So long... I'll not be returning

Kodama@lemmy.ml to Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ@lemmy.dbzer0.com – 409 points –

I've used most available services, but discontinued one after another along with promises that a better user experience will be provided with reduced content and removed functionality with the slight price hike. YouTube was my first and last video service I paid for, only Spotify remains on the borderline.

116

Based on the screenshot I assume that you used youtube premium lite (what ever this was...) on your smartphone. Therefore, here the obligatory recommendation for NewPipe. Quasi Youtube Premium as apk. It has all the features you need:

  • no ads
  • you can close the app and your videos keep running in the background
  • you can turn off the screen and your videos will continue to run in the background

There is also the fork NewPipe x SponsorBlock (link to repository) which integrates SponsorBlock into the app. (duh...) This will also skip the creator's ad blocks in the video.

I'd also like to plug ReVanced. You do have to provide your own copy of the YouTube APK (easily downloadable from APKMirror), but it allows you to install multiple patches into the app, including Return YouTube Dislike, SponsorBlock, and other stuff. It allows background play and blocks ads, too. (You can see the list of available patches here.)

The problem I have with ReVanced is that it sometimes doesn't register videos as watched or doesn't save the watch progress. It happens pretty randomly too, one week everything works correctly then the other week nothing I watch gets saved

Huh. The only time I had that issue was when my adblocker app was blocking a specific domain that the YouTube app needed unblocked to save watch history. I unblocked the domain, and I don't think I've had that problem since. I had to unblock s.youtube.com/api/stats/watchtime, though the internet says it's changed to youtube.com/api/stats/watchtime in more recent years.

Problem with that is that I want to use my subscriptions but using that app might get my user potentially banned and I do not want my google account banned.

I've used ReVanced every day for over a year now and nothing has ever happened to my Google Account. I also used regular Vanced for at least two years before that, never had any issues.

It wouldn't be in Google's interest to kick users out. Kicking apps out? Sure, that's how YouTube Vanced died.

ReVanced smartly dances around the rules.

Never heard of anyone getting banned for using revanced.

You could create a burner account to be on the safe side. I believe there is a way to export the channels you've subscribed to and I port them to a new account. Haven't tried that myself though yet.

It's only an anecdote, but I've used it for about 6 years HEAVILY and haven't been banned. I've also never heard of anyone banned for it.

I wish new pipe had a "save" feature. I like to save videos for watching later or whatnot. I am making do with a playlist called "saved" but still...

it does

I didn't mean a download function. I want to save, as in "watch-later". Save way a "save" works onn lemmy/reddit.

Uhm, I just made a playlist called "later", I can't tell any difference to a watch later feature tbh.

Ah, sorry, I guess I dont understand the difference between watch later and a playlist. Since you metioned a playlist I assumed you were talking about saving the actual file to watch later.

And for iOS I can recommend uYouPlus (https://github.com/qnblackcat/uYouPlus). The cheapest way to sideload it is using AltStore. But there are other services which offer sideloading on device, these don’t require a computer.

On Android just use Brave browser and turn on the setting to allow tabs to play media in the background. Opera does the same thing.

Not sure what iOS options there are.

Missing too much. I get all that with Revanced and my subs and saves and downloads.

You geht downloads and subs with NewPipe, too. But it boils down to preference. And I prefere a open source app to begin with instead of patching something.

"To show our appreciation, we're offering the same one-month free trial of our new subscription that we offer literally fucking everyone."

Well I was not a high paying costumer, I just went for the lunch and didn't give any tip. Assumed that it was good enough to pay for the basic service.

The one month is what got me. A whole one month

These companies are really shooting themselves in the foot with this shit.

Lol, to show our appreciation for being a paid member here's a one month free trial that we give everyone regardless.

Yes it's a joke but I have the option to just leave, worse would be if you are dependent on the platform in some way.

I don't see why companies should show you any appreciation except what you pay for or what you are given in return for your services, it would be nice but I do not demand it.

If you don't like it, leave it, or make a plan you can ditch it.

W the F was premium lite?

This is Lemmy, you can swear here. Don't be afraid to say 'What the frak'.

it's just after 10pm, which means you can drink if you want, and we can say whatever the hell we want

It didn't include YouTube Music. It was also offered in a few select countries.

You don't want YouTube + YouTube music but you want Spotify + YouTube? I abandoned Spotify the second YouTube Premium was introduced in my country. I loved Spotify. I started using it back when it was invite only. YouTube Music is worse for sure, but it's good enough and a lot cheaper.

An easy answer, Spotify are where my friends hang around. I would not have any second thoughts to drop Spotify, but for me I love to share playlists, tracks etc with family and friends.

As general nobody use YouTube music here in Sweden.

I know. I'm also from Sweden. Everyone uses Spotify. We were such early adopters on a very broad scale it very quickly became a standard. I don't know anyone who uses YouTube Music except myself. Yes you can't share songs or playlists but I realised when I couldn't do it that I didn't really miss doing it either. I can still send my friends a text about new songs I like. I dunno. To each their own I guess.

You're having me confused. I'll never share any playlist and I'm on Spotify, should I leave then?

I use the third party app ViMusic to access Youtube music, not perfect but it works well, looks really good and it's free and without any ads!

Android has Revanced for YT Music, which is what I use. Only thing I miss out on from premium is the automatic local caching of tracks (called downloading officially). But I just use a different app to download music from youtube playlists as mp3 files if I really need them offline.

YT Music has a lot of the obscure indie (like soundcloud indie) music I love. The mobile app UX is close enough to Spotify.

I stopped paying for YouTube the moment Google killed Google Play Music and forced YouTube Music on me. Now Google gets no money from me and Apple does because they still offer a true music library service.

I have held a vendetta against YouTube Premium for nearly a decade. I will never use it. I don’t give a shit how cheap it is or how many features they take away. I will stop watching YouTube entirely before I pay a single cent for Premium.

You used to be able to lock your phone on iOS and continue listening to YouTube. I always had audio playing, but I was still connected to my environment. They took that away just so they could add it back in as a feature in Premium. Maybe it seems overly petty to be this upset about it 9 years later, but I don’t care. I’m a treat addict and they fucked with the product. I let go of most things when it comes to enshitification because the alternative is to drive yourself mad. But this is a hill I will die on every time forever.

Fuck YouTube Premium.

Yep. Same reason I will never pay for it and I point this out to anyone who has it. They simply created a problem only to sell the solution. Scummy to the end.

As someone who has worked on free Internet services, it used to be easier to make money from ads. A video ad view was worth nearly a dollar US. Audio ads were maybe 7 or 8 cents a listen. Now, a video ad view makes a few cents and audio ads are worthless. They likely did the math about how many audio ads they'd have to play on the phone in your pocket to break even and decided you'd hate it more than they would. Since content owners get just over half of what YouTube makes, they'd probably be pissed about seeing the drop in income too.

Feel free to hate YT. This was an economic decision at around the time when ad revenue had just fallen off of a cliff.

I think you are correct. I didn’t know the exact numbers but I was aware of general reasoning. The economic forces that push unethical design decisions range from mildly annoying to horrifying depending on which decision you’re talking about. Facebook using A/B testing with neural imaging tech to minimize users’ opportunities to disengage from the platform is probably on the more extreme end. Regardless, I don’t think the decisions being objectively correct when optimizing for the continuation of capitalist firms makes them any less morally onerous.

This is stupid. Kick out a customer? Guess €0 per month is better than €7

Greedy fucks

I do not understand the position where companies first provide a good service and and than later reduces the experience and functionality. YouTube especially, when they are providing a platform but not the content.

Their AI would easily see that I more or less gave them free money since I wasn't a high consumer putting any load on their data centers. I paid to remove the worst ads around to just see a few trailers and videos for the kids.

I do not understand the position where companies first provide a good service and and than later reduces the experience and functionality.

Twitter has taught us that the vast majority, once committed to a platform, will tolerate endless abuse and never leave. So companies treat you real nice to get you in the door so they can piss all over you later.

Do a search for "embrace extend extinguish" to learn more.

EEE is not really about that, this is more enshittification.

EEE and enshittification are very related concepts. The extinguish phase of EEE usually goes hand in hand with enshittification as once you've extinguished the competition you're free to cut costs and enjoy a monopoly. Cutting costs leads to enshittification.

Related in the sense that they're both common techniques in capitalism. You can use one without the other just fine. EEE can only be applied by market leaders, enshittification hits all (public) companies on the capitalist market.

Huh?

EEE is about a big company acting like they're helping a smaller company/organization, but they have the goal of taking full monopolistic control over the market. Enshittification is companies using loss leader products to create lock-in, and then slowly making the product worse to squeeze money out of all parties until the company's product crashes and fades into irrelevancy.

I don't have numbers to offer but the initial pricing may have been losing them money. Some big companies will offer a service at a loss to get more customers to bite, then when the price hikes hit many of the customers will be used to the service and just sign up for the hike.

This is the norm for the "X as a service" market. Since it's a recurring revenue stream you can offer your "product" below cost to entice people since they're going to have to keep paying up to continue using it. Then once you've hooked enough people you can dial up the pricing and dial down the costs/features. Fuck everything about this. I want to pay once and own for life.

"Cloud" based services I genuinely understand the need for a recurring service model. They are paying for hosting of infrastructure on a recurring basis and a one time fee wouldn't cover that.

Generally, though. I agree. If I'm running the software locally, I want to own my license fully.

The problem is that they keep making stuff that was formerly a purchase (download, physical copy, run locally, etc) into unnecessary cloud services just to justify the transition to "X as a service". I want to download it and keep it on my home server, not pay a recurring fee to access the same file over and over from a server.

Yeah. That's a different problem. 😁

I was more referring to the idea that subscriptions themselves are the problem.

I'm also ok with subscription prices increasing over time as costs increase. But I completely agree with removing services being a bad thing.

Why pay for that shit in the first place? Just use YouTube Revanced and install Sponsorblock while you're at it.

I believe one should pay for services/content to promote costumer needs, put your money where your mouth is. But people need to stop being obsessed to always see the latest and greatest movie, sports event, concert etc. The business model would fall and it would force change but that will not happen on this 3rd planet.

In this case I just wanted to remove ads the few times I opened the app without the hustle. Conviniance easily beats piracy, even quality will take a hit.

I pay for mullvad and Proton since I like the service they provide and I encourage people to do the same.

I know what you mean, but I refuse to throw money at Alphabet, when we're basically the tradegoods to them. They siphon and sell off all of our information. I'm not paying for that. If I like a creator, I'd rather pay for their Patreon and get some more benefits with that.

Plus, Revanced is way more convenient than the official YT app. You can customize the shit out of it.

I pay for 3 different streaming services because it's (still) more convenient than piracy. I pay for games because Steam and GoG are super convenient and they constantly have good deals. But fuck YT.

Same. I'm happy to pay for Patreons or other donation methods to creators I really like, but no way I'm giving a cent to the big tech monstrosities that have monopolized the Internet. They deserve nothing.

Sometimes you would pay for convenience.

In its golden years, I happily paid for Netflix because it had literally everything I wanted and it was easier than torrenting everything.

Yeah but NewPipe and ReVanced aren't torrenting. They're finished apps.

Some of us like to give back to the creators we watch in the easiest way possible while not seeing ads.

Well, you see my parents and grandparents don't understand the concept of ads fully, especially in case of YouTube Shorts. After a few instances of them sharing the ads, thinking they were regular content, i just got the family plan.

They offer 1 month free to show their appreciation? Dont they offer 1 month free to literally everyone? You just open youtube and you are bombarded by "try youtubr premium free 1 month".

Such bullshit "appreciation". This is insulting.

I agree that it's bullshit. He should be stepped up automatically to the next highest plan and billed the old amount. However, their offer would technically be a 2nd free month since he presumably got that first free month that everyone gets (as you pointed out) when he first got the service.

Solid point, although we dont know for sure if they offered a free month back when he started.

Fortunately there's newpipe and libretube, though the latter feels like regular YouTube app.

or just use sth like revanced if you just want to continue using the official app

I just wish there was a way to sideload something on a Roku :/

Hi, not sure if this will work on roku, but it does fine on my nvidia, /u/Metigoth mentioned STN (SmartTubeNext) - it's on github. You could download the apk and try side loading it. Edit: gotta get used to linking better.

good riddance. I ended mine when I realized how aggravated I was at paying for a service where I couldn’t specify a global resolution of 480p for mobile, and the auto-choices they provided always set me at 240p or 1080p, which either looked like shit or wrecked my data cap. If I have to micromanage the res per video, I’m just using uBO to block ads for free, and don’t watch YT on any device that doesn’t let me use it.

I bought premium lite because I often watch youtube on my TV which just has a better bitrate compared to using my web browser. Is there any way to get that better bitrate without paying for the full premium?

As i see this post is getting downvoted, don't think i like paying for it. There just wasn't a feasible alternative for what i wanted. Downvoting questions like these isn't helping, it's just bullying.

Smart tube https://github.com/yuliskov/SmartTubeNext

Doesn't support LG tv's sadly. Thanks for the response though.

There is a very small LG TV homebrew scene that I think has a hacked Youtube App available. Been meaning to look into it deeper myself.

This is where I'm starting looking into this stuff for LG's WebOS for what it's worth: https://www.webosbrew.org/

Good luck!

If you have an Android TV, just download an app called "SmartTube". I used to be subscribed to YT Premium but then I found that app and cancelled my membership. It automatically blocks all ads and also has SponsorBlock implemented which auto-skips sponsored segments, etc. It's super useful. Then on my phone I use YT Revanced which is essentially a modded version of the YT app which does practically the same thing as SmartTube.

I love Newpipe on my Android TV and phone. Added benefit of not sending any user data to YouTube I just imports my subscriptions from my phone to the TV every month or so

Can you cast from revanced to smart tube?

As a IT dumbass, it seems all the listed options here so far are for Android. Are there any similar apps for IOS?

Who would name their child that?

Not op, but I only give my initials. They dont need my full details. They're lucky they get initials.

It was a good run since the first days of mainstream Netflix. Now, I can't keep up with all these services and subscriptions.

Brave browser on my phone and PC, no ads, no popups. I'd recommend to anyone.