I'm sure they are working on a youtube messaging app behind the scenes.
finally
::: spoiler This article is just a youtube premium ad 🤢
As far as what you get when you go Premium, you won't see any more ads within the app or the videos that you're watching. Plus, you'll gain access to background play, along with being able to download videos on the go. And perhaps what makes this plan even more worthwhile is that you get access to YouTube Music, which features over 100 million commercial free songs. Now, the one drawback is that these features don't come for free, with a subscription costing $13.99 per month in the US.
:::
But premium doesn't have sponsorblock
YouTube is testing a feature where it'll pop up a button to intelligently skip ahead if you skip once, or so I've heard.
That sounds a lot like sponsorblock.
Though it won't be fully automatic.
I have premium and SponsorBlock. It doesn’t have to be all or nothing.
How does that work, do you still need revanced to modify the apk?
I use uYouEnhanced on iOS. Also the actual SponsorBlock extension on Safari.
If they hadn't gotten so obnoxious with ads that it was impossible to use YouTube without blocking them, I wouldn't have used the vanced/revanced stuff in the first place.
They find a way to prevent using those, I'm out totally, including on the few devices I didn't care about playing the ads because it was just background noise.
Oh well
I even had Youtube premium for a bit. Revanced is nice just to dial back some of the bells and whistles that isn't relevant to the video platform. The official app feels clunky.
I had YouTube Premium after Vanced was killed. I gave it a fair go. No ads- great, it is now back to how it was a decade ago. But also no SponsorBlock - and my God, how many channels I realised I couldn't listen to anymore when 50% of every video was an ad for one of three online services or games I'm definitely not going to ever pay for. So now I just... don't watch YouTube on my phone. Hurray?
Seriously, if the ads are supposedly worth €15 a month, pay the fucking YouTubers enough that I don't have to listen to a linguist try to sell me WarThunder
I still think premium should allow you to block sponsors. YT should make them be sections that are removable.
I know, right? So many creators even explain why they do that, it's because they can't make enough from youtube to do this full time, but they can from raid shadow legends.
YouTube premium would be worth something if all the creativity their creators have to use to make a living despite the pay was used for better content.
Id really like to use revanced while paying for premium if it means it doesn't get borked every x months and I don't risk getting banned, kind of like Spotify tolerates 3rd party clients as long as they are premium accounts
yeah I use revanced + YT premium for sponsor block. Haven't experienced any issues yet though
I mainly watch it on my Roku TV and it is TERRIBLE. Idk if they've updated it in years.
Wouldn't mind the ads if they weren't deliberately twice as loud as the music! That's just fucking rude
We need better alternatives
Also YT premium is not a good solution as it does nothing for privacy
Video is nearly impossible to host in a sustainable way. The bandwidth usage is among the most expensive things you can host. The only way you’re getting something better than YouTube is if it’s tax funded somehow.
Public libraries should host the peoples internet. As a service, not to generate tax dollars, not to break even.
Jumping from platform to platform is just delaying the enshitification.
Nebula is very sustainable.
The 20mbit bandwidth of a 4k video might have been a lot 10 years ago, but it's child's play now.
Nebula works for now because it still has nowhere near the amount of videos being served and uploaded per minute than YouTube. Having to cache videos in servers all around the globe takes up significant cost too.
I also pay for Nebula.
I'm fine paying for a service, but I'm not going to pretend that it is a YouTube equivalent.
20 mbps may be child's play, not often for download only, not upload, and then don't forget that just a hundred viewers will generate 2 gbps of traffic. And hundred viewers are nothing.
Sure, most videos are not 4k. The bandwidth usage still goes up pretty quick.
I think PeerTube's idea that viewers of the same video can serve each other is an interesting concept. Problem is, afaik most are not using dekstop computers anymore, and most of the time people are living off batteries and their traffic limited cellular data subscription, where this is probably a very costly operation for the user.
I get what you're saying, but honestly 2gbps of traffic is also nothing in 2024.
I think a ~$100k server can push something like 1-2tbps. That'd be enough bandwidth for 100k users.
I'm not in the streaming industry, but that's at least what I've seen from Netflix's presentations. The main bottleneck for streaming servers these days isn't even the network cards, it's the bandwidth on your 16-24 channel DDR5 server RAM interfaces.
Netflix presentation from 2021 about their 1tbps servers:
And what ISP will give you a connection with terabits in upload speed?
Probably you're thinking about placing the machine in a data center, I'm not familiar with that.
However with that price I wouldn't say that "it's nothing". Even just the hardware, where I live it's the price of a house, and people barely afford it even with a loan.
It's probably not much to well running companies, but here we are speaking about individuals and relatively smaller groups, ran by donations and not for profit.
And the main bottleneck there is, is it really the RAM? How? Are they not touching storage and keeping everything in a ramdisk?
Yeah, video streaming can't really be run on donations like Lemmy, that's true.
I think the presentation discusses it, but basically, if you have 20+ ssds in your server, trying to read them all and process the file system will mean you're copying around too much data at once in your ram. A 1gb file might require like 5-10gb of data traffic in ram while the CPU is processing it due to copies and checks, etc. Ram can't handle the resulting 10tbps of ram bandwidth needed. The optimization that Netflix is doing is to use pcie to send files directly over the pcie bus from the ssd to the network cards, skipping the cpu and ram altogether.
Interesting service but still bad for privacy
That's probably true, but economic sustainability is what makes privacy sustainability possible.
Youtube is such a mess because it has to fight so hard to make ads work, which is unsustainable.
Nebula makes its money through monthly fees and thus has no incentives to track users beyond providing a better service.
Nebula being essentially a creators' co-operative organization also helps with the sustainable governence side, too.
Well I sure hope it isn't getting Tax funded
Why not? Nationalize it and treat it like the infrastructure it is. Take the ISPs, too, while you're at it.
Will that end up with countries or territories ring-fencing things they fund for their own taxpayers?
God no
Also YT premium is not a good solution as it does nothing for privacy
Neither is accessing any Google service in the first place, ReVanced or not.
Using third party clients does. Think invidious or piped with apps like Libretube
Using third party clients does. Think invidious or piped with apps like Libretube
It requires a proxy (Piped acts as proxy). A 3rd party client in itself doesm not because the video files are still streamed off Google servers.
Still good for privacy
Still good for privacy
No, non-proxied clients don't do shit for privacy. Accessing the video streams directly off Google servers is enough to be tracked,
But there isn't any non-free code involved so all they have is your IP address at the time and what video you watched. That's it.
Not as great as a public proxy but it is way better than using the proprietary spyware
Piped exists and has continued to work smoothly for me this whole time. There are many public instances but running your own is best
Invidious and piped are under attack by YouTube. We need YouTube alternatives.
We need better alternatives
We'd need a quantum leap in storage and bandwidth first - orders of magnitude better, if we want competing to be financially sane 😮💨
Maybe when Google is (hopefully eventually) shattered into a million pieces by some US judge, YouTube could be splintered into several smaller companies, each with some portion of the infrastructure and channels/videos - thus forcing competition. Vaguely similar to the Bell divestiture.
I have YouTube Premium but I have to use ReVanced to block shorts because it's terrible for my ADHD. My mental health has improved ever since I ripped that fucker out of my life.
I want to control what I see, and this isn't even about them being paid anymore, it's just about forcing me to see what I don't want to see.
I know it will eventually be blocked by YouTube like Twitch did but you could try ublock Origin with this filter list or another custom filter list. Works pretty well for me.
Another good one I use! As well as AdNauseam and SponsorBlock, obviously :P
i would recommend you the "freetube" client, it works very well, with no recommended feed
You can hide them with the normal app. Just click the "x" on your main feed.
They always re-appear and I'm tempted to click on them, that's the main issue.
Good luck YouTube
The official YouTube app will provide one of the better experiences...
Ha ha ha ha... the author must be dreaming or hasn't tried many other apps. NewPipe lets you run videos at custom speed, and optionally pitch-shift videos. And you can save videos to watch on any app capable of playing video files stored on disk.
Agreed... The second half of this "article" reads like an ad/puff piece.
A better researched article would go into the difference between API access, scrapers, and modifying the YouTube app, and question which of those YouTube will be able to detect. Maybe even discuss using region-pricing with a VPN to get YouTube premium for cheaper.
And don't have to drag the seekbar, simply tap wherever you want to play
If they manage to break third-party applications, and they cannot be repaired, then I am totally just leaving YouTube entirely. It's not worth it at that point.
I agree. I refuse to watch ads or to pay for an experience that offers less than a fraction of what Newpipe offers. When Newpipe is no longer viable I'll repurpose that time to chipping away at my reading list.
My third oarty app stopped working recently, went back to old youtube for my morning shit. Ruined my poo, absolutely not ever going back. Got my app back but grabbed a nebula sub and downloaded a few other options. Fuck youtube.
Interesting, I guess we will have to see how quickly and widely this is enforced. I haven't used the official YouTube app for a very long time and have relied heavily on third party alternatives (Vanced/ReVanced, NewPipe, LibreTube, Grayjay). There is absolutely no way I am paying $17 a month for YouTube so I think a family plan would probably be the best option, though at this point I think I'd be more likely to just abandon the platform altogether.
I quit when they took away the dislike counter, so many said they would but didn't. All I ever see about Youtube is people complaining about their new shitty tactics... just leave, it''s the ONLY way to get any changes. They will never change if people keep using the platform.
Suck it up, leave, you won't regret it.
But where do I go instead for my aquarium hobbyist videos? 😥
You're not going to find everything you want outside of YouTube just yet. But apps like GrayJay make it a lot easier to start transitioning to other platforms.
It combines most all of the video sharing platforms in one. From there you can start following creators if they have their channel setup on different platforms while still being able to keep your main home feed coming from YouTube if you wanted to.
How did you quit? Is there any other video platform?
I use the official YouTube app with premium. But, it glitches and reloads on its own after a while. Not to mention the UI frame rate getting capped to the video frame rate when playing a video.
3rd party apps let me download and browse the videos in a better way and I can also download them in 4k resolution in HDR format.
@Wahots guess they'll do just like they did with ublock origin ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
<details><summary>Reveal/hide</summary>I still use ublock origin without an issue</details>
If my 3rd party app is broken to the point theh can't bring it back, I would like to say I'd drop YouTube like a sack of moldy tangerines. But I really don't know what I'd do without it. I use it about 8hrs a day.
::: spoiler This article is just a youtube premium ad 🤢
But premium doesn't have sponsorblock
YouTube is testing a feature where it'll pop up a button to intelligently skip ahead if you skip once, or so I've heard.
That sounds a lot like sponsorblock.
Though it won't be fully automatic.
I have premium and SponsorBlock. It doesn’t have to be all or nothing.
How does that work, do you still need revanced to modify the apk?
I use uYouEnhanced on iOS. Also the actual SponsorBlock extension on Safari.
If they hadn't gotten so obnoxious with ads that it was impossible to use YouTube without blocking them, I wouldn't have used the vanced/revanced stuff in the first place.
They find a way to prevent using those, I'm out totally, including on the few devices I didn't care about playing the ads because it was just background noise.
Oh well
I even had Youtube premium for a bit. Revanced is nice just to dial back some of the bells and whistles that isn't relevant to the video platform. The official app feels clunky.
I had YouTube Premium after Vanced was killed. I gave it a fair go. No ads- great, it is now back to how it was a decade ago. But also no SponsorBlock - and my God, how many channels I realised I couldn't listen to anymore when 50% of every video was an ad for one of three online services or games I'm definitely not going to ever pay for. So now I just... don't watch YouTube on my phone. Hurray?
Seriously, if the ads are supposedly worth €15 a month, pay the fucking YouTubers enough that I don't have to listen to a linguist try to sell me WarThunder
I still think premium should allow you to block sponsors. YT should make them be sections that are removable.
I know, right? So many creators even explain why they do that, it's because they can't make enough from youtube to do this full time, but they can from raid shadow legends.
YouTube premium would be worth something if all the creativity their creators have to use to make a living despite the pay was used for better content.
Id really like to use revanced while paying for premium if it means it doesn't get borked every x months and I don't risk getting banned, kind of like Spotify tolerates 3rd party clients as long as they are premium accounts
yeah I use revanced + YT premium for sponsor block. Haven't experienced any issues yet though
I mainly watch it on my Roku TV and it is TERRIBLE. Idk if they've updated it in years.
Wouldn't mind the ads if they weren't deliberately twice as loud as the music! That's just fucking rude
We need better alternatives
Also YT premium is not a good solution as it does nothing for privacy
Video is nearly impossible to host in a sustainable way. The bandwidth usage is among the most expensive things you can host. The only way you’re getting something better than YouTube is if it’s tax funded somehow.
Public libraries should host the peoples internet. As a service, not to generate tax dollars, not to break even.
Jumping from platform to platform is just delaying the enshitification.
Nebula is very sustainable.
The 20mbit bandwidth of a 4k video might have been a lot 10 years ago, but it's child's play now.
Nebula works for now because it still has nowhere near the amount of videos being served and uploaded per minute than YouTube. Having to cache videos in servers all around the globe takes up significant cost too.
I also pay for Nebula.
I'm fine paying for a service, but I'm not going to pretend that it is a YouTube equivalent.
20 mbps may be child's play, not often for download only, not upload, and then don't forget that just a hundred viewers will generate 2 gbps of traffic. And hundred viewers are nothing.
Sure, most videos are not 4k. The bandwidth usage still goes up pretty quick.
I think PeerTube's idea that viewers of the same video can serve each other is an interesting concept. Problem is, afaik most are not using dekstop computers anymore, and most of the time people are living off batteries and their traffic limited cellular data subscription, where this is probably a very costly operation for the user.
I get what you're saying, but honestly 2gbps of traffic is also nothing in 2024.
I think a ~$100k server can push something like 1-2tbps. That'd be enough bandwidth for 100k users.
I'm not in the streaming industry, but that's at least what I've seen from Netflix's presentations. The main bottleneck for streaming servers these days isn't even the network cards, it's the bandwidth on your 16-24 channel DDR5 server RAM interfaces.
Netflix presentation from 2021 about their 1tbps servers:
https://people.freebsd.org/~gallatin/talks/euro2021.pdf
And what ISP will give you a connection with terabits in upload speed?
Probably you're thinking about placing the machine in a data center, I'm not familiar with that.
However with that price I wouldn't say that "it's nothing". Even just the hardware, where I live it's the price of a house, and people barely afford it even with a loan.
It's probably not much to well running companies, but here we are speaking about individuals and relatively smaller groups, ran by donations and not for profit.
And the main bottleneck there is, is it really the RAM? How? Are they not touching storage and keeping everything in a ramdisk?
Yeah, video streaming can't really be run on donations like Lemmy, that's true.
I think the presentation discusses it, but basically, if you have 20+ ssds in your server, trying to read them all and process the file system will mean you're copying around too much data at once in your ram. A 1gb file might require like 5-10gb of data traffic in ram while the CPU is processing it due to copies and checks, etc. Ram can't handle the resulting 10tbps of ram bandwidth needed. The optimization that Netflix is doing is to use pcie to send files directly over the pcie bus from the ssd to the network cards, skipping the cpu and ram altogether.
Interesting service but still bad for privacy
That's probably true, but economic sustainability is what makes privacy sustainability possible.
Youtube is such a mess because it has to fight so hard to make ads work, which is unsustainable.
Nebula makes its money through monthly fees and thus has no incentives to track users beyond providing a better service.
Nebula being essentially a creators' co-operative organization also helps with the sustainable governence side, too.
Well I sure hope it isn't getting Tax funded
Why not? Nationalize it and treat it like the infrastructure it is. Take the ISPs, too, while you're at it.
Will that end up with countries or territories ring-fencing things they fund for their own taxpayers?
God no
Neither is accessing any Google service in the first place, ReVanced or not.
Using third party clients does. Think invidious or piped with apps like Libretube
It requires a proxy (Piped acts as proxy). A 3rd party client in itself doesm not because the video files are still streamed off Google servers.
Still good for privacy
No, non-proxied clients don't do shit for privacy. Accessing the video streams directly off Google servers is enough to be tracked,
But there isn't any non-free code involved so all they have is your IP address at the time and what video you watched. That's it.
Not as great as a public proxy but it is way better than using the proprietary spyware
Piped exists and has continued to work smoothly for me this whole time. There are many public instances but running your own is best
Invidious and piped are under attack by YouTube. We need YouTube alternatives.
We'd need a quantum leap in storage and bandwidth first - orders of magnitude better, if we want competing to be financially sane 😮💨
Maybe when Google is (hopefully eventually) shattered into a million pieces by some US judge, YouTube could be splintered into several smaller companies, each with some portion of the infrastructure and channels/videos - thus forcing competition. Vaguely similar to the Bell divestiture.
Do it and host a fediverse video platform: https://joinpeertube.org/
I have YouTube Premium but I have to use ReVanced to block shorts because it's terrible for my ADHD. My mental health has improved ever since I ripped that fucker out of my life.
I want to control what I see, and this isn't even about them being paid anymore, it's just about forcing me to see what I don't want to see.
I know it will eventually be blocked by YouTube like Twitch did but you could try ublock Origin with this filter list or another custom filter list. Works pretty well for me.
https://github.com/gijsdev/ublock-hide-yt-shorts
Oh on desktop it's not a problem, I use an extension to block shorts
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-shorts-block/
I also use Unhook https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-recommended-videos/
Another good one I use! As well as AdNauseam and SponsorBlock, obviously :P
i would recommend you the "freetube" client, it works very well, with no recommended feed
You can hide them with the normal app. Just click the "x" on your main feed.
They always re-appear and I'm tempted to click on them, that's the main issue.
Good luck YouTube
Ha ha ha ha... the author must be dreaming or hasn't tried many other apps. NewPipe lets you run videos at custom speed, and optionally pitch-shift videos. And you can save videos to watch on any app capable of playing video files stored on disk.
Agreed... The second half of this "article" reads like an ad/puff piece.
A better researched article would go into the difference between API access, scrapers, and modifying the YouTube app, and question which of those YouTube will be able to detect. Maybe even discuss using region-pricing with a VPN to get YouTube premium for cheaper.
And don't have to drag the seekbar, simply tap wherever you want to play
If they manage to break third-party applications, and they cannot be repaired, then I am totally just leaving YouTube entirely. It's not worth it at that point.
I agree. I refuse to watch ads or to pay for an experience that offers less than a fraction of what Newpipe offers. When Newpipe is no longer viable I'll repurpose that time to chipping away at my reading list.
My third oarty app stopped working recently, went back to old youtube for my morning shit. Ruined my poo, absolutely not ever going back. Got my app back but grabbed a nebula sub and downloaded a few other options. Fuck youtube.
Interesting, I guess we will have to see how quickly and widely this is enforced. I haven't used the official YouTube app for a very long time and have relied heavily on third party alternatives (Vanced/ReVanced, NewPipe, LibreTube, Grayjay). There is absolutely no way I am paying $17 a month for YouTube so I think a family plan would probably be the best option, though at this point I think I'd be more likely to just abandon the platform altogether.
I quit when they took away the dislike counter, so many said they would but didn't. All I ever see about Youtube is people complaining about their new shitty tactics... just leave, it''s the ONLY way to get any changes. They will never change if people keep using the platform.
Suck it up, leave, you won't regret it.
But where do I go instead for my aquarium hobbyist videos? 😥
You're not going to find everything you want outside of YouTube just yet. But apps like GrayJay make it a lot easier to start transitioning to other platforms.
It combines most all of the video sharing platforms in one. From there you can start following creators if they have their channel setup on different platforms while still being able to keep your main home feed coming from YouTube if you wanted to.
How did you quit? Is there any other video platform?
I use the official YouTube app with premium. But, it glitches and reloads on its own after a while. Not to mention the UI frame rate getting capped to the video frame rate when playing a video.
3rd party apps let me download and browse the videos in a better way and I can also download them in 4k resolution in HDR format.
@Wahots guess they'll do just like they did with ublock origin ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
<details><summary>Reveal/hide</summary>I still use ublock origin without an issue</details>If my 3rd party app is broken to the point theh can't bring it back, I would like to say I'd drop YouTube like a sack of moldy tangerines. But I really don't know what I'd do without it. I use it about 8hrs a day.