There are browser extensions such as LibRedirect which will automatically, well, redirect requests to these alternatives, with extensive configurability by the user.
<https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/libredirect/>
YewTu.be went offline last week amidst news that Google were cracking down on YouTube viewers employing adblocking.
As to benefits of Invidious and Piped front-ends:
- No subscription required.
- Less data exposure to YouTube /Google itself.
- Lighter website / improved UI/UX.
- One small way of registering dissatisfaction to YouTube for dark patterns / user-hostile site practices.
Invidious: <https://invidious.io/> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invidious>
Piped: <https://github.com/TeamPiped/Piped>
I don't use social media because I think it's a net negative in my life. However YouTube I've always justified by following lots of educational content. I've learned a lot of cool things and gained new hobbies just by watching YouTube. One day, leather-working videos popped up on my feed. Soon I was making my own stuff with leather - it was a heap of fun!
I've noticed over the past few years though, that no matter how much I try to tweak the algorithm, I'm just getting mindless junk. And shorts are the worst of it! They're deliberately designed to hook you in, so they're very hard to ignore.
And so YouTube, I have to admit, has become a net negative. Another place for mindless dopamine hits, zombifying us all. I'm so sad about it!
Anyone who says that and actually believes it is fooling themselves if they think they’re immune to strategies developed by an entire industry over the course of decades to the tune of billions of dollars.
Not a skill issue. Just the way our brains are biologically wired and people exploiting it for ad money.
People don't voluntarily pay to be treated as semi-intelligent scrolling cattle, we fall into endless scrolling unconsciously and pay with our eyeball-time, but we don't go "oh I'm gonna shell out $8 for the privilege of browsing an inferior TikTok". He's got to chose one strategy and commit to it.
I think it's a bit dramatic to jump to words like "dark pattern" just because YouTube dared to suggest some content in one place in the interface.
If anything, YouTube's Subscriptions tab is one of the most user-respecting pieces of social media out there. It only shows you your subscriptions, and it is chronological.
I'm currently still paying for premium but now it's like my cable bill. I sorta have to, but I don't feel like it's a voluntary transaction where I'm paying to get something I want. Now I'm paying to reduce about 50% of what I don't want and there is no option to get what I want at any price.
Fascinating -- I've been seriously considering cancelling mine as well, for the exact same reason.
Those shorts are a thorn in my side.
If you come from a third world country I get it, but many of us here do not. $12 is less than half an hour of work for even middle class Americans and Europeans.
I guess if you don’t even watch YouTube I don’t understand why you are even in this thread.
We had a "showdown" moment with our kids some time ago due to inability to manage device usage. Ended up with me changing the wifi password and all the kids devices permanently lost internet access at home.
The kids have been playing together - and outside! - and generally much happier ever since. Mental health definitely better. Who'd have thought it?
And during the day I occasionally leave the live stream of a stork nest running. One of them learned to fly just two days ago, and it was fun watching them getting to learn how their wings work, while they don't have much space to train [1], which makes me ask how many such livestreams exist which normally would be volatile data. I'm not sure if these live streams do get stored, but it would be a huge amount of bandwidth for almost no added value.
Then there are fun mathematics videos which show you how to solve mathematical problems [2], daring you to solve them.
Basically there's so much of value, like `the native web`, `ServeTheHome`, `Jeff Gerling`, `No Boilerplate`, `Code to the Moon`, James Briggs`, gliding, mtb-riding, windsurfing, so much quality content which is hard for a TV station to deliver.
I don't see it comparable to Reddit.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLUl4u3cNGP60cspQn3N9d...
I would buy YouTube premium but I don't really want to remunerate Google for their anticompetitive business practices or their mistreatment of content creators. So I just go for patreon of channels I like.
YouTube is an endless goldmine of quality videos made by people who actually give a shit about the topic they're talking about, rather then people who are just trying to make "content" to monetize.
I also appreciate that at least some of my monthly payment goes to the people making the videos I'm watching.
I'm honestly surprised to hear such a cynical take on it.
So basically it is a way to use YouTube with a proxy server in between. Quoting directly from LibreTube (an Android app based on Piped) -
> With NewPipe, the extraction is done locally on your phone, and all the requests sent towards YouTube/Google are done directly from the network you're connected to, which doesn't use a middleman server in between. Therefore, Google can still access information such as the user's IP address. Aside from that, subscriptions can only be stored locally.
> LibreTube takes this one step further and proxies all requests via Piped (which uses the NewPipeExtractor). This prevents Google servers from accessing your IP address or any other personal data.
> Apart from that, Piped allows syncing your subscriptions between LibreTube and Piped, which can be used on desktop too.
You can also self host it or use an instance like https://piped.video/
The only real "without any reason" I'm aware of is free tier infra running on an account that hasn't upgraded to paid tenancy. "Always-Free" resources belonging to an unpaid tenancy can be deallocated without notice in order to provide resources for a paid tenancy.
There are malicious people out there (on large, official platforms as well, because moderation is fiction) that will replicate someone's social feed and then adds controversial crap/crypto scams/weird stuff in the middle of it all. Taking action against imposters is sometimes necessary.
If you're a normal Youtube channel and you find someone "ripping" your videos to Yewtube, I completely understand why someone would demand a takedown. Most people barely know how to operate a browser, let alone understand the concept of privacy preserving alternative frontends that work through local implementations of Youtube's client code.
If you're some underpaid tech support person who gets a DMCA complaint about such a mirror, I wouldn't be surprised if they decide "take down first, ask questions later" would be a safe bet.
You may think Azure is amateur hour, but it apparently does not hold a candle to OCI.
and yet this site was still using them prior to ban hammer because “it probably won’t happen to me”
I will always say this: fuck Oracle. Fuck Larry Ellison. Any person or company that uses their products despite knowing the shit the founder and company has done deserves any consequences
And that self-hosting as a fallback (if only to test backup and recovery procedures) is also highly underappreciated.
-their cloud console interface in general was bad
- the technology is pretty rudimentary: after spinning up some ec2 instances and attaching some volumes, I needed to enter some strange custom commands in the terminal to make them useful (aside of the standard partitioning and mounting)
- their cost explaining docs were worse than Amazon IMO.
- for some reason they started spamming me with Portuguese mail (maybe because my last name looks like Portuguese?)
- Somehow I cancelled my admin account but not some inner account so for some time i couldn't login but still had some volumes that were being charged... I couldn't delete them.
- I tried to spin up one of their ready made wordpress instances but it wasn't working. I've since forgotten what was the issue but at the time I found it hilarious.
Overall I wouldn't touch it for stuff related to work. Had very bad experience with them .
As far as I can tell, the site is just a youtube frontend, so it's unclear if this was some sort of pseudo-DMCA thing, or if Oracle Cloud just sometimes intentionally scorched-earths paying customers.
Cloud companies all make certain claims around bandwidth/CPU/memory/etc. on low tiers, but if you actually fully utilize the tier, they'll almost invariably make your life miserable.
Normally they won't outright boot you (this seems surprising), but your instances will suddenly always be limited to what the Cloud Company considers to be "proper" for the low tier you are paying for--which magically is always much smaller than what they advertise.
While they may in some way violate Google TOS, that is not a legal matter.
And I like supporting the content creators that I watch. Rather than just freeloading.
> Error processing transaction
> We're unable to complete your sign up. Common sign up errors are due to: (a) Using prepaid cards. Oracle only accepts credit card and debit cards (b) Intentionally or unintentionally masking one's location or identity
It checks nightly for any new videos on the channel and Jellyfin sends me a notification when a new video is ready to watch.
If it's a service that's piggybacking on another site there's a good chance it'll get shut down at some point. I get the feeling the author of the post is a little naïve that this comes as a surprise, that their two accounts with Oracle were linked and banned in unison came as a surprise and there wasn't a backup.
However anyone who uses a site like this knows it's easy come/easy go. You get what you pay for and appreciate the time, effort and money the webmaster has put in and make your own arrangements to save anything of importance to your local machine.
I understand the Spartacus-cum-Anonymous message that they're going for but the language is all over the place.
Invidious can receive emails but isn't a person or business entity?
I might just as well say that Knobble@McKnees.com isn't a person contactable via the Internet, it _just is_.
The "free" movie selection is also really good (no ad's in premium). It's curated (read not endless fluff) and I spend less time thumbing through the damn menus (looking at you Netflix) and just watching stuff.
As an example YT Movies>Free just released James Cameron's Doc: Deepsea Challenge right after the Titan implosion. This type of realtime, zeitgeist curation happens all the time in their "free movie section" If you are starting from 0 in the submersible space great way to break the ice and start to grasp what that type of exploration entails. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZD_nbS1_II
Been with them since the Google Play Music days, just a happy customer.
If I come up with a clever tweet and then post it, does twitter own that data? what if i posted it to a middleware like a browser extension that then posts to twitter but also makes it accessible on an ipfs feed?
If I wanted to publish a website of your tweets, I believe I could contact you and get your permission, or I negotiate the rights through Twitter, like using their third party API.
In case of piped and freetube you can subscribe to channels without Google account (freetube does that even offline), it's also possible to import channel subscriptions from Youtube.
There were instances that shortly existed, or which tried to redirect you to some suspicious sites but these were filtered out.
Some of us feel supporting Google in any way is unethical, but still want to consume some of the content they have lured people to put on their servers.
Videos can also be optionally proxied in some instances but that wasn't a draw for me.
It's up to the instance admin for Invidious and the behaviour of Piped to proxy googlevideo. Not sure if it's visible at Invidious if you use an instance that doesn't proxy the traffic, but you can be sure it's proxied when you use Piped.
After moving to Oracle Cloud to use their Free Tier for my personal blog, I got this email from them back in April, basically requiring me to migrate to pay-as-you-go since my blog had near zero traffic. To be fair, I'm perfectly fine with this and happy to still be billed $0 per month. But it just set the perspective that Oracle wouldn't blink an eye to kill my site off if its PMs or lawyers thought they needed to revisit a subscription plan or usage terms - and I'm not saying that it's any surprise to me.
> Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) will be reclaiming idle Always Free compute resources from Always Free customers only. Reclaiming idle resources allows OCI to efficiently provide services to Always Free customers. Your account has been identified as having one or more compute instances that have been idle for the past 7 days. These idle instances will be stopped 7 days from now. If your idle Always Free compute instance is stopped, you can restart it as long as the associated compute shape is available in your region. You can keep idle compute instances from being stopped by converting your account to Pay As You Go (PAYG). With PAYG, you will not be charged as long as your usage for all OCI resources remains within the Always Free limits.
More trouble than it's worth, imo. Was fun while it lasted.
Edit, sorry, 9 hours: https://ocistatus.oraclecloud.com/#/incidents/ocid1.oraclecl...
Maybe not the best way to judge? i.e. based on impression of other products?
People run personal projects on AWS etc.
Oracle cloud is also a lot better priced than the big 3.
Now when I read "oracle cloud", my thoughts immediately go to their horrible, gross way of doing business in DB land. Pay outrageous amounts of money for poorly specced machinery, the "you are not allowed to benchmark us" snafu, poor docs, no open source mindshare to speak of/terrible community. And I personally hate their sql dialect but that's me.
Then, you apply this feeling of grossness on the idea of them being your cloud provider. One that at the moment is not dominant, so learning how to navigate and use it is probably not that useful for your career right now. And one with, for me, a pretty shit-tier branding.
All in all I'm not surprised to learn they have a very generous free tier to lure people in.
I think the key is that I subscribe to channels I want to watch and I use the like button on videos I want to see more of.
> I've noticed over the past few years though, that no matter how much I try to tweak the algorithm, I'm just getting mindless junk. And shorts are the worst of it! They're deliberately designed to hook you in, so they're very hard to ignore.
If you're actually clicking the shorts ("very hard to ignore") then you're going to get more of them, period. I get an occasional shorts line in my feed but I scroll right past it.
But yes. YouTube shorts are a massive net negative. I wish I could remove them completely.
I watched a lot of the History Channel, TLC and Discovery Channel growing up. I've seen all manner of documentary about all manner of thing. I'd say plop your kids in front of that every now and then, but these days it's just Pawn Stars and Hoarders and Deadliest Catch.
The monthly show checkouts are somewhat limited (I think 10 a month) but their offerings are pretty large and generally family friendly or education based, even though they do have some more modern or topical movies or shows from time to time.
If everyone blocked ads content creators would be forced to research platforms that allow direct payment via micro-transactions, merch, or direct donations instead of ads. LBRY and liberapay exist.
If creators want me to tip them, they need to offer me an ethical to do so with money. I will not pay adtech companies with my time, or money, ever.
Also, most of what I watch on YouTube is clearly pirated (or ad free). That’s pretty much been their business model since day one, though they have diversified a little into legitimate for-profit content that is supported by ads.
[0] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/department-justice-announces-...
while True:
...A tremendous advantage to viewing without authenticating is that you can quickly set a strong affinity based on your current interests, and don't have to live with consequences of viewing low-quality content for hours, days, months, years, millennia, etc.
If Invidious and Piped offer(ed) the option to permabam channels as well (to those subscribing directly to those services, or even within a single session), so much the better.
If you only care about the channels you’re subscribed to, it’s a much better experience.
> Now when I read "oracle cloud", my thoughts immediately go to their horrible, gross way of doing business in DB land.
And you don't think about issues with Amazon the ecommerce provider? Lots of complaints there. How do you treat that separately? Every provider has their pros and cons.
Oracle cloud is currently the fastest growing cloud provider and catching on to be the top 4(?). The skills/knowledge is likely transferable too.
Oracle the database at its time was good. There were likely some shady practices, but it was actually a good database for large enterprise that needed it. Your only other choice(s) included SQL Server from Microsoft and it didn't perform as well. I can't claim I like it either but it wasn't useless.
> All in all I'm not surprised to learn they have a very generous free tier to lure people in.
All in all - let go of your bias as it clearly impacts how you view things. Most of it is sentiment and based on some opinion or hype. Lots of companies have shady practices in 1 way or another - some are well known and others are nicely hidden. In large companies not every product or department is the same either.
As an engineer and to live up to that name - I rather operate on stats and facts. Perhaps Oracle cloud is less reliable, not as well documented or have other problems - that's all fine, but not that its "gross". What does that even mean? Will it stink if I login to it?
Bandwidth is under a pretty generous "fair use policy" and if they decide you are not using fairly, overage is only $1/TB. On AWS, $90/TB and the free bandwidth is not very much.
Are you worried that you'll hit a huge traffic spike and need to upload 20TB faster than you can provision a new server?
If you really are set on cloud storage, B2 is cheaper than S3.
Multi-provider setup may incur additional effort, though the payoff is in liberating yourself from lock-in to any one vendor. Note that those costs are being incurred here regardless, with both the costs of having to develop those on the fly and with downtime. Effectively, multi-provider set-up was a deferred cost for yewtu.be, now being realised.
One trick for using hosted services to to avoid the service-specific tooling of the hosts in question. Yes, that decreases the value-add of such services, but again, the trade-off is reduced lock-in.
There are also multi-platform solutions which stand as middleware between your own application and/or services and that of the host platform.
I run a bunch of stuff single region, single cloud, but I’ve got a regular job that takes the dumps of my databases and other user content and pushes it over into a Backblaze B2 account tied to a separate credit card.
At $0.005/gb/mo, every 100GB costs you about $0.50/mo in storage. Depending on how much data is changing, if it’s say 10GB/mo you’re looking at about $0.90/mo in AWS’s punishing egress charges.
For less than the cost of a basic McDonald’s cheeseburger every month a lot of services can add _durability_ which is more important in many cases. If your service has a lot of value people will wait for it to come back. If it’s never coming back, then you’re probably done. (I worked with one client who was entirely offline for a MONTH. People called CS every day begging them to fix it faster, but not a single one cancelled.)
Yeah, if AWS nukes my entire AWS organization it’s going to be a bad week getting everything set back up on $AnotherCloud. But it will be back up in a week, not lost forever along with my users’ trust.
YouTube music is in no way better than Spotify. I actually had to leave Google play music (and YouTube music) for Spotify because the product was so subpar.
The only benefit was that some random thing on YouTube might be there but, other than that, just part of the Google poor support of their paying users.
The benefits you site are possible without their premium, using other apps and, again, they worsened the experience to push you to premium which is extremely shady.
It makes sense only if you believe everything on the internet should be free.
> YouTube music is in no way better than Spotify.
I don't disagree. It's highly subjective.
> The benefits you site are possible without their premium, using other apps
Piracy is always an option. But if you choose not to do it, buying premium makes sense.
> It makes sense only if you believe everything on the internet should be free.
I wish HN readers would try and stay away from strawmen and address what others say.
If a product offers something and suddenly makes it product progressively inferior as a means to make a distinction of "this is premium", then it's an anti pattern. It feels scummy since it didn't start with "first X are free" and shows a lack of upfront monetization strategy.
>> YouTube music is in no way better than Spotify.
> I don't disagree. It's highly subjective.
It's highly objective if you actually use arguments, which you don't.
>> The benefits you site are possible without their premium, using other apps
> Piracy is always an option. But if you choose not to do it, buying premium makes sense.
Using the term piracy here is playing into the game of anti competitive companies who continually lobby governments to get their way over the actual desires of citizens.
You haven't really supported your quasi marketing campaign claims about the YouTube experience.
Truth is: They had a product that was good. Made it shitty and told you to pay if you want what you had. You pay and laud it.
I mean, you do you but it's an unconvicing sell.
The premium experience still absolutely sucks, merely the free is even worse.
I didn't mention those in my comment above as the main issue was alternative front ends to mainstream services, but another obvious option is alternative services.
The key stumbling points for that seem to be discoverability and monetisation.
Historically the problem was you had to get people to install an app instead of visiting a website, but now everybody's trying to get people to do that on mobile anyway.
In theory P2P isn't great on mobile devices because they run on battery and have limited cellular data, but devices also allow apps to tell if the device is connected to a charger and unmetered WiFi. And if you only upload from devices that are, that's probably still enough bandwidth to give you a significant cost advantage. Then add in anyone you can get to install the app desktops and TVs, many of which are always on and have fast unmetered connections.
Then offer streaming on the website, but only if you subscribe. The paywall on the website links to the app installer, which is free (with ads).
How much are you paying for someone hosting? If you're paying them the same as your costs (high), then why not just pay for more servers which will be more reliable? Especially because of the difference between how much bandwidth during peak demand hours, which is probably going to be when there are the most devices on battery, and when you'll need the most servers anyways. The same way peak electricity demand in some areas is after peak solar.
So even if you do 1:1 view time credits, now you're losing money if they upload at night, and watch that same amount during peak hours. Probably what most people are doing. This is what happened with California new solar NEM3 plan that changed the export rates from 1:1. You only get something like 20% credit for the power you're putting in. So can you pay hosters enough to want to host, but not enough that you're better off paying for your own servers?
This doesn't even go into storage costs yet.
There's a cryptocurrency for P2P storage and transfer, Storj. Looks like they even have an S3 compatible gateway, but they don't look that much cheaper than object storage on DigitalOcean or CloudFlare.
Similar to voting. Yeah, I could vote for a third party candidate, but the real power I have is in how many other people I can convince to vote for someone.
Youtube is one of the few platforms where people making content can actually survive off of it. It's not everything but it's more than ~anything else.
It would be nice for there to be more platforms but personally I'm exhausted of platforms trying to race to the bottom and ultimiately squeezing people who are actually doing the "hard work".
(My one big complaint is that youtube doesn't charge people for bandwidth, meaning that services like Vimeo are ... kind of DOA. I don't know how you do that and have viral stuff for normal people, but it does feel like something should be in place)
But at some point it got into the ballpark of two 10-15 second ads every 5 minutes even on the channels of people who explicitly asked not to turn on monetization because they're making educational content, often for kids and schools. The mobile app nags me with a "try premium" / "skip trial" popup 5 times per week. There are consistently small bugs in the user experience of the app.
Oh, and they're rich as God because they're also the people who own the operating system, browser, app store, and search engine I used to find all this stuff -- plus my email and my productivity software, all of which they will leverage to _squeeze_ every last bit the juice out of me as a user. They own all my data already. They own everything.
So, what is the "principled stand"? Enough is a goddamned enough! If they were just going to show some ads, it would be fine, but like every single parasitic horror show out there, they promised they'd be good and they cannot stop getting worse.
At the very least, I can choose not to pay them $12/month for the privilege.
Thats why cloudflare won't host sites with lots of video. It's why twitter doesn't do HD video. Thats why there are no startups trying to make video hosting sites.
If you hosted a youtube clone on AWS with their cloudfront CDN, you'd be paying $0.085 per GB out to the internet. A youtube ad view earns perhaps $0.004. HD video is ~6GB/hour, so a 3 minute video costs $0.0255 to host (before compute and storage costs, profit and engineer time).
Earning $0.004 for something that costs you $0.025 is never going to work out...
What costs is having a CDN, a bunch of very fast servers that exist in every point-of-presence, given the load they endure CDN cache servers fail quickly when compared to others. -- along with the upkeep of their networking equipment, which is cheap but not free.
But Google itself has invested wisely in how it connects to the internet, they are dark fibre all the way with many hundreds of gigabits between sites and pops. It's a huge upfront investment (the kind SV startups seem to hate) but the long tail makes bandwidth essentially free.
The only cost they have is hardware and peering, and given their size I can't convince myself if they are or are not being shafted financially by big ISPs for peering - even if they are though, it's marginal compared to what GCP/AWS/etc; charge us, even Colo datacenters will charge significantly more than what it costs Google.
For example, transfer out from S3 gets down to $0.05 at just 150TB, including the AWS markup.
(Note that CloudFront data out is not directly comparable to S3 data out!)
No, there are no startups in video for the same reason there were no startups in office apps or operating systems in the 2000s, a subsidized 500lb gorilla in the space.
The problem with a video startup is that you have to charge for your content. And some jerk will download your video, post it to YouTube, and distribute it for free.
If YouTube were forced to stand on its own instead of being subsidized by the Google advertising maw, we'd see innovation in the space.
Until YouTube gets broken out from Google by anti-trust action, the video startup space will continue to remain dead.
Also youtube's bitrate usually far below that amount.
> It's why twitter doesn't do HD video.
Twitter does HD video. I don't know whether it is generally available or not, but for example, Tucker Carlson's videos are 1080p.
My question is specifically about YouTube.
IIRC it's possible for the slider to have a lower maximum if you're already using some of the resources on another VM, since they allow splitting. This has caused some confusion for some people, possibly due to leftover block devices from deleted VMs acting as if they are taking up free RAM/CPU credits.
Disclaimer: I haven't tried this out myself. I found this blog post a few days ago when I first heard about the generous Oracle Cloud free tier.
Nothing against the developers of it, but it's a tool available for use by others and I'm not going to jump on it any more than I'll install random unsigned browser extensions.
Contrary to what they want you to think, there's an entire world beyond them where trust is not dictated by them.
Hell, I'm not even running the assorted very functional "photo scan to pdf" apps that I purchased Pro versions of over the years because while there are some very skilled developers in Moscow and St Petersburg I have no way of checking on whose behalf they use those skills.
I'm sure it has a rapidly approaching expiry date, however.
I nearly cancelled premium over shorts. They are aweful.
You often hear the argument that people aren't going to "use" their bandwidth and watch ads, but that's dumb. The ads are to pay for development of the app or the content. The bandwidth is to offset what you downloaded yourself. It's two different things. And if you have unmetered bandwidth you're not using anyway, don't be a miser.
But if you really want to give people something as an incentive to upload, show them fewer ads, and give more credits during peak hours. Now, if you want to see no ads, you have to upload something like 10x what you download, and correspondingly up to 10% of users can get that deal. But if 10% of users take that deal, you eliminate your bandwidth costs and still have 90% of the ad revenue. And if more are willing to take it, it means you can give fewer credits until it balances, or vice versa.
There are also ways to shift demand around, namely through pricing. Make electricity cheaper during sunlight hours and more expensive between sunset and 8PM and suddenly tons of people are doing laundry midday on a weekend instead of in the evening during peak hours. Which also makes it more economical for people who can't avoid peak hour usage to buy an energy storage system so they can run on stored energy when the power company is charging high rates and then charge it back up when power is cheaper.
The inferior experience in terms of YouTube is the increase in ads. I like to think of it as a price increase due to inflation.
> It feels scummy since it didn't start with "first X are free" and shows a lack of upfront monetization strategy.
That's a standard practice actually. I have seen new restaurants offer food for free on the day of opening to attract customers and then charge from next day onwards. They will also gradually keep increasing their prices to cope up with inflation and/or other reasons.
> It's highly objective if you actually use arguments, which you don't.
Treating your preference as objective just shows how much disconnected you are from the reality. In my country, YouTube is the goto choice for music. Moreover, YouTube ads are skipable, but Spotify ads aren't.
> Using the term piracy here is playing into the game of anti competitive companies who continually lobby governments to get their way over the actual desires of citizens.
Desires of citizens like you is to get everything for free. That's what I have understood.
> You haven't really supported your quasi marketing campaign claims about the YouTube experience.
Your happy customers are your best marketers.
> Truth is: They had a product that was good. Made it shitty and told you to pay if you want what you had. You pay and laud it.
I agree, they did make the product shitty for free users. But that won't make me and many others stop using it.
> The inferior experience in terms of YouTube is the increase in ads. I like to think of it as a price increase due to inflation.
It's a coping mechanism. Just like people who think their lives need to be worsened due to inflation and "that's due to exogenous characteristics" and not to do with their gov policies.
>> It feels scummy since it didn't start with "first X are free" and shows a lack of upfront monetization strategy.
> That's a standard practice actually. I have seen new restaurants offer food for free on the day of opening to attract customers and then charge from next day onwards. They will also gradually keep increasing their prices to cope up with inflation and/or other reasons.
I knew you'd go for this one. Transparency matters. Restaurants are usually upfront about this. Have a taste before buy is fine. Destroy the competition and then abuse a captured market while still actively destroying the competition (lobbying, attacking funding, purchase with intent to stop, etc).
Also, Just because something happens, doesn't mean it's ethical. People made money squatting on URLs like savehaiti.com after the hurricane and, even though it works, it's scummy and not something to laud.
>> It's highly objective if you actually use arguments, which you don't.
>Treating your preference as objective just shows how much disconnected you are from the reality.
It's not preference. You didn't state it initially as preference. There's also objective features to analyze or no product would be better than another.
This poor attack at me is funny seeing as you want to move the ballpark to play the victim and not have to defend bad claims.
> In my country, YouTube is the goto choice for music.
Which doesn't mean it's a better product. And did you think about everyone else's Country before making your statements or does it only work to excuse your lack of solid arguments?
> Moreover, YouTube ads are skipable, but Spotify ads aren't.
Suddenly we are talking about a free tier and not the product GPM/YM vs Spotify in their premium versions? More goalpost moves.
>> Using the term piracy here is playing into the game of anti competitive companies who continually lobby governments to get their way over the actual desires of citizens.
> Desires of citizens like you is to get everything for free. That's what I have understood.
"Citizens like me". You don't know me. You made a bad sales pitch for a product that abused customers and instead of recognizing that you start attacking anyone who points out the truth with poor strawmen.
You don't know how many services I pay for but you should have inferred that I pay for Spotify and that I paid for GPM/YM so your whole dishonest line of attack is moot.
>> You haven't really supported your quasi marketing campaign claims about the YouTube experience.
> Your happy customers are your best marketers.
Actually, you've massively failed as a marketer by being unable to point out advantages or defend why YouTube had deteriorated their product and demanded payment for it. And let's not even address the behaviour towards the creators who built the bulk or their content.
>> Truth is: They had a product that was good. Made it shitty and told you to pay if you want what you had. You pay and laud it.
>I agree, they did make the product shitty for free users. But that won't make me and many others stop using it.
No. You just acquiesced and got screwed over but think championing it is a good thing. It's hilarious but at least you agree on the core.
Good marketing, bud. They should hire you.
From a security standpoint, can you tell me what's different about this vs "I ran this chunk of PowerShell that said it would patch Office to bypass activation"? After all, it's just a patch.
From a security standpoint, What's the difference between using revanced's open source patches and downloading literally any open source software from GitHub?
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It is not just $12/month for YouTube that is the problem most people have to budget for all their content consumption between streaming services, sports subscriptions , music subs, newspapers you can easily spend upwards of $300/month , that is not including other productivity tools Saas you could end paying for like o365 , Dropbox and so on .
YT would be the one easiest to cut because you won’t loose access just have to put up with some ads unlike everything else .
For many not seeing ads is not worth $12 a month , for some like you the value is enormous so you see it as worth paying .
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I personally stopped paying for YT premium because I get most of the content from Nebula what I used YT for, at 1/10th the cost.
Also there is no way to disable Shorts and they won’t improve the by design poorer implementation on Firefox; both these make my experience using the platform poor even if I pay for it so I don’t bother.
I have only reasonably included couple of options in each category, you could mix and match preferences and use different providers or may get deals and it is part of combo with some other plan , however you will still be in this range.
- Streaming: ($121) (Prime, Apple have other uses bundled, Disney is undroppable if you have kids)
- Disney+ (ESPN, Hulu, Disney) - $20
- Netflix - $16
- Paramount+ - $12
- Max (HBO) - $20
- Peacock (NBC) - $10
- Apple Tv+ (via Apple One ) - $23
- Nebula - $5
- Amazon Prime $15
- MLS - $13
- NBA - $20
- Spotify(podcasts,list: $10
- YT music: $15
- Audible: 15
- NYTimes ( or main newspaper) : $16
- Bloomberg/FT ( or business daily): $25
- Economist/New Yorker (or other long form magazines): $20
On top you could be paying for
- any game network subscriptions like PlayStation Plus maybe $20-40
- one time purchases for movies/ games etc in addition to Prime, AppleTV+, Disney+ plans when they not included perhaps another $100 every month
- cable/internet/Mobile plans which are another ~ $200 easily
- Patreon/ podcasts or other creator specific subscriptions
- other personal productivity apps you may pay for (o365, Dropbox, email etc) maybe another $100
It's a strange argument anyway, nobody buys something simply because it's only an hour of work. The internet offers me a hundred subscriptions every day, if I buy them all because they're just 10 bucks I'm broke. Whatsapp cost 1$ once and they even dropped that because although it's great value, what matters is that none of it is exclusive.
More over, i'm constantly of the defensive with it. If i click on an impulse video -- aka one i watch guiltily but would rather not make a habit out of it -- Youtube disregards other videos i'd much rather watch and now gives me repeated videos of that one thing. I open a fair bit of stuff in Incognito just to avoid Youtube polluting my feed.
I think i'd happily pay $3/m for what i get. But generally it's not close to $12/m for me, especially when i don't feel like it's working for me.
I use YouTube far less than Netflix, Disney, Amazon, bbc, all of which are cheaper. Many YouTube videos come with burnt in adverts too.
I'm not sure how you drew that conclusion. Of course Floatplane subscribers get the sponsorships edited out, that's the benefit of being a sponsor.
LTT was worried about their Youtube dependence, so created Floatplane. The fact of the matter is they wouldn't be in existence without Youtube and would probably die, even with Floatplane now existing.
There's no evidence anywhere that Youtube is dying.
~15€/mo and my family doesn't have to watch ads, we get YouTube music (not missing Spotify at all TBH) - that's well worth the money.
If you're a student or working low paid job I can understand - but on a site mostly for software professionals and startups ?
I currently pay for premium to avoid ads myself, so you don't get to call me any freeloader names while I complain that despite paying I still have to suffer shorts and utter shit suggestions and embedded sponsor ads and having to answer a ridiculous 2fa prompt on my phone every single time just because I use firefox in medium private mode , and annoying things like hiding downvotes, and serious things like censoring and invalid dmca takedowns and algorithmic promiting/hiding, etc.
Now, if Youtube was an independent company, that'd be a different story. But it isn't, so µBlock it is.
I suppose ultimately I am arguing that $12/month isn't "cheap" because it's really "$12/month and whatever time you spend on it". I used to dump so much free time into things like TikTok, YouTube and Reddit, and I am grateful their leadership answers to greedy millionaire/billionaire venture capitalists who can barely tell a mouse and keyboard apart.
Pay money, get no ads. It's not that complicated. It's totally reasonable to whine about the increased ads and not wanting to pay ofc. But at least we can pay to not have ads!
I understand that YouTube costs money to run, but the monetization situation does not reflect that, and is thus totally backwards. The current model is that users pay for a “service” (YouTube) which has an expense for “content” (video creators). The content is what the users actually want; the situation should be that users pay the content creators, who pay YouTube something akin to rent. It is not fair that YouTube profits off of the value that content creators bring rather than just their infrastructure. It is akin to paying the owner of a building for access to the store.
It's been about a while, and so far hasn't gained a large userbase of viewers - at least in part because content creators don't want to pay for random non-paying people to watch their videos.
I bet the economics don't add up for running a video hosting site, yet only getting revenue from audio ads.
Even spotify hasn't managed to survive on audio-only with ads - they have to put in other arbitrary restrictions like 'you can't play the song you want to play' to dissuade people from using the lossmaking plan.
Throttle the connection so its slow enough users get 480p video at peak viewing times. Ask google for $$$$ to stop doing that.
Also, that 1TB/month cap is just foot-in-the-door technique. It will stay 1TB or so as videos, games, websites, etc. continue to get larger and larger and then they will lean on Appeal to Tradition (logical fallacy) when people complain that 1TB/month isn't adequate.
Remember that for a while they were just about the only site that could load Flash. YouTube is that important.
I should also note that Google will send data from their DCs over dark fibre to their PoPs near you, so they only transit onto the internet locally.
I’m not sure how you can say “YouTube isn’t dying” and “LTT is worried about relying on YouTube” in the same breath. Linus was always complaining about YouTube from a creator’s POV.
The local farmer sells to 10 shops. Each shop buys from 10 farmers.
Sure you can hitch your wagon. It’s a massive risk, sometimes unavoidable. It makes perfect sense to diversify your supply chain.
Is this really the middle class U.S family reality?
How could you not have Disney+ if you have kids ?
Netflix is at 75M Americans paying for it (and many others sharing), typical family definitely has more than just Apple Music and HBO
I would think my family having access to read good quality journals rather than get their news and analysis just from social media or click bait content farms is worth $50 / month ?
I know only 2 top quality newspapers not behind a paywall : Aljazeera and The Guardian, both while have decent American coverage or not amercian. Perhaps you can also include NPR, BBC and few other high quality news sources that are still free but are not newspapers.
Every high quality news source even news agencies like Reuters[1] are now behind paywalls.
[1] Associated Press is still free, given their non-profit status hopefully will remain so.
Anyway, what you say makes sense, but I just don’t think many people drop $50/month on that stuff. They don’t see the value, and continue to feed Facebook.
They came to prominence when Bin Laden used to give them recorded tapes and interviews post 9/11. They have comprehensive and deeper coverage on topics and geographies [1][2] where western news orgs won't focus.
Beware though, they have biases too like everyone, particularly on covering Qatar and Middle East. The government funds them as tool of geopolitical soft power by creating an honest dependable news, no different from UK with BBC but without the colonial undertones, on average with global topics they are a solid source.
[1] In particular areas with some Muslim population, i.e lots of Africa, East Asia etc