wrote and it is something quite different to what you're picking out.
My point from the beginning was that $100/month is not enough to host a successful channel on YouTube. You absolutely can do it on vimeo, self hosted jellyfin or similar. Plenty of options around. It just get extremely expensive if you're serving content to hundreds of thousands or even millions of viewers.
You can probably start at $10/month with a hetzner shared instance and 1tb storage and unmetered 1 Gigabit Ethernet. Gonna be fine for ~2 simultaneous viewers
I only addressed the storage first because his idea was so far outside of a realistic price. Storage cost is a rounding error on the invoice if you're serving videos to consumers with views as a semi successful YouTube channel gets
I think that is still overcooking it. Peertube has a FAQ on the subject [0], going off that it's probably achievable to have 1,000 concurrent users at ~$50/month+storage. Not commercially advisable, it is pretty obvious that everyone in the game ends up going ad-supported and that makes sense to me. But YouTube could in support something like that for small channels without too much trouble. The issue here for the median channel case doesn't look like costs in the >$1,000/month range as much as foregone revenue and operational complexity. The vast majority of content creators don't get hundreds of thousands of views.
[0] https://joinpeertube.org/faq#should-i-have-a-big-server-to-r...
All we need is hosted APIs and frontend frameworks to wrap content as the user desires.
Charge API users for their bandwidth.
I don’t want Google also deciding what to boost to help them gobble up more human agency.
Reduce redundancy by making HR its own thing.
At the end of the day Google’s core engineering competency is load balancing date center use. The rest is behavioral economics research influenced gamification of our agency
No one has the right to control my client just because I visited their server. If Google doesn't want my client, they can easily block me.
Acting like people running custom clients are thieves or something is ridiculous.
This also frees me from any qualms about using alternative clients, which are superior in certain situations.
It's not a contract though, its a dictatorship (which they have the right to do) but it's been getting worse and worse for the consumer, and is just another loss leader until who have consumers trapped and then start charging, abusing, etc... I'm with you in spirit, but google is not a good participant in this agreement as of late.
Hosting videos costs a lot of money and alternatives to Youtube will see only limited success as long as Google can subsidize the service with the money from the massive spy machine.
Causing maximum drain of resources for Google while providing as little as possible for their spy machine is the ethical choice. Let them bleed. Youtube is the largest obstacle to honest businesses that provide video hosting and viewing in exchange for money - instead of making money from spying on users in ways they are unable to fully comprehend and consent to.
From a business perspective the building is a shop. Anyone without money is provably there to just wander around looking at things. Doing this a lot is weird, especially given that 99% of visitors buy a coffee or a pencil to keep the museum going.
From a user perspective it’s a museum — the whole point is to wander around looking at things! Should it be required that you buy something, or at least be forced to exit through the gift shop?
Is this the same unwritten social contract which means we shouldn't use a mute button on ads? After all, the TV company gets paid to send ads to us, and muting those ads means less ad effectiveness.
Don't use the toilet during an ad break either.
Nor use the +15 seconds functionality on video recorder playback to skip ads.
You can see how the social contract for my entire life include the option to avoid ads, and even with 'freeloaders', the broadcast TV business model worked.
YouTube started long after Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc. ("the Betamax case") established time shifting as an allowed practice in the US. Their business model, based on any implied social contract, must therefore include that possibility, eg, that people may watch content via downloaders.
They could respond by, for example, placing ads directly in the downloaded video steam. This would mean less profit, but no social contract requires customers to keep a company profitable.
And it would be odd indeed if broadcast TV had a more effective business model in the face of freeloaders than online video.
"Freeloading" off a $2T company. Not really. What is really going on.
If Google was concerned about "freeloading" then they would not be encouraging people to store their data "in the cloud"; they would be encouraging them to store it on their own computers. Google wants people to upload data "for free" to Google servers. They design software and hardware to coerce people into uploading, e.g., "syncing".
It's not cool to invade peoples' privacy for profit. That is a social contract that has been broken.
Google could charge fees for storing peoples' data, these fees could cover the costs and allow for some profit, but then they would not be a $2T company. Only a relatively small number of people would pay. The Google customer is the advertiser not the uploader. Thus, this alleged "social contract" to allow Google to spy on people through their computer use, including surreptitiously sending data to Google, is motivated by greed.
That's the ugly culture.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41404530
Top comment: "If [the university computer science department's] cluster somehow ever runs out of disks, I'm happy to donate a terabytes worth, but like hell I'm giving money to big-G for cloud storage."
I have no moral issue with this either. If Google wants money then they need to be more legitimate in their business dealings. No ignoring DMCA abuse, no ending user accounts with no appeal, no dark patterns period.
After a few minutes I would say this is easily the worst way to watch YouTube short of printing the videos out.
They present a perfectly valid choice to you, and it works great. It’s a reasonable enough price (not great but reasonable), but it supports the creators you watch with part of your subscription money.
Plus it has other benefits if you care, like free TV shows and movies and YouTube music. I don’t use that stuff but it is there.
Why are you entitled to ad free viewing?
“It’s only a few so it’s ok I take something for nothing” is not a legal concept I think would hold up in other contexts.
What I'm entitled to is to do whatever I want with every bit of data I download through my browser. The day this stops being the way things are, is the day the web dies, and I can't believe anyone (particularly here) could be defending that.
YouTube provides their data freely. You don't have to sign-up or accept a contract. You open a link and locally download said data. It's on my device, and I control my device, not Google. I can do whatever I want with the data I download, I can make the background pink, I can change some text for something else, and I can take out the parts that I don't like, like ads.
If YouTube wants to stop providing their data with no strings attached, they can. Reddit didn't like the way many of their users used their API, so they blocked it, and I don't use Reddit anymore. If someone doesn't like the way the open web works, they are free to leave, but they can't change the rules.
You ask why we are entitled to ad-free viewing. I ask why do you think Google is entitled to dictate what I do with the local files in my personal device. Do you feel entitled to open your browser's dev tools right now and modify this comment I just wrote?
Not every proper behavior is enforced. You are always free to be a jerk. And it's pretty goofy to tie that to arguments about total personal freedom. Get outa here. You're violating the social contract. You're using a loophole to get much better treatment than "normal" people and in fact you make their experience worse as they have to watch more ads to make up the cost of serving stuff to you.
Also, would the internet be better if everyone acted like you? I think it would be in a significantly worse place if it was never possible to show an ad on the internet, if everyone was as free as you. So you get a massive benefit from others not using their "freedoms?"
"Screw 'em. If they put a fruit stand in my town, I get to take anything I want from it. It's my town. I don't have to follow their "please pay me" signs. I've always been able to take anything I want in my town. Even back when nobody would bring anything over for 'sale.'"
Cringe
If you're trying to use morality to defend your argument, then yeah, we just have different values. If Google wants to give me something for free and then, as you said, put a sign asking to please give them my money, I'm sorry, but I don't make donations to trillion dollars companies.
But again, I don't think any of that really matters. As I said, they are using the open web, they're free to stop anytime they want, but not to change the rules the web is based on.
1) Answer the question. Would you ever steal physical goods from an unmanned fruit stand merely asking for money? If not, would you do it if the company owning the fruit stand was rich enough? Did enough bad things? If the fruit stand was _really_ big?
If you answer yes to any of those questions I no longer wish to talk. We truly do have different values.
2) The fruit stand is an analogy for building a business on the open web. You seem to have missed that. Do you think that the internet, that these companies, got to their importance in our lives because everyone is free to modify their packets? That is delusional. It's a quirk most people aren't even aware of, and the internet is as good as you think it is today in large part because they aren't. It's why the fruit stand keeps coming to your town and is the size that it is. It's why you spend so much time stealing from it. Framing your position as exercising inalienable internet rights is ridiculous.
3) Something else you seem to have missed is the parts where I highlight the implications of your philosophy. I'm starting to think that you are arguing in bad faith. What if everyone acted like you? You think that would lead to a better world? Specifically talk about the impact on your favorite YouTube creators. You think it's fine that you don't pay them anything for their effort? That they probably get paid a hair less when you watch their videos because you take the bandwidth without paying for it by watching ads? Why do you only mention the impact on Big Bad Google? Because its easier to launder your conscience that way?
To be clear, my stance is that blocking ads is theft but petty theft; a few cents. Getting all high and mighty about it, and especially getting _anywhere near_ sounding entitled, is ridiculous. Continue to steal a little but be humble about it.
You can’t walk into Best Buy and demand a TV for $7 because that’s how much profit the company makes on it. You’ll be laughed at and security may suggest you go elsewhere.
Some of these are open source and easy to run, like https://github.com/iv-org/invidious
https://github.com/FreeTubeApp/FreeTube?tab=readme-ov-file#d...
I am looking for a better open-source alternative tbh.