Newpipe remains one of the best solutions for background playback. They do tend to move pretty quickly to patch "fixes" that YouTube throw in now and again. It's also useful for video backups if you need to preserve them for any reason.
This started happening for me a few weeks ago.
Lately I discovered Firefox with background play and sponsor block extensions still work. If this stops working hopefully tubular will be a good backup.
Except for on the TV (where I use SmartTube), all of my Youtube activity is done with web browsers.
Otherwise: On both big computers and with my pocket supercomputer alike, that means Firefox and uBlock Origin. It works quite well for navigating Youtube's website and watching videos.
An old iPad that I have suffers from Apple's deliberately baked-in lack of choice, but it does handle Youtube's website very well with Safari and AdBlock.
It has been a very long time since I've used Youtube's app on any device at all.
You can download only the soundpart as mp4 or opus too.
Same time, one can appreciate the YouTube business: once you give something away for free, people absolutely loose their fucking minds if you make it paid. Once you set the bar to zero for payment, people will murder in the streets and despise you if you reasonably charge for what could have been a paid product all along. So there's a psychological blocker to switching on payment that people are ready to go to war for. It's the same blocker that cripples "open source" sustainability. People quickly develop an entitlement-callous, and feel cheated if you require payment instead of just continuing to surrender value to them.
It reminds of how a group of primates will kill a handler who gives cake to one, but not the group. This "free / paid" tension triggers some kind of deep-rooted human fairness wiring that is really tricky to extinguish once activated. That's why you should never open source your code and never give stuff away for free, if you plan to posslby make money from it somehow or make it paid in future. Because if you ever withhold the siphon of value related to ads or other 'you as a product' models, they will launch a jihad against you.
I think it's interesting how the human fairness reflex, often correct, breaks down in the context of "provider / consumer" dynamics. Even if the provider is not some "evil mega corp" but simply a solo software creator, people will still feel you are attempting to rob them of all dignity and debase their honor if you require payment for what was previously gratis.
Oh well. Live and learn, YouTube.
If YouTube allowed syndication with other websites, for example, so I could watch videos on whatever website I wanted (with an appropriate portion of the revenue going to YouTube), I would have no problems with them changing their monetization model.
Hmmm, possible. How to test? Hard, given their monopoly status. Tho does Rumble offer paid subscriptions?
A small but perhaps weak counter to your thesis is that if people were really unwilling to negotiate with YouTube over cost/experience, why would they then so vehemently attempt to eradicate ads, rather that accepting them as a lesser cost than the subscription fee?
But I guess what you're really saying is that none of the costs YT deigns to levy is felt as fair by those complaining. Not the ads. Not the USD9 (?) / mo subscription, however localized. Thus it's not free-then-paid, it's "bad pricing" that's arming the militia? Were the pricing simply "fair" people would be happy to pay it. But what rational expectation could they have for a fair price? Unless I'm mistaking Disney+, Netflix, HBO, are all more expensive, but IMO provide less range. I'm less convinced "fair price" is it the more I think about it, but there could be something there. How else would you expand that?
Good, self contained point overall. Tho I'm going to side with the psychological factor as I've experienced that in other domains where the monopoly is not a factor. And the "merely a fair price" argument hinges on a sense of rationality which appears conspicuously absent from the reactions. Emotional and ape logic, yes, but objective and economic rationality + empathy logic? No.
Disney, Netflix, and HBO all fund the creation of and own the content they provide to users. Youtube does not. Youtube inserts itself as a middle-man taxing regular people sharing videos with other regular people. There is obviously a non-zero cost to infrastructure but their attempts to extract revenue go far, far beyond that, hence people feeling their prices are too high, whether the price is paid in ads or subscription fees.
When you say "their attempts to extract revenue go far beyond that"(A) I feel I can't accept that on good faith, I'd need to see numbers. Also I doubt this kind of data is the thing most people reacting with "prices are unfair" or "payment is bad", are drawing on, instinctively or not. So it's hard for me to accept this thesis as the source of ills. Tho, maybe it is. Maybe people's innate sense of fairness really does cover this, somehow.
I'm not aware of those numbers, so it doesn't seem that way to me, but maybe I'm just not across it. Can you give examples of your claim (A)?
Another way we could measure it is by the value of an ad-view relative to the price of the subscription they offer. Ad views are auctioned and go for different prices based on category, demographics of viewers, etc., and aggregate statistics are not provided, but an ad-view typically tends to be in the range of US$0.01 per ad view. A subscription fee of US$9* to avoid ads, then, would require viewing 900 ads to justify the cost. I suspect in reality most people don't see more than 100 ads in a month, so Youtube is likely generating an 8x profit margin over costs of not showing ads to Premium users, give or take depending on how you work out the napkin math. If people had an option to buy an ad-free subscription with none of the other premium features for $1/mo, I suspect the uptake would be significantly higher and feel fair to the general population.
*After looking it up, Youtube Premium apparently actually costs US$14.
Anecdotally, I used to spend, I believe, ¥480 per month for a Niconico subscription (Niconico is the Japanese domestic equivalent to Youtube). I was content paying this subscription fee for years, until they increased the price up by 50% to ¥720, and about two years ago the price further increased to ¥990. I cancelled my subscription and stopped using the website. I am not opposed to paying subscription fees to platforms, but when it feels extortionate, I won't. The same is likely true for many or most people.
Small strange nuance for me is when I switch to my corp account, and see an ad, sometimes I really enjoy the ad, because it's novel and creative. Sounds funny to say, and I probably wouldn't fele like that if I saw ads all the time. But some of the YT ads do seem pretty high quality.
I don't wanna trick anyone into showing me ad-free content, I just want a chance to choose.
If you marry somebody and they suddenly become a totally different person and try to extort you a common reaction is to feel deceived and unhappy. They have cheated you in a sense of the opportunity cost of being able to marry someone else.
That people might not understand that tells you something about them.
Anyway, in this case I think the analogy is a little overblown because the stakes are so different, but is revealing. You can way more easily divest of a software product than a marriage (presumably, tho that may differ locally). But, as in marriage, there's a interesting nuance: the stories we tell ourselves about what went wrong are so often one-sided, which lacks empathy for how the other person is probably just doing their best. A similar empahty mismatch with the entitlement of consumers who don't comprehend that the value they expect a person to provide them for free, should actually be compensated. As in, a free exchange.
That someone might confuse those could tell you 'something about them.' Or it could just be an honest mistake, on their part. That we're all likely to make.
Still the trigger to ape-brained fairness-wiring seems similar, and embodies that same one way empathy. Free and fair exchange, in commerce and relationships, should be based on more of a mutual empahty.
Thanks for bringing it up!
Arranged marriages are unpopular because we value choice. For the same reason we, westerners, abhor monopolies that transform society, wreck age old institutions, remove choice and limit access to what once was free.
Aside from that - what age old institutions are wrecked by monopolies, or which ones are you talking about it? Genuinely curious.
I see your point now about monopoly. It’s more sort of monopoly in the digital age and it’s pretty coherent what you’re saying, From the narrow point of view that you’re meaning here, and it is a significant point. I think the only solution in that case is you have to treat them as institutions and they have to be run for the public benefit - but saying that sounds ridiculous and I don’t think it could ever work so I guess our societies have to come up with some other solutions. But the problem, your point is referencing, is very real.