Louis Rossman/FUTO's YouTube app, GrayJay, now supports Sponsorblock... and shames you if you use it
Seriously this was very surprising. I've been experimenting with GrayJay since it was announced and I largely think it's a pretty sweet app. I know there are concerns over how it isn't "true open source" but it's a hell of a lot more open than ReVanced. Plus, I like the general design and philosophy of the app.
I updated the YouTube backend recently and to my surprise and delight they had added support for SponsorBlock. However, when I went to enable it, it warned me "turning this on harms creators" and made me click a box before I could continue.
Bruh, you're literally an ad-blocking YouTube frontend. What kind of mental gymnastics does it take to be facilitating ad-blocking and then at the same time shame the end-user for using an extension which simply automates seeking ahead in videos. Are you seriously gonna tell me that even without Sponsorblock, if I skip ahead past the sponsored ad read in a video, that I'm "harming the creator"?
Well, they can see whether you watched them or not. So technically still tracked. At least in the official youtube app.
They can see the percentage of people who watched that part of the video, as part of the video analytics. This doesn't track the user, though, at least not if you have history turned off, or are using another front end.
And I'd guess that's done in the backend instead of the frontend. They should be able to know how many times their server steamed a part of a video.
Well when a video is buffered it's loaded in memory but not viewed yet, they can't count loading the video as a view or they'd count the whole video as viewed if you simply buffered it in full, it would also screw up that watched timestamps feature to see which part has been played back most.
So yes they can count how many times it has been streamed but they also need to know you've watched it because sitting on pause while the video buffers all the way through isn't a view, it isn't watching those segments, but it does stream them from the servers, in the same way Newpipe and Grayjay does. Which is how a video can register no views despite being watched on something like NewPipe.