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FixYT

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458 pointsturbo_pax114 comments

I think this is completely wrong approach. We as a community should stop giving G/YT our traffic if their stuff does not please us instead of making an effort to give them more traffic.

But then you find yourself up against their network effects and more often than not, it goes absolutely nowhere. If you just want a nicer YouTube, step 1 is at least experimenting within the confines of the existing one. Otherwise you'd need to worry about all of the infrastructure and accepting video uploads, encoding, etc. Unless you're on a crusade against Google/YouTube, this is absolutely the sane way of starting out.

This is unreasonable. YT isn't going to disappear. Did myspace? No.

The fact that YT provides an API is plenty to reface it. You should view this website as another from of protest. Which of there have been plenty of protests in recent.

It's not wrong, just a different one.

... wait, MySpace is still around?

Not really. The brand is, but it's a completely different service now.

You can log in with your Facebook account now. Tells you pretty much all you need to know.

I wouldn't say it's completely different. It certainly is positioned in a completely different way but one can still log in and view their old pages and content.

Yes. And thanks for that. There are older bands that still have their music on myspace and nowhere else.

YT isn't going to disappear. Did myspace?

Yes...?

Not literally, but in many other ways they absolutely fell off a cliff.

YT could disappear, but you'd have to pour a _lot_ of money into it.

Isn't that exactly what Google tried before giving in and buying YouTube?

... Are you saying we should buy YouTube?

Existing in a vacuum != existence in reality.

Sign me up, i want youtube to be killed dead!!!! Youtube is cool but google jumps in and just ruins your experience. They asked me 4 time before to adjust my name and i chose my current username....4 times. Now, for the last two weeks i have been getting this pop again but now i must apparently sign up for G+, when i try and comment, guess what that fu popup again, i cannot comment unless i join G+.I have been just closing the window and saying, "O well that saves me some time wasting at least." Google is now as arrogant as Microsoft was and don't care about what the consumer wants but where they want to push you. I will never use G+, Google will save themselves the distraction by shutting down that crap, but they so blinded by facebook that they losing sight of the actual power they have.

They got this idea in their head that they need to create the complete identity for users to target ads better. This idea came about when the press and pundits where saying that facebook was so valuable because of realnames and user identity. The issue is that it's been proven that you can build a profile from a person's search history, even Target can predict if you are pregnant. So why waste time with this shit, anger your users and destroy your brands value?

So all you have to do is start a tech company that does this. When Google knock on your doors, with literally one and half billion dollars of Google stock, you have to say "No".

Would you do that? Could you blame anyone else for doing that?

I couldn't do it, but Snapchat's CEO turned down a cool $3 billion.

It can be done.

>Snapchat's CEO turned down a cool $3 billion

Because word is he's getting offers for over $4 billion

And next week somebody will post that Apple offers $5 billion.

Thanks for mentioning about the company. I've never heard about it until now. Surprisingly enough I had to look at Wikipedia to know what they do and further details. Their website currently gives no clue about anything they do but a new product called "Stories", which for newcomers like me means zilch.

Youtube is a social product and Google+ is a (vastly better) social product. Of course Google is merging them. Google has multiple social services and merges them together. You have multiple Google accounts and... oh. You... don't merge them together. In fact you fight it every day for years. No kidding that at this point, by the time the change has stopped giving you leeway that you're frustrated your protest has stacked up to nothing.

In fact if you merge your Google accounts your protest isn't lost either. Your protest has been and is nothing. It's just in your head. Merge your Google accounts and use Google's social product or don't. If you wanted to protest Google why didn't you just stop using it? Or stop using it now?

I use incognito mode to use anything Google. You log in with your chosen identity and aren't nagged about merging any others.

Yes, creativity and experiments aren't the answer. It's rejection and protest that will solve all our imaginary problems.

Where would you host the videos? The amount of traffic they see, and the amount of videos they store is incredible. For example:

http://9to5google.com/2013/11/11/netflix-and-youtube-account...

Self-host. YouTube produces massive amounts of traffic because it has so many videos. But if you divide all that traffic to small independent operators then the amounts would be far more manageable.

Once you are self-hosting you could alleviate any potential bandwidth issues with a CDN such as CloudFlare/Akamai and/or by using P2P protocols such as BitTorrent.

A bit rough, but yeah. The 3rd world is not yet ready to do this much video, because of mobile data prices. Let's stick to the awesome plain text solutions & low bandwidth media for now. (Canvas, cached SVGs, bluetooth & wifi, etc...) If we stick to text and backwards compatible media we can solve all internet problems by tying phones to balloons.

We should aim to make rms proud, but choose MIT because that code is more easily reusable.

It's nice but if you ever even appear to cut into their ad model they'll shut ya down. Gotta pay the engineers, other employees, electric bill etc.... youtube ain't free ;)

EDIT: I really like the site & hope you flesh it out. Just not getting my hopes up too high. :)

YouTube only shows ads in the video right? Looks like those are still being shown.

Nope - they run homepage banners, sidebar ads and occasionally full-page adverts (that hijack the background). It's surreal browsing without Adblock occasionally.

Hmm, interesting. I get sidebar ads occasionally, but I've never noticed the other ones - maybe I just tune them out when I see them. (I use ghostery, but disabled it temporarily for testing this out.)

Not to mention the ads shown next to original content created by youtube creators earn them a living.

Ads displayed around the video are almost always tied to the ad displayed on the video and ads displayed on the video are part of the revenue-sharing program.

Wow. I wonder how much I miss while using Adblock. That sounds miserable.

I've built something a little bit more fleshed out, actually... How about a site that lets you search and watch videos at the same time. And also does Vimeo. And lets you save them to personal collections. Here you go. http://huzzaz.com/search

This is very cool! The interface should get a little more love, though?

Redisplaying YouTube content on other websites is explicitly allowed. Ads run in the embedded player, which they made easily available and usable on purpose.

What is NOT allowed, as far as I know, is using their API and player to make a website that does nothing but show YouTube content.

Last time I checked if all your are doing is repackaging their content but not adding any other content of substance to the page, it is against the TOS. This was a couple years ago but that was my understanding.

Yup, they can block your domain from embedding if they want.

They do make it tricky to monetize, though. IIRC, you're not allowed to accept payments or show your own ads alongside the videos.

It is actually not against their TOS to accept payments or run additional ads alongside their content.

It might be, depending on what else is on the page. Clause 4(d) of the Terms of Service[1] reads:

"You agree not to use the Service for any of the following commercial uses unless you obtain YouTube's prior written approval:

- the sale of access to the Service;

- the sale of advertising, sponsorships, or promotions placed on or within the Service or Content; or

- the sale of advertising, sponsorships, or promotions on any page of an ad-enabled blog or website containing Content delivered via the Service, unless other material not obtained from YouTube appears on the same page and is of sufficient value to be the basis for such sales."

[1] http://www.youtube.com/static?template=terms

I subscribe to Avdi Grimm's excellent RubyTapas series, and the biggest pain about it is the lack of a web viewer. Google seems to be explicitly disallowing him to use YT, and that really sucks. Anyone looking to make and sell videos has to put them on Amazon or whatever and make you download them.

If those videos were available to be purchased from his site, or if you could subscribe to his site to get premium video content, do you think that you would do that?

I already pay nine bucks a month for the subscription. I found user-made scripts to download the files on his site, and did so, but that's not a real solution because I don't like storing that kind of stuff on my laptop, and Dropbox or whatever isn't any better than just getting it from his site, save having them in two places. I'd definitely pay more for a web viewer.

That last one seems to the be the kicker, right? Interesting...

As I'm involved with an open source analysis and visualization tool named yt [1][2], this submission made my heart skip a beat.

[1] http://yt-project.org

[2] Neal Stephenson reference.

yt-project looks interesting. thanks for sharing.

I love it. With all the horrible and bloated changes they have been making, I thought there would be an opportunity to create simpler version of or alternate of YouTube. I guess you are still using YouTube contents so they can block you if they wish.

I still think there is an opportunity to create an alternate video sharing site that's good enough.

Good job, though! I will be using your site instead of youtube as long as your site is live.

There's also Google's own version of trimmed down youtube: http://www.youtube.com/feather_beta

After enabling that I've never looked back. No comments and loads way faster.

This should be more well known. I just enabled it and don't plan on ever looking back.

Until you want to watch a playlist or a channel without choosing each video each time.

Feather Beta doesn't work with the "Play all" links or playlists in general.

I created a little thing for making and sharing playlists: http://www.cueyoutube.com/

I tweet my lists using the hashtag #cueyoutube which means I can always go back and find them later using http://snapbird.org/

This is the problem I ran into, I originally enabled it think it was great and the next day promptly disabled it because of this.

You're right, this is wonderful.

Now all that's missing is comments - how about this?

https://github.com/saibotd/embeddit

Both this and Youtube's own Feather beta seem to lack support for playlists. I like playlists for listening to music at work, for example Brad Neely's "America, Now" videos (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPQrXUpvkuc&list=PLD8217FD2EE...). Also useful for watching web series like Marble Hornets. I love a simpler experience, but I think content creators will want playlists.

Got you covered. http://huzzaz.com/search

http://www.tubalr.com/ is the best for Youtube music, it has automatic playlists for artists

After getting fed up with the ongoing changes to subscriptions I created a barebones tool to act as a replacement. No Google/Youtube account needed, new videos are fetched using the API, setup is git clone and open in browser.

https://github.com/adabei/tubeless/

Pro Tip: Just use github pages to instantly give people a demo. All you need for that is to make a gh-pages branch and rename your main file to index.html.

Thanks, that's a good idea. This would eliminate the need to download anything and make it usable from mobile without any additional steps!

Indeed! Did the same for my own youtube thingie: https://github.com/daviddeutsch/yt-sanegrid/

I'm a big fan of toogles and its chrome extension.

http://toogl.es/#/browse

from http://fixyt.com/about : "Thanks to toogl.es for the like/dislike concept. Toogl.es is an awesome YouTube alternative too."

Thank you whoever you are. May the randomness of the Universe be in your favor.

- It's blazing fast, much faster than the original.

- Doesn't have that stupid loading bar at the top.

- No more glitched video page loads.

- Isn't going to be redesigned every 5 months like YT.

- The video player is center aligned and not left aligned.

- Drops all the unnecessary UI elements and doesn't bother me to start using my real name with G+.

I've become so pissed off at Google for the way it's been handling YT redesigns (and Analytics redesigns too). It's like they get the most amateur designers out of high school, and go on an a/b test spree by changing absolutely everything they can. YT's gone through 3+ redesigns now. Each one getting progressively more annoying than the last. And they just keep tinkering with things that aren't broken. Remember the slideshow playlist at the bottom of the screen a year back? And who in their right mind would left align the div holding a video player?!

It's annoying when a company treats one of its flagship products like a never ending science project experiment.

Good job on FixYT, my only suggestion: give me the option to turn the color scheme black.

I very much agree. I feel like every Google product is going straight downhill in similar ways.. even the ones unrelated to Google+. There must be some grand design to the whole thing but I don't see how it can all be money.

It's blazing fast, much faster than the original.

It really is, I'd love for whoever made this to show a breakdown - front-end and back-end - of what decisions they made that added up to this.

As always, I love sites that strip down YouTube. YouTube houses tons of great content; however, they seem to be making their consumers pretty unhappy. Check out http://www.tubalr.com it's my app and focuses on YouTube's music content.

Grats on hitting the front page and I hope you can retain users, its the hardest part about websites like this.

I would use tubalr more often, but whenever I need it, I can't remember what it is called. I've liked you on Facebook, so my usual way of finding it is by going there and finding you amongst my likes.

In other words, you should try to come further up on google searches for "youtube music".

I've heard this far to many times :( Thanks for being a user when you can think of the name though!

Same here. I usually Google for tubular or tublr and can't find it.

> "supports privacy and stores no information"

Interesting that there's still a Google Analytics tracking call on the page.

but hey, fixyt themselves don't store the info, so... i guess it's fine, right?

i'm getting a little tired of the 'privacy backlash' from many quarters, as I don't really get what people are after. piggybacking on youtube, which needs to generate revenue and does so by relevant ads... just strikes me as juvenile.

You want "privacy" but you also want the fruits of non-private endeavors? Too bad. Build an entire video hosting and streaming service, give it away for free, focus on 'privacy', and see how far you get. But leeching off YT feels wrong.

The big privacy concern with YT is that your viewing history will be displayed to your friends and acquaintances, attached to your real name.

People can say, "Don't be ridiculous! They would never!", but Google is so utterly tone-deaf to user concerns that people, myself included, just can't rule it out. And it makes us angry.

Think back to Buzz: suddenly, you could view all of your contacts' contacts!! That's the level of deafness Google has to how you might want your data displayed to people you know...and that's why this feature is so unacceptable to pretty much everyone.

Then that should be specifically highlighted as a concern and a fix.

I don't even know what people mean by 'privacy' anymore - it means so many things to different people. A friend of mine started a 'social network focused on privacy'. Except that when you signed up, your details were available to anyone else who'd signed up - they could browse all existing members. Was that 'private'? I complained and he's changed the behavior, but the point is his notion of 'privacy' was apparently radically different than mine.

It's shocking that only now I realize just how incredibly bad YouTube has become.

It's a consequence of google's empire-itis. If they view youtube in the mold of their major business they see they can spend most of their effort working on the technical problems, slap some ads on it, and then call it a day. Even though this might provide a good platform for many people to host videos and is probably revenue positive or at worst neutral for google, nevertheless it doesn't do much to advance an entire new industry.

In many ways youtube would be better without google. The technological problems would be more severe and a bigger challenge, but such a youtube would likely be smarter about finding ways to better monetize content and to pass on that monetization to creators (to create a virtual cycle of new content, and so forth). As it stands now youtube barely acknowledges creators as anything more than any other ordinary users of the site.

I use a browser plugin that strips down the actual site to a minimal version http://www.clea.nr

It's by far the best solution I've found since it stays out of the way, and when I click on a Youtube link the page is much nicer.

There's also YouTube's own Feather beta: http://www.youtube.com/feather_beta

And https://youtube.com/tv

Can't seem to install the plugin - chrome is blocking the installation and I can't find it in the chrome extension store...

generalized readability/printfriendly .. pretty nice.

sent from my 2006 laptop

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/youtube-cente... is useful, especially fixing buffering and quality.

http://www.youtube.com/feather_beta

The overbloatiness of YouTube and the artsy-fartsy nature of Vimeo have left a vacuum for something that would be similar to the imgur of videos. I wouldn't be so surprised if someone applied to a venture capital firm with this sort of thing.

Does this get around the issue of local ISPs caching the content and then causing the video download to be extremely slow?

I've heard there's a way get your browser to always connect directly to YouTube's servers, but I could never get it to work.

It is just youtube embedded plays. The whole thing will not work if a video has disabled embedding.

I mentioned this in another thread but YouTube feather (beta) is pretty much this. It strips down everything but the video and the recommendations on the side. Also it is an official Google feature.

For those interested: https://www.youtube.com/feather_beta

I love how channels are presented. Now I can actually see the new videos.

Will use this instead of YouTube for a while!

PS Can you make "load more" optional? I just want stuff to be loaded as I scroll automagically. :)

Finally, related videos that are related to the video!

For some reason google decided to show videos 'relevant' to me. But all I want is videos related to what i'm watching.

Thanks, I really like it.

On my recent trip, I wanted to watch some YouTube videos in the air but there wasn't WiFi on my flight. I found an app called MxTube for iPad and it blew my mind how much cleaner, faster, and more intuitive it was than the REAL YouTube app. Added benefit - You can cache videos for offline playback. I happily paid the $1.99 pro upgrade to support the developer.

If it could get around youtube's annoying DASH and buffer the entire video while paused I would use it!

Look for the Youtube Center addon or extension. Among the many options is disabling DASH.

Careful, though - Google is fighting back against this and in many cases, you don't get all resolutions when disabling dash.

Looks like the YouTube specific autocomplete uses an undocumented Google API at suggestqueries.google.com

Someone documented it here:

http://shreyaschand.com/blog/2013/01/03/google-autocomplete-...

Fantastic! There's so much wrong with Youtube these days. It's great that someone is trying to fix it! Now, a nitpick... Your about page has a typo. You've got the word recommendation with only one m. If it were my site, I'd want someone to tell me.

I thought about doing something similar a few years ago but gave up after reading in their TOS that in order for embedding to be allowed, the page cannot be specifically about the video but instead must simply use the video to enhance the original content on the page.

I've been using Toogles all this time. This seems even faster. Will switch between both as each have their points. Thanks.

And Googlers, you've run YouTube into the ground with clutter. Stop. Roll back. And get rid of tying of it to G+. We don't want that.

Recommendations are actually nice, but the problem on YT is how they are based on the current video and my personal browsing history at the same time. I think in earlier days they were just based on the current video and this made much more sense to me.

This is what YouTube should be like (or how it once was actually).

However, I agree with others that building a UI on top of it is not much of innovation. I'd rather see new and better apps instead of new and better props for the old and ugly services.

All the videos that require sign in due to "rated content", seems to be not working since they require sign in. I dont even get a sign in option, just "error occurred".

I don't have a youtube account so this site is a good way to watch youtube videos with content restrictions.

Simply awesome, in an instant I remembered all of the reasons I used to like youtube.

What's the real purpose behind this site? All I see is YouTube with Bootstrap.

Read about the purpose here: http://fixyt.com/about

Thank you, now I can watch yt videos without any flash player!

This is so good! Hoping YouTube takes a clue or two

That Noah movie looks absolutely "epic".

Seems so much faster than Youtube.

Did they just fix the comment?

Shameless plug for playr.me

already watched and hide it would be great!

where can I comment ?

just kidding, great job

It's completely useless to me. All the important content discovery features are gone. The search is horrible, all the nice filtering options YT has aren't there.

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