YouTube Blocks Background Listening Workaround for Free Users | Hacker News Reader

YouTube Blocks Background Listening Workaround for Free Users

pcmag.com

47 pointsripe44 comments

It seems crazy and impossible now, but imagine this notion: Software should serve the needs of the user.

Software that does things the user doesn't want, like try to trick money out of him, waste his bandwidth, or fill his screen with unwanted ads used to have a name: Malware. We've redefined that term to mean when a non-BigTech firm does those things, but the definition used to be functional, not attributional.

RMS warned us of this day, and now it is here. You don't control your data or the code that operates upon it. That would've sucked in 1990, but since then, we've migrated our entire lives into that code/data. The degree to which it embodies your very existence is the degree to which you have lost control over your life, which for most of us is total. You lost that control but it didn't disappear; it is now owned by someone else, commoditized and exchanged, redirected and engineered. Enjoy the ride if you can, because you're just in the passenger seat.

Would it be better if youtube removed the free, ad supported version entirely, and only allowed paid users?

It would be better if there was a better value proposition, instead of “pay to get what we removed”.

It’s not as though free users listening with the app in the background is somehow an additional marginal expense as opposed to them listening with the app in the foreground.

It actually is a marginal expense. There are two main reasons.

For music videos there are different licensing terms for listening vs music videos. So if they don't appease the licenser than their contract will be less favourable.

And of course ads will pay less for people who aren't looking (although his is technically lost revenue, not an expense).

It actually is an addition marginal expense. They have to pay for infrastructure and possibly licensing fees.

yeah, as it would open up the market

There is no free Google product. You pay for all of them with your data, your privacy, and your attention.

Your data is worth far more to them than a $13/month subscription fee. In fact, if you do pay it, the data becomes even more valuable, because you're now guaranteed to always be logged in. You're also likely to use it more to get more "value" out of your purchase, generating even more value (for them). Finally, you've also identified yourself as the kind of person that pays for things that should be actually free.

Worse than all of this, when you use Google (or any of these malware/spyware companies), thanks to network effects, you don't just pay for it with your freedom, you pay for it with some of everyone else's too.

> There is no free Google product.

You can take great advantage of them if you can resist the "payment".

It is a bit of freeloading. The product exists because there are multitude of humans that cannot help but "pay".

Setting aside whether the payment with my data is worth it - I don't understand why youtube would be in the category of "things that should be actually free". They have server costs, and employee costs, and they pay out to creators - somebody has to pay those bills.

I actually think yes.

Recently they removed the ability to search by date. And on Maps they drastically reduced the info shown to non-logged in users.

Some alternatives recently discussed:

NewPipe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47020218

PipePipe: https://pipepipe.dev/

I haven’t used any of these alternatives myself.

Newpipe has been very good at playing and patching the cat and mouse games that YouTube will suddenly roll out now and again.

If you're fine with a paid option (although it's source-available and distributed for "free" on their website), then Grayjay [0] is my personal favourite. I can't remember the last time I saw an error. On NewPipe, I can't say the same.

[0]: https://grayjay.app/

Alternatively if you're interested in paying, YouTube Music has a subscription option, or YouTube Premium includes YouTube Music.

> interested in paying

Does this really happen? Do people think, "I wonder what else I can pay for today, I love paying"?

Revanced on Android devices is the perfect solution for all of the youtube shortcomings

Or skipvids.com if you don't want to install anything

Whenever I see this particular "feature" being blocked, all I can think of is my own past personal usage of this feature. It was purely to listen to podcasts or whatever while in the car. So by default this feature should just work, and it should be: turn on the source and listen.

Instead its disabled to try to extract more revenue out of users, so my personal use case becomes a potential road hazard for people who didn't give in and instead are fiddling with their phone to ensure that it keeps playing.

Can't imagine this is even a moment of discussion in 2026 when making the decision to block something like this.

my current flow for this if i ever have the misfortune of only having youtube as a source, is to turn on the video, and face the screen away from me in the cup holder. So personally I've found what i consider to be a safe alternative.

Can't imagine younger drivers are going to go through the same amount of caution to avoid grabbing their phone or looking at a video playing while they are driving.

> So personally I've found what i consider to be a safe alternative.

A bit more effort, but downloading the podcast and listening to it via a basic audio player app that does not further enshitify itself daily is even safer.

at some point ima stop being lazy and setup the reverse proxy for my jellyfin server and this will be a smooth "ytaudio {url}" alias that downloads through ytdlp and places it in the proper folder .

For now its a rare enough occurrence where i just keep neglecting it.

Yeah, how many podcasts are Youtube exclusive? I can't imagine there's that many, if any at all.

its usually like an old video from some conference or something.

yt-dlp actually downloads from more sites than just Youtube.

Whether a given podcast is on a site it will download from is a different question.

Before I put a modded Youtube app on my phone to re-enable the feature, I would just leave the screen on, turn the brightness down, and place the phone face-down on my passenger seat (all before taking the vehicle out of park, of course).

Vinegar extension still works on iOS. It restores the native HTML5 <video> element to websites like YouTube that go out of their way to circumvent it or add listeners to pause it when focus leaves the page. Since it’s the native video element, it works with the native iOS picture-in-picture.

It should frankly be illegal for Google to interfere with this like they try to do, but luckily this extension solves the problem.

This does work with the screen on. But at least for me Vinegar background audio while locked hasn’t worked for the past several weeks. Once you lock it no longer recognizes there’s any media to play.

Still works for me. I still get the media overlay that tells me what is playing and elapsed/remaining time, but the actual controls do nothing (play/pause, rewind/forward).

Sometimes I get double audio; usually a refresh of the page fixes it.

It has a lot of issues and sometimes it seems like there are two copies of the video – the one I’ve backgrounded and the one on the main page. So if I lock my phone it’ll go back to the part of the video the last time the phone was locked or start at 0:00. This is definitely annoying but if I fiddle with it enough I can get it to work okay-ish.

Still seems to work with Firefox on Android and the Video Background fix extension too.

The only way to listen in the background on all browsers is via skipvids.com

For android and desktop, it's automatic when you lock your screen.

For the latest ios they have a Pip and audio mode button.

“Last year, video watchers using them were greeted by longer video loading times and increased buffering on YouTube.”

Ah yes, the Five Second Gaslight. “Experiencing interruptions? Find out more!” when it’s the site intentionally shoving a 5 second delay in and getting people to blame their ISPs for connectivity issues when YouTube was the one dicking around.

"using ad blocker? your video is delayed 5 seconds, ad viewers receive a considerable amount more suffering!"

Huh, I thought the delay was Google trying to make using non-Chrome browsers a pain. Didn't realize it was because of ublock origin, not Firefox.

Such a poor management team at YouTube lately.

No, this is the enshitification phase as laid out by Cory Docktrow:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/28/enshittification/

They are now in the phase of making everything worse in a vain attempt to increase ad (or subscription) revenue streams.

Who cares about what free users want?

I honestly don't know if this is sarcasm or not, but I would think, just based on the fact that 96% of users are free users, they shouldn't try too hard to piss them off.

Free users generate negative revenue, so even if a million of free users leave and a thousand convert to paid users, it's still a net win for Youtube.

Why wouldn't I assume they're just going to screw over their paid customers too? Now ask me why I would never pay for YouTube Premium. And there's your answer. You're actively discouraging people from giving you their money which was the entire purpose of having a business to begin with.

Google is an advertising company. Its goal is to create growth and maximize profits. How do you get more money if the free users leave? Raise the subscription prices.

If in the current arrangement the free users represent a majority of the costs, hassle and noise and a shrinking or stagnant share of revenue, then you get more money by turning the screws and seeing how many convert.

So what? I just use Tasker to disable the touch screen and then I put my phone in my pocket.

Seeing Google do things like this (and the change to how they display ads on Google.com) makes me wonder how much hot water they are in with AI spending.

At least they had a few tricks up their sleeve to keep it looking like growth is happening. Wonder how long it can last, though.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com