YouTube Just Ate TV. It's Only Getting Started | Hacker News Reader

YouTube Just Ate TV. It's Only Getting Started

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92 pointswallflower224 comments

In my circle, piracy is making a comeback. We're tired of having to hunt down streaming services, and be extorted for hundreds of euro a month, just to see ads for their own programs.

Streaming was fun for a while, but as always these greedy execs are ruining it.

> Streaming was fun for a while, but as always these greedy execs are ruining it.

I've been doing a lot more digital purchasing. Like movies and TV shows. I know there is some risk to the services shutting down. But Disney's MoviesAnywhere mitigates that some.

I typically buy stuff when it is on sale. Generally a digital movie is (way) cheaper than a single ticket at a theater. And I've kinda built a decent sized library where I usually can find something to watch.

And, generall, my library is way better than Netflix at any given time. (Though I still have a couple(!) streaming subscriptions...)

> digital purchasing

That's an oxymoron if you can't have a local copy

Just let me buy an MP4 legally for $5 and I will buy every movie.

This is a good point.

I paid many movies on iTunes, and there's no way to access that content anymore, certaily not from my Linux (main) machines.

Also, people who "bought" 1984 on Amazon only to see it disappear from their Kindle will not have been amused.

Nobody likes to have things they spend money on cluttered across 20+ services with changing subscription fees and licensing terms. It's a mess.

Check out Moviesanywhere lets you sync itunes movies to Google, and other providers including moviesanywhere itself. Its owned by the movie industry iirc so totally legit. Not sure if it will help but it sucks losing an entire movie library otherwise.

Hell, I'd be happy to pay full price to have this option.

All my devices run Linux and apparently there is no amount of money that will let me stream paid content above 480p.

Maybe we'll soon see another round of "piracy as a paid service", just like Napster and the beginnings of Spotify.

That industry is still worth billions today. IPTV being the biggest one, then there's the debrid sites.

That never went away. You still have tons of debrid services.

Shhhhhhhh....

Netflix does 720p and kanopy too, maybe some at 1080p. Need to install widevine.

Hell, sell me BluRays that just contain an "unprotected" MP4 file in them, and I'll pay a little extra if I'm allowed to copy it as much as I want. I promise I wont share my files with anyone else, unless they're over my house to watch a movie together. I would go back to buying movies.

I'd buy 720p MP4s for $20, though my tastes in passive visual entertainment are rather niche.

We need mandatory licensing. It worked for Radio, it can work for Streaming.

There's no reason Netflix and Hulu couldn't both have ALL media available. Then they could actually compete on features and capabilities, not on media catalog.

Too many services nowadays. Was fine when it was just Netflix, had mostly everything, no ads, full quality. Nowadays Netflix price has gone up, additional plans for 4K/no-ads, anti-account sharing and less content as content now has gone to Amazon/Disney+/Hulu/Discovery+/Paramount+/Peacock/HBO etc. etc.

Even if you subscribed to them all you'd still not have everything. Sailing the seas, you get everything for free or for a couple dollars a month for a more premium experience.

Time for change.

Higher price, 1080p cap, no account sharing… that’s one thing.

But the content issue is just so dumb (and I’m not blaming Netflix).

I suppose next we will have a new streaming service for each film and show.

Let me pay $0.1 for each episode I watch, make everything available and route to the right entity that should be paid and then offer one cross-platform client that everyone pooled their efforts into. And since we're dreaming, make it a open collaboration with a FOSS client too.

I'd predict most of the piracy would again disappear quickly as long as it's better, faster and has virtually everything people wanna watch. Basically replicate what Spotify did, but more open, so closer to what Grooveshark tried to do I guess.

Grooveshark, that's a name I've not heard in a while...

But even Spotify are putting the price up this year. I bet if something like that happened, it'd quickly soar to $0.2 an episode in the next year, then slowly creep up more and more.

> I bet if something like that happened, it'd quickly soar to $0.2 an episode in the next year, then slowly creep up more and more

Yeah probably, until they find the point where more people leave because it's too expensive than they'll earn by raising prices, then they'll oscillate or find a new direction. Isn't that how capitalism is supposed to work?

... so we end up in the same predicament we are now. Maybe the model doesn't work? And no, I'm not a communist.

I think it's broken, yeah. I think the whole "art for money" thing doesn't make sense in general and something else has to be figured out. Artists should be able to survive without depending on things like "perfectly competitive goods" or whatever.

Capitalism is supposed to have perfectly competitive goods to be efficient. IP protection - especially the obscene century-long protection of copyrights - renders capitalist competition into monopolistic competition, which no longer maximises consumer surpluses. Hence mandatory licencing can increase benefits for society - and in the past such models worked - e.g. for radio. Today, the only reason content conglomerates get away with it is that they can pay of sufficiently many legislators.

That's Adam Smith liberalism. You can have a market and competition without capitalism. Just look at what China did for EVs and solar panels, its full liberalism under state planning.

China does have _some_ capitalism, state capitalism but still, capital owners decide what is produced, with state supervision (nuclear, coal, rail sector, Alibaba). Already for its telco sector we knew it was different, it wasn't like the usual, a sort of capitalist liberalism with state planning. Now we have more data, and i'm not the only one to think its EV boom is the perfect example of a non-capitalist liberalism.

In 1999 I paid (inflation adjusted) $20 per episode in DS9

If you are only wiling to pay 10 cents then that's a major problem - viewing figures just aren't that high any more. A modern scifi show would need 100 million viewers to cover the production budget at 10 cents a person

The post popular scripted show on US TV - George and Mindy - gets about 5-6 million viewers when it's on for free. At 10c/episode or $2 for the year that would be $10m for the entire season. TV costs a lot more than that to produce.

This is what Hulu started out as... before ABC/Disney bought everyone else out as they shifted to their own separate services, and now Disney is burying Hulu under Disney+. When Hulu started, it seemed like the solution, but everyone was greedy and wanted a bigger piece of the pie. The same goes for TV/Cable and even streaming "live tv" options. YouTube TV option even tried, originally like $35/mo, but now is just as much as any of the other "Live TV" services (in the US at least), north of $80/mo.

Piracy is the answer... though, it's aa couple extra hoops to jump through... using a seedbox over self-hosting that is. I should probably just have a script that does an rsync to my local NAS every few minutes to make it slightly easier... already have a watch script to upload .torrent files to the seedbox.

> Even if you subscribed to them all you'd still not have everything

And even if you could get all the video itself, it's not guaranteed you'd get the right video+audio+subtitles combination that you want, as everything seems to be negotiated separately.

So while one service could offer the right audio and the right video but not the subtitles you want, another service could have the right video and the right subtitles but instead be dubbed without original audio.

It became a whole mess for people and eventually it was again simpler to just resort to piracy for the even the slightly technical consumers.

Man, jellyfin is shockingly absolutely killer for subtitles. I don't remember if it's a plugin or built in, but there's a subtitle search option that cross-references your video's filename into some database that usually gives you a workable set of subs.

Plus it respects your options to default subs on or off, in a language you choose, in a style you like to see. I don't think any streaming services do it this well honestly

Kodi has this as well. I wouldn’t be surprised if similar functionality was also in plex/emby too

Plex also has this

"Some database", could it be opensubtitles.org ? Sigh, if I were them I'd be annoyed that my work is hidden away behind the words "some database".

The plugin does name them, but that's the nature of work so good as to become invisible, you don't actually see it unless you already know (Or care/need to look into it)

This is what copyright does though by design. Everyone leverages the monopoly granted by government to maximize profit because its way easier to force people to your service for maximum profit and compete (n offerings rather than everyone ha>ing the same offerings and competing on price and user experience. This is also causing the crazy market dislocation from hige show budgets because they are tryingto invest in their competitive edge when creativity doesnt work on big budgets at all. it needs a constraint to push on.

Plus exclusivity, probably. Music abides by the same copyright laws yet you don't need to subscribe to Spotify to listen to certain artists, or pay YT Music Premium for someone else. I'm not including podcasts here, since they are more of a "production" itself rather than just owning the rights.

The government came in and spanked the music industry back when it was radio primarily and that caused a licencing and payment regime to be codified that forced this as a matter of custom. The situation in video has always been exclusivity to channel partners and replayability didn't play a big role until the industry was pretty mature so no spanking from government has yet to materialize in the video market to fix this situation to the extent possible under the currenty broken copyright regime.

> Even if you subscribed to them all you'd still not have everything.

Do you actually need everything, everywhere, all at once?

Do one at a time and then switch after you run out of shows or if another service has a "must-watch".

Why are you simping for the shareholders? I should have the choice of anything I want to watch. The unethical option provides all and is cheaper than a subscription for a single one of those services.

Besides, those services often make it difficult to unsubscribe with dark patterns.

And why are you acting like you have a right to unlimited access of all content made, regardless of the economics, for $20 a month at the highest quality of service through one platform?

Things cost money, that's the world we live in. You don't have to like it, but it is what it is.

The unethical option is actually illegal and, as more people do it, only game theories everyone else into having to pay more. Feel free to do it, not going to pretend I'm a saint on the matter, but don't act all incredulous and morally superior. You're still here complaining you could steal oxy cheaper than pay for it at a pharmacy; just a different fix.

WRT unsubscribing, I can't relate. It's, what, 5 buttons? I do it every other month and it's never been a problem. Isn't this forum supposed to be techies?

Because it's totally possible? They've done it with Spotify for music. No reason the same shouldn't be done for films and TV.

Are we seriously praising Spotify's business model and affect on the creator market?

Not to mention they're up to $12/month. Creating movies and shows is significantly more expensive than music, so it makes sense the price to a catalogue would be scaled by an order of magnitude. Not to mention the increased costs for digital providers for storage, bandwidth, and compute requirements.

I'm, of course, more than happy to hear about how the reruns of Friends could stay on Netflix since it's just a dispute about perceived value. But the rest? Come on, I know you aren't totally ignorant on the economics of these markets.

I think many people would gladly pay somewhere between $60-100/mo for access to everything either ad free or very minimal ads... nobody offers that. And trying to mix-match always leaves a gaping hole. For that matter, I'd probably do somewhere between $25-50 a season of a show, depending on the show, episodes, run-length etc. As it is, you can get close to this where Blu-ray box sets are an option, and that includes media. Easy enough to rip yourself, though time consuming.

The breaking point is generally around 3-4 of the paid streaming services... many people are going to have Amazon as a baseline for shipping... then you get shoved D+ with every kind of bundling (Verizon, etc) under the sum, then Hulu may or may not be attached... People pay for Netflix out of legacy... that doesn't leave much room for Peacock, Paramount+, AppleTV, etc, etc. It's just easier to say f*ck it and pirate.

Hulu was great for the first couple years... minimal ads, new tv shows same or next day. Then the partners all dropped out with greed as primary motivators.

Making a movie or a series is way more expensive than record a song

That's an argument for having a more expensive service, not a worse one. Even ignoring price, nothing on the video side comes close to Spotify when it comes to selection, other than Netflix back in the day.

Copyright is supposed to exist for a limited time to "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts." The current 100 year plus regime is effectively forever and not in line with the original constitutional purpose. With reasonable copyright timeframes, at some point all copyright will expire and then everything will be legal. The notion that an artist is entitled to extract money from each eyeball or ear that encounters the work until the heat death of the universe is unethical.

What does that have to do with streaming services?

Probably 80% of what is watched is from the last year, a lot of it from the last month. Most of the rest is from the past couple decades. The original US copyright law of 1790 allowed for 28 years.

I mean, I agree current copyright is too long. It's just not that relevant to streaming. Not a lot of people are looking to watch old episodes of Knight Rider for free. (Those who are, I salute you.)

Given that the law is broken and the entertainment industry is generally responsible for that, it seems reasonable enough to decide you don't want to give them money that they will use against you (perhaps making exceptions for indie groups). Once you've made that decision, piracy (at least downloading) becomes amoral. Whether you watch the stuff has no effect on anyone else (personally I don't, but more because I'm not interested).

You'd be surprised how many people watch Seinfeld and Friends on repeat as comfort shows. Old shows is a pretty large part of their business.

I agree with you, but that's not what's happening in this conversation. Nor are any of these services a historical archive, they are ongoing catalogues and your subscription funds new shows, as well as servicing cost.

And let's not feign ignorance by saying the overwhelming vast majority of things being watched are exactly that new content, not 30 year old reruns of Frasier.

EDIT: I apologize, only ~2 seasons of Frasier would extend past copyright. It started airing 1993.

> right to unlimited access of all content made, regardless of the economics, for $20 a month at the highest quality of service through one platform?

Because the only reason we don't have this is a substantial industry devoted to preventing it? Which simultaneously has a terrible rep for exploiting its workers, the pay non-transparency of Netflix, arbitrary cancellation of incomplete series, and the general fiasco that is David Zaslav.

Heck, I'd take "all content made before 2000 at acceptable quality transfers for $20", but the further back you go the more likely it is that the only online supplier of a movie is a pirate.

(Criterion Channel Online is not available in the UK, which is another bugbear: copyright means arbitrary unavailability)

I do have the right to do this. In my country downloading isn’t illegal, only uploading is. And rightfully so.

Or, just pirate it. The quality will probably be better, anyway.

Eh, depends. Pirates these days need to burn hardware keys for 4K, so only sponsored or high-popularity stuff gets it. Everything else gets 1080p, though some groups do upscaling to try and make up for it.

If the content has a Blu-ray release, the pirated content will usually be better than the stream. But you could also purchase the Blu-ray yourself.

Anyway, pirating is illegal. I totally respect it for those who can't pay due to economic bloc or age, or as a form of protest... but hearing folk with 6-figure salaries bemoan having to pay too much, then act like children when told they could just take turn with the toys does rub me the wrong way.

It's not about paying too much, it's about the actual experience.

While streaming has gotten (and continues to) progressively worse, pirating just gets better.

I'll pay 100 USD a month for an 'everything' subscription. That option doesn't exist, and piracy is by far the best option outside of that.

I'm there with you... I even pay/paid for a number of them at once for a long time... my SO would usually use their dedicated apps for streaming. Me, I'd sail the high seas just because the final landing point on my NAS was easier to watch through Kodi than dealing with the UI of many of the services themselves.

Amazon Prime used to have each season of each show separated, for example... Hulu and Hulu Live TV mess with each other, and fragment older episodes... Disney+ is a pain to use.. Paramount/CBS breaks with the PiHole... they all kinda suck in so many ways. I actually pay for YouTube ad free, it covers music as well... and I tend to watch from the couch. I've started using Rumble a little more, but the TV UX leaves a lot of room for improvement. Similar for Pepperbox and other alt streaming options.

I hope Apple TV doesn't get into the bandwagon

> Was fine when it was just Netflix, had mostly everything

This was problematic too. Centralisation is never good in the long-term. Surely, we would have learned that from traditional media, AWS outages or autocratic structures. Humanity as so much to learn still

Centralized marketplaces can work, but it’s hard to maintain those (there is one Centralized Internet, not many various internets, for example).

A subscription service that “covers all” like we usually get with music would be quite nice, even if it was only “older” shows after a year or so.

There isn't one centralised internet, its thousands of autonomous systems which connect to each other using a common language.

Now sure, some companies try hard to centralise it and own it, this leads to a more fragile ecosystem.

I mean that as a customer, you buy "one Internet" and get the "whole thing", you don't have to connect to various internets depending on what you want that day (as you did before by dialing into BBSes).

Companies and countries are doing their darnedest to break the Internet up into separate, smaller networks.

Too many services is a good problem to have in a regular market. The problem is the accessibility and fragmentation of content. If all services had the same content, they would have to compete on the features, price and performance, which would be a healthy form of competition.

Yes, need proper standardisation. we are now in the era when there’s fragmentation in a tape audio players, with dozen of different incompatible cassette tape formats and musicians having lock-in contracts with one format each. To listen to all music you would have to buy each player on the market. Only piracy allows you to buy just one tape player and have copies of all other tapes to play.

I pirated for many years until Netflix had everything when I was in high school. Roughly around the time I got a job I stopped pirating games and bought everything on Steam. There is still some annoyance with other launchers besides Steam but, I endure.

Its been a long time now but probably around when South Park left Netflix, I started pirating again. Now I have a massive Plex server and home lab dedicated to piracy. AND I STILL PAY ~$20/m for Usenet lol.

> probably around when South Park left Netflix, I started pirating again

Unrelated, but fun example as South Park is probably the only show on TV that also let people watch the entire show (-latest seasons it seems) for free online! https://www.southparkstudios.com/seasons/south-park

Been like that (in many places) for many many years at this point too :)

Depends where you are, I only see short clips on there.

> let people watch the entire show

Isn't that only for people in the US?

I lived in three different countries in my life, and neither of them have been the US, but all of them have apparently had free South Park episodes available to them :)

I don't know if that website works/shows full episodes in the US, currently I'm in a EU country and everything except the last two seasons seems available.

Why so much?

Plex is a pretty light-weight system as long as transcoding is avoided or it has hardware transcoding available to use.

And wrangling Usenet is a fairly simple affair on vaguely modern PC hardware, too.

So all of that stuff runs in the background on the same desktop Linux box that I also use for everything else.

Am I doing it wrong?

As "lightweight" as it is, you don't even need Plex or a "media server" software. My "media server" has been "files on an NFS share" which has worked for me for the last 15-20 years.

Oh, I also use SMB for that. A local file share is more than enough for anyone who lives alone, in a cave, and who never has never physically interacted with another person -- and who never wants to.

Plex, meanwhile? It is much more approachable by the lays.

My elderly mother can watch my media with a cheap little Roku box while she sits on the sofa at her house many miles away with a remote control in her hand, using Plex.

SMB share is the minimum viable. Plex on an android TV device is a lot better. Access to all the media with a simple remote has been a great experience.

Value adds I get from Jellyfin:

- Each member of my family gets their watch progress individually tracked down to how many minutes they made it into each video, across devices.

- The server's GPU automatically transcodes video into the best format for the device, display resolution, and available bandwidth. Very helpful for streaming stuff off the home server while away from home to optimize battery life and bandwidth.

- Automatically pulling subtitles from opensubtitles. Very handy if you have a multingual family who enjoys foreign media shows together. The paid streaming services are mostly abysmal at subtitling.

- A soft reason: My family members are seriously impressed by how nice the web UI is compared to Amazon Prime Video, Peacock, etc. It's literally opened their eyes to how software doesn't have to be bad - capitalism makes software bad over time.

People use separate computers for wide range of reasons. My desktop isn't always running Linux for example, or even from the same partition always, and to run something 24/7 I need to host it not on my for-work desktop. I also run some less trusted software on separate server and network than say Home Assistant and Frigate.

Sure, I suppose. And I do have a separate computer for HA, because I consider it part of the house.in a way that is simply deserving of (cheap!) dedicated hardware.

But most of my multi-os stuff happens with VMs these days.

After I spent a few years successfully running Windows as my primary desktop OS, as a virtual machine (with its own dedicated CPU cores and accessories like GPU), the lines between separate computers and different operating systems permanently became very blurry to me.

> most of my multi-os stuff happens with VMs these days

Sounds like you could be interested in Qubes OS, which runs everything in VMs by default with an amazing UI. (My daily driver.)

I also started torrenting again after I got tired of the quality of streaming content. But I still use Youtube all the time.

Yep. Piracy getting popular is the market telling you something is seriously wrong. The system is currently broken with tens of services each coming in at $10+ per month (and seemingly increasing every quarter).

For me personally piracy made a comeback when everyone memory-holed "The Speech" episode from IT Crowd. I had even paid for it on a separate platform when Amazon removed it, only to find the platform I paid for it on removed it also. Say what you will about Graham Lineham, I still think it's one of the funniest IT crowd episodes, on par with "The Work Outing". I'd rather not have media I personally enjoy rug-pulled from me in this manner.

Yeah Graham Linehan was a great comedy writer (past tense because I don't think he's writing more, not that he is a horrible writer now), and even though IT Crowd had some really weird episodes towards the end, it's really interesting to see how much his views shifted (in my biased opinion, for the worse) after the show was done.

For people not in the know, Linehan is nowadays a very outspoken voice against "transgenderism", specifically in regards to trans women, and is quite close to the J.K. Rowling sphere of influence. He seems to have given up a lot to end up where he's now.

Now with IT Crowd, it's fascinating that there are the typical early 2000s trans jokes, what with the trans woman getting into a relationship with Douglas because he misheard her saying "I used to be a man", for "I used to be from Iran", after which Douglas and the trans woman get into a fist fight together. This is the episode "The Speech" that the parent is referring to. It's pulled from circulations over allegations of transphobia, but really this wasn't at all abnormal for the time, and there were lots of shows with jokes that, although maybe less physical, were far more cruel to trans women (trans men of course, never really coming up at all, but that's another story). I remember a tweet that called out Linehan for this episode at the time, and he apologized with genuine understanding, no cruelty behind it. That's not something I could ever imagine him doing now. It's a shame in my opinion, I think IT Crowd is one of the better comedy shows of it's time and I don't know if he'll be able to write it now as he used to, as with any deeply held political belief it does seep into the work itself, sometimes making it better, sometimes ruining it, though I will probably not watch anything Linehan will create in the future, sadly.

I'm waiting for TorrentCoin to pay/earn while you're watching/seeding to occur and then the pirating will become profitable and open the flood of dedicated for profit pirates from less regulated parts of the world. When this happens (it's sorta happening right now with Real Debrid & etc...) there will be a napster moment for movies and streaming.

It's not extortion for them to charge money for you to watch TV shows, at historically low prices.

From the point of view of content owners, an moderate amount of piracy is ideal, since it implies that they’re extracting maximum value from everyone who isn’t pirating.

I focus a lot on 4k, bluray and dvds. Shuffling physical media is nice.

Small used cd/dvd stores like rasputin are a delight.

If life gets busy, you pause without racking up subscription fees.

Also - there is something deliberate about choosing and watching a movie physically. You buy it deliberately, and later you play it more deliberately.

When I had netflix, I could spend the time to watch a movie doomscrolling through not-that-great stuff to not watch.

I’ll just add that bogus DMCA takedowns (for anticompetitive or censorship goals) are a real burden for many YouTube creators, making supporting their monopoly at least as morally dubious as piracy.

Also I think the piracy experience has improved significantly. Jellyfin + Infuse makes the watching experience just as good, if not better than, the streaming apps. You get the same nice scrolling interface, trailers, automatic subtitles and it feels just as good as the Netflix app. Except it’s all the content you actually want, nothing you don’t, and there are no ads.

Also some streaming services are not available at some countries or only sold as some bundles with only particular ISPs or cable providers in that country.

Hence you cannot buy it legally even if you wished (to change your ISP).

I rather keep myself to a single service, I don't suffer from FOMO, do not need to see everything.

If ads get too much, then I just shut it off, books don't have ads, and the local library has enough audio books and DVDs to keep me busy on rainy weekends.

I think the explanation is less about greed and more that ad-supported programming is almost always the only viable economic model. Cable worked brilliantly because everybody paid for a full range of channels, sure YOU only watched about 8 of them but other people had a totally different 8. Some channels survived many many years without earning any subscriber fees, just getting the distribution was enough and the ads paid the bills.

Anyone thinking that paid streaming subscriptions could entirely replace ad-supported for the long-term, never really thought it all through in my opinion.

We used to share passwords but as the streaming services begin the crackdown started cancelling the services and just use pirated movie watching sites.

Funny enough, our TCL Smart TV has an UI that shows trending movies etc. and when you click on these it just does a web search with the relevant words to find pirate websites. The browser is also able to detect video streams and asks you if you want to just play the video in the video player. The overall experience is not too far away from the legal streaming platforms.

Most new films are a trash anyway, so I don't think I feel moral dilemma either. In fact, if the streaming services go away this will be a net win for the movie industry.

In the 90s we clamoured for being able to subscribe to what we want rather than a single

We broadly have that now.

I subscribe to Youtube, Spotify, Netflix, Disney, Apple, Paramount, BBC. Only Apple and BBC force adverts on me, and Apple I'll be cancelling because of it. I keep BBC more out of moral reasons as I think it's a net good for the UK.

The monthly cost is very reasonable to me, inflation wise its about the same as I paid for BBC and Sky in the 90s.

Last night we wanted to watch the 2012 Les Mis film, £3.50 to rent it from Apple. In the 90s, inflation adjusted, it cost £8 to rent the tape.

If I can subscribe to watch something without adverts, I will. If I can buy or rent it, I will.

If I can't do that though, then I'll get it elsewhere.

I love paying the extra for Paramount+ on Amazon Prime to avoid the ads only to find out that does not include Paramount ads.

My personal theory on this is prestige TV is in a recession.

After Game of thrones season 8, people wonder why they should invest into a show when there’s a high chance it won’t pay off. Even for a good show it can feel like work. That plus the high cost for studios and over abundance of supply, meant studios pulled back.

Instead we’re seeing a reemergence of low effort TV. And YouTube plays nicely into that.

At some point this pendulum may swing back (remember in 2000s when everything was low effort reality TV).

> After Game of thrones season 8, people wonder why they should invest into a show when there’s a high chance it won’t pay off.

GoT was going downhill way before the final season. Also, I'm not sure what you mean by investing in a show. TV watching should be enjoyable, you dont have to watch things you dont like hoping for a payoff later on.

When I see a show has 2 seasons (like Andor) and it’s finished. And I see it’s well reviewed I’m definitely in. The creators thought out a compete arc.

When a (non episodic) show is in 3 out of ?? seasons even if everything is good so far, I’m now skeptical. Not just GoT but shows like Westworld leave me wondering if I wasted my time.

Many people (myself included) enjoy TV shows that have an ongoing story. Ideally we want that story to come to a satisfying end, eventually. It's disappointing when, after watching it for tens or hundreds of hours, the team behind the show delivers a sub-par ending, or no real ending at all.

Sure, there are lots of episodic shows out there where each episode can be enjoyed (or not) on its own, and if the show starts going downhill, you can just stop watching, and it's not that big a deal.

> you dont have to watch things you dont like hoping for a payoff later on.

No, but it's disappointing when I watch something I do like for years, and then the payoff never materializes. Sure, that doesn't erase the enjoyment of watching it over those years, but not getting that payoff feels like leaving us hanging off a ledge.

I wonder how the GoT writers couldn't see that they were blowing it with season 8 (is it even the whole season, or just the last 2 episodes).

Some commenters rationalize that Daenarys was always going to lose her shit, but the way it was handled in "that episode" was very unsatisfactory. I guess the writers wrote themselves into a corner because they had to work with what they've already broadcast, unlike a book author who can go back and rewrite plenty of stuff across the book when they find they need to establish something for the climax...

Being "invested in a show" is using "invested" in a slightly different sense than monetary investments. It's not hoping for a payoff later, it means the show has already caught your attention and you actively want to see the next episode, that you're excited for it.

YouTube has a ton of decent effort content. Like it’s not nearly as expensive as traditional TV episodes but it’s not total slop.

I can watch hour long videos of people building impressive projects, engineering products, performing interesting tests, etc. The kind of content you never would have got on traditional TV.

Do you have recommendations? I've been struggling to find a good one since Outdoor Boys shut down.

https://www.statsignificant.com/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-tvs-g...

This is a pretty well known fact. Netflix is the best example. They created the prestige streaming market with House of Cards, and now they're primarily using algorithms to create low-cost reality shows and cheap disaster documentaries.

My youtube experience:

- open video

- 2 unskippable ads

- click somewhere in the video to skip the creator's sponsor section (more ads)

- 2 more unskippable ads

- video plays, the original audio was automagically replaced by a dogshit 1995 tier "ai" dub

- it's not the part I wanted to see, click somewhere else

- 2 more unskippable ads

At that point I spent 5 minutes watching ads and forgot why I came here...

Use the Force .. err use Newpipe

Youtube is squeezing more and more to push subscribing to premium. Youtube is where "everything" is - they know they can squeeze hard, where else are you going to go?

Ironically it looks more and more like TV with the non stop ads and sponsors.

Either pay for their Premium service or use uBlock Origin (Firefox) + SponsorBlock. Otherwise YouTube is unusable.

My experience - ublock lite. Haven't seen an add for ages. Watch two seconds of creator's sponsor section then skip to next bit.

Add sponsorblock to skip those sections automatically as well.

try Brave browser

There was a time when the algorithm was truly amazing and the recommendations were smart, spot-on, and mostly high quality. I don't know what happened but you have to search now for decent content.

The recommendations part of YouTube just seems to give me old content or will show me things I've already watched. Despite it feeling almost user-hostile, I still use Youtube,

It's also filled with ads, sometimes as long as the video, it's insane

I'm either gonna drop youtube, or hope something like peertube starts to grow

They seem to give totally different suggestions based on platform. On the TV app I get great high quality content every time and I love it. While on mobile it just pushes junk and shorts.

YT has a bad tendency for over-recommending. I watch one video about stock market and my next ten videos are about stock picking from random guys. I also immediately get advertisements for crypto platforms!

The only time I appreciate over-recommendations is when I search for old standup videos of Dave Attell, George Carlin, and others and it suggests more of these gems.

> I also immediately get advertisements for crypto platforms!

Ad-blocker.

I recommend turning off the watch history. It means the only recommendations you get are related to the video you're currently watching. It's not perfect but it's a lot better.

Thanks. I will try this.

The algorithm was slightly different and it was working on a different kind of data (mostly videos). Now it is working also on shorts and it has to deal with the rise of automated videos, videos with misleading titles and other hacks by malicious actors.

I really wish their was a setting to tune feed "volatility". This also drive me crazy.

Sometimes I'll be marking something as "not interested", but that time with it spent auto-playing is enough for my feed to turn in to the stuff I just said I wasn't interested in.

I just don't really care for TV that much, but my husband was on at least three streaming services. I would occasionally manually pirate shows and movies when he asked, but a while back I hooked up radarr to my jellyfin server. Now he's canceled all our streaming services and gone full pirate.

Our entire tv and movie budget is now condensed into a single subscription: the VPN behind my torrent box. And also all the new disks I have to keep adding to the media array to support his new habit.

Can you share a good resource on how to set up Radarr with Jellyfin? I tried but couldn’t get it to work. I just want to have it running on my PC (not a dedicated server), my computer is connected to my TV via HDMI and that’s all I need.

Right now, for pirated content, I use the Stremio app for Windows [1] with the Torrentio [2] and PirateBay+ [3] addons. It’s a “sandboxed,” relatively safe way to pirate. Stremio itself is a legal piece of software (for now), and I feel safe using those illegal addons without worrying that they might inject malware into my PC. It works well for most movies, but not always for older or more obscure ones. There’s also a UX issue: you have to choose between different pirated versions of the same movie and test several to find one that works properly.

Also, I don’t need a VPN because in my country ISPs don’t really care about that (yet), so a lot of people just pirate content, it would be a nightmare otherwise.

[1] https://www.stremio.com/

[2] https://stremio-addons.net/addons/torrentio

[3] https://stremio-addons.net/addons/thepiratebay+

dunno man, if you're struggling that much probably just download movies of the pirate bay and use vlc to play them. radarr isn't that massive of an upgrade

i use it but i have a server if i had to run it locally i'd probably just skip it

These comments are a good example of why HN can be way, way off sometimes.

YouTube is clearly becoming the dominant media platform of the future.

Random acts of piracy or obscure video platforms are not indicative of how 99% of the population acts.

I don't see anyone in this thread even implying that's how most of the population acts, they're simply stating their take on streaming.

Pretty much every comment here is talking about how their YouTube experience is suboptimal, how streaming platforms are getting worse (and not how YouTube is getting better), and other dismissive takes.

It's skepticism all around. The same kinds of comments are on threads about TikTok, which are equally clueless about how big of a deal TikTok is culturally to young people.

Sorry if my comment comes off a bit cranky, I just find the lack of any substantial comments here about the future of video media, etc. to be disappointing.

And how is YouTube becoming better? Because in recent years if they detect ad blocking on a network? They will shadow ban the entire network. I can no longer use YouTube without a VPN because every single video cuts at the 1:00 mark. No explanation, no pop up. The videos simply load indefinitely. I have tried numerous solutions, but when I’m on my home network? I either VPN or I don’t get YouTube access.

This has been my situation for at least 2 years across multiple devices and accounts.

I muck about on HN and get ~80% of my video content on youtube. I think it's great overall. The rest ~5% twitter, 0% TV although I have one sitting switched off with a £174 bbc fee. 5% pirated maybe.

If you go with the official HN guide of "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity" and avoid "stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities" then youtube is much better - watching Hinton explain AI and neural networks at the mo. https://youtu.be/jrK3PsD3APk and https://youtu.be/IkdziSLYzHw which is kind of interesting.

I subscribe to Amazon Prime/Apple TV+/NetFlix.

But I also have subscriptions to 2 Usenet services, a paid Plex account, couple of Nzbget instances running full-time attached to a Qnap NAS and an instances of Sonnar.

Just so that I can get unfettered access to 4K content and consume it anyway I want it (Stream using Infuse on Apple TV box or AVP, or download them to my MacBook Pro for watching it while travelling, etc).

But suprisingly I am watching more content on a paid YouTube subscription. The Youtube Apple TV app sucks somewhat, but there is always YT-DLP.

I remember when people laughted off the valuation at the time of Google acquiring YouTube.com ($1.65 billion). With the benefit of hindsight, this was a wise move that has payed enormous dividends, and more benefits no doubt still lie ahead.

The cycle of:

Cable TV

Cable TV with a million add-on packages, eg: “oh you want to watch hockey? Thats extra. Oh you want this channel too? Different add-on”

A couple streaming services

Tons of streaming services with a mess of territorial ownership, eg: Thursday night football on Amazon, other games on different services.

We just took the cable + tons of packages model and instead ended up with a ton of services.

These days I just have HBO, Netflix, and pay for ESPN for Hockey, and even those 3 feel ridiculous. I can see why piracy is easier and more appealings

I time shift with torrents. Tivo is dead, long live the new Tivo!

Most live sports events come out as torrents 2 - 3 hours after. Sometimes sooner.

I recently noticed that a channel I subscribed completely gave up. She used to have a lot of reselling and business content, and even had an Amazon Liquidations storefront, etc. Now all that's gone, and she's showing typical rage bait BS, like Walmart shoplifters getting caught and the like, and every video she's wearing low-cut tops to get extra cleavage out there. I have no doubt she's getting more engagement than she used to.

At that point just pivot to a MindGeek video service, their pay per 1k views is significantly better than Youtube.

She already had a decent following and a channel that was several years old, and I assume that played a large part in her initial content pivot success. I assume most of her original followers would be annoyed and eventually unsubscribed, but honestly, I didn't notice her shift for a while (looks like her last legit business content was about six months ago)

I've seen this repeated all over the internet, but it's far from true. CPM/RPM on adult video is way, way, WAY lower than YouTube or other SFW ad networks.

I really love newpipe[1]. No ads, continue playing with screen switched off, download option, and i appreciate the lack of recommendations (This way I only see news from the channels I'm subscribed to and don't get drawn into a recommendation-loop).

I'm not sure what will happen to it once google enforces their developer registration thing [2]. I assume that f-droid and newpipe will still work on rooted phones, but in general I don't like the direction in which this is going...

[1] https://newpipe.net/ [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45409794

YouTube has so much questionable content on it that gets millions of views... Parents who've found ways to monetize their kids. Dangerous / unpleasant pranks being pulled on members the public. Conspiracy theories. Fake game shows where the winners being given money are actually friends of the host. Or where the host pretends contestants are doing something dangerous, but actually it's CGI, (misleading young viewers into thinking the dangerous stuff is real / fun). Morons making content that's attractive to kids who don't know better. Etc.

While there is some quality content on there, the amount of terrible content getting vast amount of views is pretty high.

I guess one question is whether TV is much better.. I would say on average it probably is less bad, although there have also been / are questionable unethical tv shows. But at least with TV shows there's more likely to be a few more layers of questioning / analysing / looking at the ethics, with responsible people involved.

You don't like conspiracy theories?

You prefer everybody agrees with the truth?

Conspiracy theories nowadays are about a year away from being conspiracy fact. Digital ID is being HEAVILY pushed by the Labour government in the UK. Scary times.

If I was a billionaire I would prioritize identifying, monitoring and controlling the underclass.

But that's a conspiracy theory! Why would they ever do that?

... come back to this comment in a year.

I think that's a fait accompli -- it's merely a matter of who has access to the data.

The funny thing is that the clear anti-democratic leanings of our technolords are based upon not trusting the vote of the masses has unfortunately been somewhat validated (case in point: the current admin). There's just one small problem: the technolords themselves have only one vision and skill: enshittification in the quest of personal enrichment.

China has a very scary model of societal control, but at least they know how to invest in the country as a whole.

If you were a billionaire, what practical reason would you have for promoting democracy?

I'm not convinced something that's been tried multiple times on and off in the UK (last time ID cards were being brought in - by Labour and the 2006 act - it was cancelled by the coalition), and happens in many countries, is a "conspiracy theory"

Who exactly is conspiring and what exactly are they conspiring for?

I mean, it depends a lot on the conspiracy theories.

The common right-wing conspiracy theories in the US are, like, one or two hops and skips away from "jews are running the world and we need to kill them".

Guys, why does everything come back to something hitler-y? Can we stop that please?

Maybe a business/layer would be needed (if that doesn’t exist yet) that pick « best quality » content and provide a curated list as a channel ? YouTube is just the whole catalog. I would definitely like that, channels and curated content from YouTube because I lost so much time finding great content sometimes that it’s sad.

The fundamental way how youtube content is organised is channels. You find a few channels you like, you watch their back catalogue and you subscribe to their new content.

And it is indeed a business layer too. The people making the channel gets paid for their trouble per views. Each channel is a little brand with their own idea of what kind of content they will give to the viewers and in what shape and what kind of quality.

I’m sure what you describe is different from this in some way, but it is weird reading that you wish youtube had channels without mentioning that it already has them.

> because I lost so much time finding great content sometimes that it’s sad.

Idk if you are pickier than me, or have even more niche tastes than I do, because in my experience youtube is full of great content.

Usually YT channels are per creator so it’s usually the same vein of content. But TV has channels from many sources and it’s a manually curated list of content. I was referring to the same way of aggregating content. TV is old and we don’t need a 1 month program of planned content I guess because everything is on-demand but still. Being able to make a specialty like curated channel and share it to watch it like TV might be a thing.

Everything was fake and centralized now it is fake and decentralized. I’m not entirely convinced it’s better. Maybe.

The internet itself is no different, its whether you choose to engage with that content or not. I have been watching Youtube for well over a decade and still have my channel subscriptions which drives the extent of the content I watch.

Monopolistic online platforms such as amazon, youtube, netflix arise due to quantum nature of the internet. Lack of spatial location. lack of time duration, lack of distance, instant multiplicity with identical copies are all quantum things attributable to information at speed of light. For life on Earth, locations, distances, time durations, lack exact copies are natural. So Internet directly interfers with everything that is natural. Platforms like Amazon can spawn millions of virtual workers attending to the needs of every customer. This conflicts with natural limitations of traditional businesses and thus destroys decentralization and localization that is vital to human life.

Not that TV is all that great most of the time either, but if YouTube is the future I feel sorry for people who have to live in that timeline.

As a thought exercise, what would YouTube recommend as related videos next to Breaking Bad episodes?

NileRed?

We're going back to discs. Rerouting a fraction of the money we spent on streaming services buys a lot of DVDs/BluRays. Plus it stopped the brain rot dead in its tracks. The family TV was turning into a constant stream of YT shorts AI voices non-stop talk shouting over 3 vids of brainrot.

I own the tv, yet have no way of just blocking yt shorts, or even easily blocking the YT app on the tv. So YT is blocked at the router level.

edit: a word

Yeah past few years 95% of all the content I watch is through YouTube. All the studios just need to put 50% or more their content on there! I haven't subscribed to any streaming service in a few years. YouTube is free on my Roku TV, through Firefox on my TV/Mac Mini set up (wireless mouse as remote) and on my phone.

Seems like the medium is the message here. There's nothing interesting in the content of the article, but that The Hollywood Reporter is saying it is what matters. It's a signal to Hollywood types that it's now OK to talk about how Youtube is eating their lunch.

Don't worry, Google will find a way to break it so badly that heavy users will stop using it frequenty. AI translation forced even on those who know the language are just a example of what they fail to understand and don't bother to discuss internally.

YouTube's automatic and forced AI translation has to be the worst feature of this decade.

At least it's optional.. YouTube thinks if you're accessing from country X, you want the video titles in language X. Utter fucking geniuses. I say "thinks", it sometimes does this and sometimes doesn't. And there's no "Leave the fucking titles alone" option anywhere...

Reminds me of IMDb pulling the same genius move of "Hey, here's the title of that movie as it was released in the region we've geolocated you in!"

It's not optional. It auto dubs stuff assuming no one in the world speaks more than one language or would rather listen to original audio with subs

Optional in the sense that there's a way to switch it back after a "wtF?! @#%$#@ you YouTube!!!"...

I wonder what proportion of decisions makers in youtube speak more than one language on a regular basis. I suspect it's near-zero.

We need a politically uncensored version (within the law) of YouTube. Things like Rumble do not work well, they are not technically polished. It's a good side project for X.

Rumble works great. What issues are you having?

Tried to upload a large video, "processing" failed after 1 hour. Repeated three times and did not succeed in the end.

> We need a politically uncensored version (within the law) of YouTube

What does that mean "politically uncensored within the law"?

Means for example, that this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AnR4Xw74_is had only <0.1% of YouTube algorithmic views (like 7 total), all the rest were "direct" link. All other videos in the same channel had >70% of the algorithmic views (YouTube "suggestions" or "related content").

They did not ban it outright, so you cannot complain or rigorously prove their bias, but they algorithmically suppress dissenting content.

Even if that's true it's not censorship, stop misusing the word.

"to examine in order to suppress (see suppress sense 2) or delete anything considered objectionable"

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/censoring

Yet you can link to it from anywhere else on the internet, including from other pages on youtube, and anyone with access to youtube can watch it. A lack of free promotion is not censorship.

Ad absurdum, if the video was banned outright upon upload, it wouldn't be considered censorship under your definition, since upload and storage are also "free."

However, the contrast between a 70% average recommendation rate and a 0.1% recommendation rate for this video shows the algorithm's bias, fitting the definition of suppression of dissemination. According to Merriam-Webster, censorship includes "suppressing" content by restraining its usual course or inhibiting its reach.

I don't know how you can draw any statistical conclusions from a very small channel with 76 subscribers and videos that all have very low view counts.

FFS, algo tweaking is not censorship. Censorship would be prohibiting the speech at all.

And what is the political part of this? That "illegal immigrants" are coming in to your country? To amp up anger and fear over that?

This is what I detest about "politics" -- when it is just emotional manipulation via hate and fear to cow people into voting for whoever claims title to that hate and fear.

Immigration has challenges but humanity is defined by immigration -- we're all immigrants either directly or indirectly. We have arrived at what could be a post-scarcity world and need to start acting like it.

There are what, 3 billion people on the internet? You are not owed people's/the algo's attention.

Peertube exists, anyone could run (or pay a host to run) a server in the network

https://archive.is/2kNrh

The streaming services really fucked up to an unbelievable degree. They had done the impossible - persuaded people to give them money instead of downloading for free.

But no they had to get greedy and managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory

I have a hard time blaming the earlier services, especially Netflix. They had a great product, and a great catalog. But then all the studios wanted to run their own streaming services, and pulled their content from Netflix. So then Netflix has to go and find ways to retain customers and increase revenue, and once you get into that game, the customer experience is going to suffer.

If the other studios had just left well enough alone and left everything on Netflix, it would have been fine. I'm not a fan of monopolization, but in this case it worked. A better model would be compulsory licensing under RAND terms. Then every studio would be required to license all their content to every streaming service, and then the streaming services would actually have to compete on quality of experience.

https://archive.is/2kNrh

Highly ironic for me this is the case as I've embraced (state) TV instead of YouTube.

Mainly because it's gotten so awful in the last few years:

- aggressive ads for everything

- content creators has gotten worse over time (doing abhorrent things, fermenting cult like audiences)

- ragebait/political content is so damn popular and common it sneaks into recommendations despite me not watching it

- Ai is everywhere

- general fatigue with how predictable the content is even with interesting topics

Yet it still has the worst UI/UX for a TV

Is that why Youtube has become unwatchable?

It's a tool like anything else. I learn SO MUCH from Youtube. Watching someone DIY something where they show all the steps, makes it so accessible. I then learn from them and create some really intricate things from different domains without any formal training. I'm talking car repairs, electrical engineering, woodworking, metal work, gardening, 3d printing. The list goes on and on.

Google figured out how to get all those creators to work for free, to put a nice coat of paint on their fascism Trojan horse. It's a tool of oppression, masquerading as a tool of expression.

sure, but it doesn't mean that the tool isn't actually useful. Gmail collects all your data, but it's still a great service.

Google gives creators 55% of ad revenue.

I don't understand, why isn't Youtube social yet. By that I mean why can't I subscribe to other recommendations by creator of the channel Posy or Martijn Doolaard or Sisyphus 55.

In the web version, at the bottom of the channel page, there's a list of which subscribers that creator subscribes to, no?

At least that's how I interpreted that section.

I mean these creators can create their personal recommendation streams (of other videos they liked) and some weighted combination of those items could enter my recommendations. This feature is present in Soundcloud.

That does sound like it could be interesting, however it also sounds like it could be horrible. Just because I subscribe to a creator doesn't always mean I align with their views on everything, so could fill my feed with junk.

I guess it would have to be another setting along with the subscription flag.

It's true... but such an awful double edged sword.

I have quite a bit of experience as an auto mechanic, and love using youtube to find footage of something I'm considering doing or some item I'm considering buying. Just the effort+time savings alone is a game changer. Previously I would download FSMs for something I was considering acquiring to see what it's really like to work on / maintain / something of the internals, to minimize risk of buyer's remorse.

However, most the videos I find of people DIYing things are utter trash when it comes to actual guidance. The readily available footage of internals and failure modes is super valuable, but most these videos will do more harm than good when actually listened to. It's a whole lot of the blind leading the deaf. And the youtubers generally speak authoritatively about things they're clearly doing incorrectly to anyone experienced.

We had the same problem in the web forums era, but the conveniently accessible instructional video format strikes me as far more problematic. At least in the web forums it was entirely a conversational text format, so you were already in the context of reading comments, and the discussion would usually call out idiots immediately front and center. In the youtube videos, especially viewed on mobile, the comments are something you must seek out past the ads, must mode switch from watching tv to reading something, and are usually filled with morons anyways.

I could see that. Some times I'll also use it to gain consensus from a few different creators. The best ones will show when they fail so its a learning experience for everyone.

The major problem with relying on YouTube content for general automotive diagnosis and repair is that it doesn't tend to be general purpose. It's always "how this one guy fixed this one problem on this one car." A video could have a title like "Fixing a 2002 Toyota Corolla that won't start" but all it shows is the guy jumping right into replacing his fuel pump. There can be many other reasons that a 2002 Corolla won't start, but you're going to have to search through 100s of other videos to find the one that exactly matches your car's root cause, which you don't know until you diagnose it yourself.

The repair steps tend to range from so-so to excellent. The diagnosis steps are almost always very lacking.

Or they "fix" their issue by replacing the fuel pump, but totally neglected to point out what actually fixed their problem was the clogged pick-up sock they incidentally replaced while replacing the fuel pump. And never even looked inside the tank to address, let alone identify, their real problem.

Seen this kind of thing play out on YT too many times to count.

Google is planning to connect vidgen to YouTube.

Expect a full-on slop tsunami, with people running bots that first generate half facts and outright hallucinations from Gemini, and then generate a visual tutorial for it to post to YouTube.

"For the DIYer, a tutorial on strengthening beams. Step 1: rub glue on them."

I used to think this. But over time everything just became infomercials.

'Ok lets install these parts from 123 parts'

I hate it. I refuse to volunteer to be subtly (or not so subtly) manipulated by Youtubers.

All the music production people are suddenly revealing tools they use, that oh wow, I'm so lucky, are going on sale for black friday. Weird that I've never seen them use these 'goto' tools ever before on their channels. Hmmm.

In a word, way less free. And more commercials.

All you pirates with your archives and torrents. You are Luke Skywalker here.

SmartTube on Android TV. Brilliant, makes YouTube usable, Sponsorblock baked in.

So I'm watching a thing on youtube. 5 minutes in I get a commercial.

SmartTube can seamlessly delete that commercial?

Yes, no ads from Google's side and ads by creators themselves (e.g. Raid Shadow Legends, SquareSpace, Manscaped, NordVPN etc. etc.) get skipped via a community-sourced database called Sponsorblock.

https://sponsor.ajay.app/

(Sponsorblock is also available as a browser extension for most browsers but has an open API for other developers to use)

I don't understand why you wouldn't just get yt premium. You get the same features and it pays out well. YouTube premium views are like gold nuggets for creators.

No Sponsorblock (so doesn't block ads by creators themselves, the cliches like NordVPN/SquareSpace etc. you have to manually skip)

They also keep upping the price every so often. SmartTube is free.

I had YouTube Premium via a VPN subscription then they cracked down on it, sod em! Why do I have to pay more because I'm a Brit than if I were an Indian? Don't bull me on "because I live in a Western country I've got a better salary etc.". If they can afford to provide it to Indians for a lower price then why would it cost them more to provide it to me? Same bandwidth costs. Greed.

Does YT Premium have something Luke SponsorBlock? Can I press a button to remove Shorts from search results? Can I reenable seeing dislikes under videos to know which ones are not worth watching?

If not, then I still need to have a custom app/browser extension... at which point why would I pay for subscription anyway?

I use Smarttube and I pay for Youtube premium, I guess I am an edge case. The Youtube app has nowhere near the customizable features Smarttube has. And I can completely block all "shorts" using Smarttube. I pay for Youtube premium because I also often use Youtube in a web browser, so no ads there is still helpful.

"I don't understand why you wouldn't just give the platform that continually gets worse your money for a slightly less worse experience"

I can't believe anybody who did not start using youtube yesterday would ever consider rewarding them. The sheer amount of overwhelmingly negative and widely disliked shit they do every single year for the last decade is staggering.

Sponsor block is much less useful now Premium subscriptions have the "skip commonly skipped section" feature, which is always the sponsored content. With the addition of this, you can avoid ads and sponsors well enough now on Premium for me.

I was pleasantly surprised YouTube came out with a first party tool to skip sponcon.

> https://dataconomy.com/2025/07/30/youtubes-ai-powered-jump-a...

I can imagine creators aren't going to be happy about that. Can't see it lasting long.

Perhaps, but its been a while now and AFAIK has been rolled out to all of YouTube's apps, even the integrated TV ones.

It only shows up for YouTube premium users, and premium user views pay more than ad supported views.

I’m sure they would much rather a premium user watches and skips the sponsor section than the usual HN viewer who has ads and sponsor sections blocked.

Sponsorblock is only one small part of the great features of Smarttube. Completely removing all "shorts" is the reason I switched to it. And the UI is very customizable, where the Youtube app is not customizable at all. Smarttube has unlocked so much potential that the Youtube app just doesn;t offer.

Youtube subscription is worth it IMO. No ads, just have to deal with live reads but youtube has a skip button for those.

> just have to deal with live reads

Sponsorblock takes care of >95% of those.

There are no commercials with YouTube Premium, which is totally worth it. Why people feel entitled to pirate things still is incredible. People fundamentally hate paying artists for their work even though it's incredibly cheap, because they can come up with some bogus way to blame a corporation and feel, like you said here, laughably, like Luke Skywalker. Insane.

What is the greater contribution to society, the movie or the money paid to see the movie?

Youtube premium is like $15/mo. I believe it was more for the family plan I used to have. I canceled it like a year ago and don’t feel I miss it at all. I just don’t think Google is a company I should ever give money to directly. If some 3rd party service blocked YouTube for $15/mo I’d be more inclined to pay them vs Google.

Avoiding commercials isn't piracy

I swear to God, I can't go three clicks on YouTube without seeing a recommended video like "BASED Trump OWNS woke moralist!"

Every time I see anything like that, I'm always clicking not interested, don't recommend channel, etc. But it doesn't help. I would think it's something to do with my searches, or someone in my household watching this sort of content behind my back, but if you look at the front page of YouTube before having searched anything (you can do this through third party services such as GrayJay; it was getting so bad that YouTube itself had to disable their front page when you're not logged in. Seriously, try opening YouTube in an incognito tab. I promise you they would not disable their front page without an extremely important reason to; front pages are prime space!) it's all the same kind of content. Youtube as it stands is worse than the most hyperbolic satirizations of Fox News. FAANG are the ones pushing the fascism. FAANG are the mouths of our owners.

Why even look at the recommendations? Just watch videos that you searched for or those from known accounts.

If you can't help yourself scrolling through the recommendations, there are browser extensions that will hide them.

Those extensions are ostrich hats

https://calisphere.org/clip/500x500/26157/0c7951eaf2251821c1...

They're very different. If everyone bought an ostrich hat, the problem in the cartoon would grow only bigger, more and more victims being claimed. If everyone used those extensions, the exact opposite would happen - the problem would be solved, there would be no more victims. Sure, it would become a cat and mouse game, but the premise still holds.

I suppose you're right.

Because recommendations can be useful for discovering new things?

I watch all kinds of great stuff on youtube that I enjoy, over a pretty broad range that starts with building drag racing cars and ends with videos of quietly walking through Japanese cities at night.

Somewhere in between those points lies more-technical presenters with a knack for cleanly delivering the best technical explanations they know how to make -- people like Geerling, Lovett, Wendell, Hillhouse, Jones, and Black.

I learn a ton from these people, and I was first introduced to their youtube channels by The Algorithm.

Meanwhile: I never, ever get weird MAGA spam or political hate on YouTube -- and I never have.

Through years of mostly very passive training, the algorithm treats me pretty well, actually.

A browse through my youtube recommendations mostly shows a bunch of engineering, machining, and car topics. Stuff that is replete with general pleasantness, and that is devoid of politics.

Even the clickbait is dialed down nearly to zero.

And maybe that makes sense, for me, since nobody but me has ever used my youtube account for anything -- and therefore, nobody has ever had an opportunity to piss in my well.

I have to say this tells us more about you than it says about Google. I never see such recommendations. The theories that I would look into if this were happening to me, which I reiterate it certainly is not, would be in the following order: perhaps you've installed an extension that is inserting content into your life; you are using anonymization techniques that mix your identity with that of other people who are interested in such content; you share a household with such people; you watch content that you do not realize is associated with right-wing content.

This is victim-blaming mentality to a T.

I don't understand the goal of your post. What is the solution you're proposing for those things? That they don't use anonymization techniques? They kick out the other people from their home?

The OP is saying they don't watch that kind of content and they mark the videos as "not interested" and Youtube is still pushing the content. The onus is on Youtube to stop. Presumably OP is logged in, or if they're not, then Youtube still uses browser fingerprinting techniques. It seems simple on Youtube's side to fix the problem. Blaming the OP here doesn't make sense.

It's not at all clear that the OP is logged in, or that YouTube is doing anything at all. This is HN, where it passes for rational thought that everyone installs rootkit "privacy" extensions in their browser and uses a VPN of no reputable provenance.

The goal of my post is to communicate that this does not resemble the mainstream experience of using YouTube.

I never see anything like this and I would definitely notice. I use YouTube constantly and am very liberal. Worst I get is the occasional JRE I have to swat away.

I'm constantly being pushed hard left or hard right videos. I am subbed to nothing political and while I've watched a few before, no matter how much "Not interested" or "Dont recommend channel" I've done, I consistently get pushed these videos.

Personally drives me off the platform, but hard since my subs are so unique and great.

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