Newpipe remains one of the best solutions for background playback. They do tend to move pretty quickly to patch "fixes" that YouTube throw in now and again. It's also useful for video backups if you need to preserve them for any reason.
I'm a NewPipe user as well, unfortunately the experience is getting worse there too. Might be because I also use a VPN, but after every couple of videos I have to cooldown my usage until the IP block is reset.
Tubular is great. Though they sometimes take a while to fix playback issues, like the one where videos only played for 10 seconds. That caused a bunch of forks to come out and I used those for a period of time.
Lately I discovered Firefox with background play and sponsor block extensions still work. If this stops working hopefully tubular will be a good backup.
I've been using Firefox on android for over a decade, including for YouTube, and maybe once a year I encounter a problem where I need to use Chrome for a specific website.
We're only discussing one particular website, though, aren't we?
Except for on the TV (where I use SmartTube), all of my Youtube activity is done with web browsers.
Otherwise: On both big computers and with my pocket supercomputer alike, that means Firefox and uBlock Origin. It works quite well for navigating Youtube's website and watching videos.
An old iPad that I have suffers from Apple's deliberately baked-in lack of choice, but it does handle Youtube's website very well with Safari and AdBlock.
It has been a very long time since I've used Youtube's app on any device at all.
I released a browserbox variant many years ago that could ensure background playback on YouTube. Despite multiple posts here and on PH, it never gained any traction. It seemed people were simply not interested in overcoming no background playback for free on every platform (including mobile).
Same time, one can appreciate the YouTube business: once you give something away for free, people absolutely loose their fucking minds if you make it paid. Once you set the bar to zero for payment, people will murder in the streets and despise you if you reasonably charge for what could have been a paid product all along. So there's a psychological blocker to switching on payment that people are ready to go to war for. It's the same blocker that cripples "open source" sustainability. People quickly develop an entitlement-callous, and feel cheated if you require payment instead of just continuing to surrender value to them.
It reminds of how a group of primates will kill a handler who gives cake to one, but not the group. This "free / paid" tension triggers some kind of deep-rooted human fairness wiring that is really tricky to extinguish once activated. That's why you should never open source your code and never give stuff away for free, if you plan to posslby make money from it somehow or make it paid in future. Because if you ever withhold the siphon of value related to ads or other 'you as a product' models, they will launch a jihad against you.
I think it's interesting how the human fairness reflex, often correct, breaks down in the context of "provider / consumer" dynamics. Even if the provider is not some "evil mega corp" but simply a solo software creator, people will still feel you are attempting to rob them of all dignity and debase their honor if you require payment for what was previously gratis.
The issue isn't with the payment, it's that you've burnt a ton of money to extinguish all competition (by giving away stuff for free) and then, when you're a monopoly because of network effects, you lock it in and charge whatever you want.
If YouTube allowed syndication with other websites, for example, so I could watch videos on whatever website I wanted (with an appropriate portion of the revenue going to YouTube), I would have no problems with them changing their monetization model.
That's a good point I hadn't considered it. So YouTube loss-lead with free for all videos -- then became a monopoly and people are reaction badly not because of any inbuilt fairness wiring trigger, but because, actually the price is merely too high?
Hmmm, possible. How to test? Hard, given their monopoly status. Tho does Rumble offer paid subscriptions?
A small but perhaps weak counter to your thesis is that if people were really unwilling to negotiate with YouTube over cost/experience, why would they then so vehemently attempt to eradicate ads, rather that accepting them as a lesser cost than the subscription fee?
But I guess what you're really saying is that none of the costs YT deigns to levy is felt as fair by those complaining. Not the ads. Not the USD9 (?) / mo subscription, however localized. Thus it's not free-then-paid, it's "bad pricing" that's arming the militia? Were the pricing simply "fair" people would be happy to pay it. But what rational expectation could they have for a fair price? Unless I'm mistaking Disney+, Netflix, HBO, are all more expensive, but IMO provide less range. I'm less convinced "fair price" is it the more I think about it, but there could be something there. How else would you expand that?
Good, self contained point overall. Tho I'm going to side with the psychological factor as I've experienced that in other domains where the monopoly is not a factor. And the "merely a fair price" argument hinges on a sense of rationality which appears conspicuously absent from the reactions. Emotional and ape logic, yes, but objective and economic rationality + empathy logic? No.
> Unless I'm mistaking Disney+, Netflix, HBO, are all more expensive
Disney, Netflix, and HBO all fund the creation of and own the content they provide to users. Youtube does not. Youtube inserts itself as a middle-man taxing regular people sharing videos with other regular people. There is obviously a non-zero cost to infrastructure but their attempts to extract revenue go far, far beyond that, hence people feeling their prices are too high, whether the price is paid in ads or subscription fees.
OK, again a good point. There is YouTube Originals (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCqVDpXKLmKeBU_yyt_QkItQ) not sure the model vs the others (also want to ad I enjoy the classic films that YT provides for free [tho I think I need to be on a US VPN to get that if traveling], plus of which you need to buy/rent), but I'm also not sure any of us has the inside track on YT's costs/revenue, so I guess we're all speculating.
When you say "their attempts to extract revenue go far beyond that"(A) I feel I can't accept that on good faith, I'd need to see numbers. Also I doubt this kind of data is the thing most people reacting with "prices are unfair" or "payment is bad", are drawing on, instinctively or not. So it's hard for me to accept this thesis as the source of ills. Tho, maybe it is. Maybe people's innate sense of fairness really does cover this, somehow.
I'm not aware of those numbers, so it doesn't seem that way to me, but maybe I'm just not across it. Can you give examples of your claim (A)?
Youtube's direct expenses are not published by Google, but there are a couple of ways we could measure it. One is the fact that Google is among the richest companies in the world, if not the richest at any given time. This definitionally indicates that the margins on their main revenue-generating services, among which Youtube is one, are extremely high, with revenue far, far, above expenses.
Another way we could measure it is by the value of an ad-view relative to the price of the subscription they offer. Ad views are auctioned and go for different prices based on category, demographics of viewers, etc., and aggregate statistics are not provided, but an ad-view typically tends to be in the range of US$0.01 per ad view. A subscription fee of US$9* to avoid ads, then, would require viewing 900 ads to justify the cost. I suspect in reality most people don't see more than 100 ads in a month, so Youtube is likely generating an 8x profit margin over costs of not showing ads to Premium users, give or take depending on how you work out the napkin math. If people had an option to buy an ad-free subscription with none of the other premium features for $1/mo, I suspect the uptake would be significantly higher and feel fair to the general population.
*After looking it up, Youtube Premium apparently actually costs US$14.
Anecdotally, I used to spend, I believe, ¥480 per month for a Niconico subscription (Niconico is the Japanese domestic equivalent to Youtube). I was content paying this subscription fee for years, until they increased the price up by 50% to ¥720, and about two years ago the price further increased to ¥990. I cancelled my subscription and stopped using the website. I am not opposed to paying subscription fees to platforms, but when it feels extortionate, I won't. The same is likely true for many or most people.
OK, some anecdotal data in support of the fair pricing hypothesis. Thank you. I guess in the case you state, it's connected with inflation? Wage stagnation / living cost increases? A general trend of digital services? Idk. Have living costs generally been going up against wages in Japan in the period you describe?
For me personally, the ads are too high a cost for me to pay. When my ad-free way of watching breaks and I get an ad, I simply close the tab. I find ads really annoying these days, and I pay to avoid them where I find the price fair, otherwise I don't use the thing.
I don't like the ads, which is why I switched to Premium. I like it. I also listen to white noise variants at night, so I can't tolerate ads there obviously. I know a little of your situation I think from reading your previous posts here, so I'm sure you are able to "afford" the premium fee. What makes you not pay it?
Small strange nuance for me is when I switch to my corp account, and see an ad, sometimes I really enjoy the ad, because it's novel and creative. Sounds funny to say, and I probably wouldn't fele like that if I saw ads all the time. But some of the YT ads do seem pretty high quality.
This is what I appreciate about paywalls, subscription modals, etc: there's a clear definition of the "deal", and I can just nope out. "Please enable ads or don't view our content" is also perfect.
I don't wanna trick anyone into showing me ad-free content, I just want a chance to choose.
If you marry somebody and they suddenly become a totally different person and try to extort you a common reaction is to feel deceived and unhappy. They have cheated you in a sense of the opportunity cost of being able to marry someone else.
That people might not understand that tells you something about them.
Yeah, that marriage situation can be totally tough. If you're going through that, I feel for you. I can relate, but then who of us has ever really picked the "right" person to marry the first time around? Sure, some get lucky. But often our wapred childhoood expecdtatiosn contaminate the idea of a perfect match with something that feels familiar but is actually wrong for us, or worse, just abusive.
Anyway, in this case I think the analogy is a little overblown because the stakes are so different, but is revealing. You can way more easily divest of a software product than a marriage (presumably, tho that may differ locally). But, as in marriage, there's a interesting nuance: the stories we tell ourselves about what went wrong are so often one-sided, which lacks empathy for how the other person is probably just doing their best. A similar empahty mismatch with the entitlement of consumers who don't comprehend that the value they expect a person to provide them for free, should actually be compensated. As in, a free exchange.
That someone might confuse those could tell you 'something about them.' Or it could just be an honest mistake, on their part. That we're all likely to make.
Still the trigger to ape-brained fairness-wiring seems similar, and embodies that same one way empathy. Free and fair exchange, in commerce and relationships, should be based on more of a mutual empahty.
I’ve read about this concept the Indians have called “izzat” which probably explains why they have arranged marriages. You can imagine the deceitful games that might be played on unsuspecting brides and bridegrooms if one doesn’t find deceitful games out of bounds morally; arranged marriages address that.
Arranged marriages are unpopular because we value choice. For the same reason we, westerners, abhor monopolies that transform society, wreck age old institutions, remove choice and limit access to what once was free.
Free doesn't emerge from the quantum vacuum of spacetime in the realm of digital products however. It's not a innate natural right, but a choice, of a provider at a given point in time. It might change. Cost might be levied. Cost should be expecdted in free exchange. Especially as a westerner!
Aside from that - what age old institutions are wrecked by monopolies, or which ones are you talking about it? Genuinely curious.
From a software standpoint, the ones I think of are Tinder, Facebook, X, YouTube. Each has dramatically altered how we do things like how we stay connected with friends and family, court potential romantic partners, participate in public dialogue and learn. Arguably, rather than supplementing cultural institutions, they’ve to a large extent replaced what was with something more addictive or convenient. Fine. But I’d argue they’ve done it with measurable deleterious effects.
Yeah, I agree with the reading that these kind of large information pipelines are essentially some kind of institutions almost like public railways or water and electricity because they’ve become essential. I mean there’s a little bit more nuance because not everybody wants nor needs a Facebook or whatever but if you make the bucket big enough, it seems almost everybody uses something inside of it.
I see your point now about monopoly. It’s more sort of monopoly in the digital age and it’s pretty coherent what you’re saying, From the narrow point of view that you’re meaning here, and it is a significant point. I think the only solution in that case is you have to treat them as institutions and they have to be run for the public benefit - but saying that sounds ridiculous and I don’t think it could ever work so I guess our societies have to come up with some other solutions. But the problem, your point is referencing, is very real.
Background playback is a feature of the browser and operating system, not YouTube.
Consumer laws should prevent Google doing this. We need an anti-DMCA to make circumvention, bypassing, or disabling of user’s device or OS features illegal.
They corned the market, drove everyone out of it, and are now rent-seeking. Can't say you have much of a choice between youtube and any other video provider that has the same content on it.
>They corned the market, drove everyone out of it, and are now rent-seeking.
It's almost dumping [1]: they gave a service away for free (even if they were losing a lot of money) just to make it unfeasible for any other company to start a competing service.
Vimeo could have been a competitor, but then they pivoted to a professional market and now that Bending Spoons bought them [2], I'm not sure they will even have a future.
It is dumping. The whole YCombinator VC Silicon Valley model is entirely based on dumping. They call it "burning VC cash", which is an overly wordy synonym for it to muddy the waters, and it would be positive for the world if everyone installed a browser script that did a `s/burning vc cash/dumping` on all text elements.
The equivalent here is if Sony owned the most watched TV network (by far) and decided that it would work fully on Sony Bravia tvs. People with LG or Samsung TV's could only watch a degraded version.
We all pay plenty. Don't forget that every product you buy that advertises on YouTube forwards some of that money to YouTube, even if you then don't watch the ads. I would be happy to pay the same amount for everything, but somehow block vendors from spending any money on ads, if it were at all possible.
This will be a positive if browsers (extensions?) allow the ability to spoof visibility by site. Most websites have no business knowing if they're in the foreground or background.
The user should be making the choice - not the website. The website could be informed about being backgrounded, if the user chooses to. But the user should have the priority in the decision chain - their choice overrides any that the website makes.
That is what it means to have control over your own computing.
>That is what it means to have control over your own computing.
Ah, see, there's the problem. The corpo apologists in the room don't want you to have that. The hardware you bought; err, licensed; to them, is their playground.
Revanced allows you to patch the official Android YouTube apk to enable this feature alongside many others, including a block, Sponsorblock, and dislikes.
Rossmann's Grayjay app offers the same functionality in a separate standalone client. It has a paid pro mode, but is free software. I use this on devices that I haven't signed in with Google.
i had that happen on firefox mobile months ago and installed video background play fix which all it does is stop sending the js hooks for when tab/window focus is lost. it was something clearly targeted to mobile browsers for people like me who don't bother with official apps anymore as they're riddled with antipatterns and ads. you can just youtube to the homepage like it's an app anyway.
There must be reaching a state where there must have more code for blocking all the stuffs there are trying to block than displaying videos. No wonder its UI feels bloated.
It's only a matter of time before the entire YouTube catalog transitions to DRM-encrypted video that you can only watch on Google-sanctioned devices. They're probably doing the math on how to make the platform at least as profitable with a drastically lower DAU count, since alienating users now seems to be their top priority.
Tell your favourite content-creators to consider alternatives alongside youtube (like peertube), and promote the alternative platforms, until the network effect pays off.
Google gave an official response in the article: background play is limited to Premium users, so anyone experiencing this behavior is already not using their wallet.
Along the same line is that you can watch any hour long video without interruptions unless it is music where you will get interrupted every couple of minutes with "are you there?" dialogues.
On iOS you can get free background play with Youtube App by putting the video in picture-in-picture -> locking the screen, -> going to control center and hitting the play button. Don’t let Google know!
More and more Youtube search results are a playlist when you click the result.
This causes a fatalistic chain where the video has a captcha, and if you don't answer it in 5-15 seconds it goes to the next in the playlist and the process repeats. This turbo charges uncontrollably down the series of videos.
The solution is within seconds remove the &pp= (or go back a few pages and do so) this gives you as much time as you need to solve the captcha. Or remember to copy the search result link instead of clicking on it and clean it up.
I wrote to youtube about this bug where playlists don't wait for you to answer the captcha and never heard back from them, which is what I expected, but figured I'd try.
Even for paying customers this is rather annoying, because the YouTube app prevents background playback of members' only streams, and I have never been able to find a convincing justification for why this is.
They did not seem to succeed very well. On my M1 iPad Air and iPhone 12 mini background YT playback works mostly fine via Brave, although you might have to go to full screen first before you enter background mode.
Install the Youtube Control Panel extension by soitis. It's available for all desktop and mobile browsers, and does a lot to restore sanity on YouTube.
If you want something lighter for Firefox Android. There is also the Background Video Player extension.
What a shame. What's the point even? I'm not going subscribe to YouTube premium anyway, and even less install and use the YouTube app. What happens with this move is just that I will just use YouTube less. I believe that's the case for most people who chose to use YouTube in a browser precisely for background playback.
As an example: knowing that I won't be able to keep the sound playing for the 5 minutes in between two buses when I need to walk and pay attention, I'll probably just launch a podcast from the beginning of my hour of transportation so that I'm not interrupted. For these five minutes, they loose me for almost an hour.
Perhaps that's what they desire. Serving YouTube video has marginal cost and you provide marginal zero value. Losing you as a customer is probably desired.
That's a very narrow view. YouTube is the only reason I have a Google account. Because of it I use some of their other products. And because I'm connected to my YouTube/Google account, they can track my behavior across products and across devices. My usage profile has value if only because it can be correlated to others (who don't bock ads), and because I share link to their platform on social media and messaging app. That's still true even if I'm able from time to time to continue listening to a YouTube video while my phone is in my pocket. But I will share less link and leave them a lot less usage data if they push me away from their products.
You'll probably find that most of us don't share links all that much. You're probably an outlier that they're not going to care about. They'll just look at the aggregate of lots of users not generating much revenue, and not encouraging revenue from others.
Comparing artists and a company like Google is… bold of you.
If you're thinking about content creators, you're just wrong. Most of them get almost nothing from YouTube ads, and for those who do, a few of them have no money have multiple revenue sources of which YouTube AdSense is very rarely the main one. Many do in-video product placements, which are not affected by being able to get audio only or having an ad blocker, and many have things like a Patreon, Tipeee, Ulule, of some sort. I pay monthly directly to the creators I watch the most on these platforms and who do not have millions of followers, because that's what they say help them the most.
Really, thinking Google worsening our user experience is even remotely something they do in favor of content creators having a hard time at the end of the month is beyond naive.
Bwaaa an evil monopolistic empire won't get our money, that's so sad really. They're racking up tens of billions of money every quarter, we don't. I carefully do my best not to give any money to Microsoft, Google and the likes. They must be dismantled anyway.
They're a monopoly. They force me to use their shitty, ad-laden, privacy-violating services. I'll use all possible circumvention measures possible. Of course I use alternative solutions as much as possible, but it's a monopoly, remember ? Not a public service. Not a sane, competitive market.
Dismantle the GAFAM. Death to them. They're evil, imperialistic, freedom-killing machines.
I can't believe I'd ever find myself shilling for Google of all companies, but how is it sustainable from a creator's point of view if the viewer neither pays for a subscription nor looks at the ads?
YouTube was better before it was taken over by career content creators. People used to make videos because they wanted to share something with the world. It was more authentic. Now everything is about clickbait and maximizing revenue.
Don't get me wrong, I'm happy that they can get some money from it, but maybe there's too much money now. Every time I hear about a YouTube creator quitting their job and going pro, I fear for the future quality of their output.
Google is doing this for their advertisers, not creators. They have already pulled the rug out for under them with AI search queries and timestamp links that circumventthe creator's own in-video ads.
I don’t ever pay for a subscription or look at ads on YouTube. I support the creators I like by donating, patreon, buying merch, etc, all of which avoid a monopolist taking an outsized cut of their earnings.
If you’re on iOS, put the video on full screen and then put Safari in the background. Next, press play in the Control Center. This should now allow the audio to play in the background.
It should be trivial to work around; for instance, yt-dlp or so
(https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp) and I think you can as-is stream
e. g. via mpv or something, probably to the browser too. Some python
script for an ad-hoc localhost webserver I'd think.
What is much more worrying is how aggressively Google tries to abuse
its de-facto monopoly. I have said it before, I will say it again:
Google abusing everyone else is a bad situation. We need to make
Google smaller again.
What a waste of resources. Imagine employing some of the most brilliant engineers on the planet and allocating man-hours towards artificially worsening the experience for your userbase in order to blackmail them into paying you, and giving them back what they had in the first place.
At least this is a loosing game for Google, since this is client side behaviour.
They may have been extremely competent at this, but if they decided to spend years of their relatively short ephemeral life on such a useless project, perhaps they weren’t the best at the time. Perhaps they needed money and were focusing on family life, I don’t know. Who I am to judge? I’m judging though.
Why is that useless as opposed to what most of us do for work? I think you guys have a weird sense of how useful the average job is, or how much the average job contributes to society at large. At least this made a lot of money I guess.
They can take the skill to any other employer and improve performance for others elsewhere. Think of all the seconds you could get back to do more meaningful things if more websites were fully optimized. It may sound silly but it snowballs into minutes, hours, and days.
I think most jobs contribute positively to the society. Not much, for sure, but they contribute.
Is the cleaner regularly removing poop stains from the personal toilet of a big and rich Google shareholder more useful than the qualified Google engineer working hard so a big number is very slightly bigger on one the shareholder’s list of numbers? I think the cleaner has more impact.
Before tech became the go-to big money job, there was a well-worn stereotype of electrical engineering grads going to Wall Street instead of an EE-centric job.
It's a testament to the health of our free markets and competition that the winning move here is to spend a lot of time and money making your product worse for the average person.
While I'm not pro YouTube, I think it's fine for companies to decide how to monetise their product, including things which were originally free. If you don't like free services, stop using them
If a company wants to offer its service as a loss-leader to outlast its competitors who offered their services at a cost its users were willing to pay, then that company has no room to complain if people don't want to pay the last-game-in-town's jacked-up rates!
There is no moral high-ground for YouTube to take here.
GP and I are apparently from that universe where you remember that YouTube wasn't the only popular video on demand game in town and, e.g., Vimeo is older than YouTube. They only won because they didn't charge you for uploading or watching. They could afford to undercut the competition since they were bought by Google.
They were also somehow the only ones that offered music videos without being shut down.
Dailymotion, Google Video, sevenload, german TV stations RTL and Pro7 even launched Clipfish and MyVideo respectively to compete with youtube. Youtube happens to be the only one that survived on Googles ad model, the others very quickly realized that paid premium content is much easier to handle (copyright, CSAM) and monetize.
There wasn't but consider the context: at the time YouTube was an almost purely piracy platform most likely the biggest on the planet if quantified in IP dollar value - yet was magically not shut down by the government. How unfair to the competition is that? Remember that other piracy based sites were raided in that era. But when Google started acquiring it, it was very quickly above the law. YouTube should not exist.
- fair use was also sot as permissive in that era! Web 2.0 coerced a legal shift -
By contributing to something I don't agree with it's called hypocrisy. Just don't use it. That's probably the only thing you can do about if you want change.
Okay, so list which websites I can use to watch all kinds of content that I can find on YouTube.
Vimeo? It's basically dead. DailyMotion? It could've been an alternative, but they've recently deleted most old videos. Peertube? Nice idea in theory, but lack of content.
Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Tiktok all fulfil the 'whatever topic I am interested in this second, there are videos about it' property, though admittedly they do not have near as much meritorious long-form content as YouTube.
They're removing functionality that you already heave built into your browser in order to force you to pay to get that functionality back.
That's not monetization that's exploitation.
Would you feel the same if your phone suddenly updated so that your camera records in half quality unless you start paying monthly? It's their product, they can monetize it how they like.
It's monetisation. If they put a paywall on the video, your browser has the functionality to play the video but you're forced to pay to use that functionality.
Also wrt phone, it's different because I paid for the phone. But also I'd just use a different camera app?
The "functionality" is watching infinite free videos they provide. They are providing you with infinite free videos that you never paid for. You are not entitled to access the infinite free videos at all. You are definitely not entitled to access them in arbitrary ways that avoids their monitization scheme.
Oh, I despise this tactic so much. It means the company has known from the start that they can't offer it for free in the long term, but decided to subsidize it in order to gain a dominant position and get rid of competition. This breaks the conditions needed for a free market dynamics to work. In other words, they win market share for reasons other than efficiency, quality, or innovation. That's why some forms of government subsidies are prohibited under certain agreements, for example. Some multinational corporations have annual revenues larger than the GDP of many countries and can easily subsidize negative pricing for years to undercut competitors, consolidate market share, and ultimately gain monopoly power.
Also, the company has hinted false promises to the customer, as it signals that they have developed a business model where they can offer something for free. For example a two-sided marketplace where one side gets something for free to attract users and the other side pays (as it profits form these users). Users can't know something isn't sustainable unless the company explicitly states it in some way (e.g. this is a limited time offer).
So from the user's perspective, this is a bait-and-switch tactic, where the company has used a free offer in order to manipulate the market.
> If you don't like free services, stop using them
If they don't like users using their service how they deem improper, ban them? they know what accounts are doing it... There is a reason for this cat and mouse, and its not ending with youtube banning people.
A lot of the current issues i see with it, is that it is treated like the go to service for video hosting...
Just consider image hosting... If i see an image in a thread and click it (much like people will do with youtube urls), and block the ad that was on the hosted site, is there this much uproar about it? That image hosting site might charge 5$ to do what an adblocker already does... If they wanna lock that up? actually lock it up, and remove the "service" portion of the business, otherwise I don't see any legs to stand on here.
Service in my eyes here, is a public service. This is a company posing as a public service, and occasionally deciding it hates how a % of the public is using their service. So they hand them a 10$ a month ticket that they pretend is required, but they will never take action on users who dont pay that ticket.
I don't think it's fine for large companies to intentionally lose money to drive smaller competitors out of business. In fact, I think this practice should be illegal and that all who participated should be in jail.
Maybe ads-as-business-model is like political ideology - it is not a human universal but must adapt to the place: for instance collectivism over individualism in East Asia, theocratic conservatism over democracy in Afghanistan -- maybe ads as business model is despicable to some regions, but accepted in others? Albania it's apparently illegal for YouTube to serve ads?
> Imagine employing some of the most brilliant engineers on the planet
I am not sure those who work at Google are all brilliant - but it should
also not matter, because they support Evil here. They should be ashamed
for working for Evil. Guess if the money is right ...
GP did not say that just because you work at a massive company you are brilliant. Nor did they say just working at Google makes you brilliant.
The irony of your comment of accusing them of using fallacious rhetoric, is that your reply uses one of the most common fallacies of all: strawman fallacy
GP assumed “the most brilliant engineers” are working on these problems. There’s zero reason to believe that is true and the one thing we know about those people is that they work for Google.
Their argument isn’t new, it’s just a rehash of “the most brilliant minds of our generation are working on trying to get you to click on ads”. My criticism was directed at the general argument, which is simply wrong. That comment is based on nothing except those people working at those corporations.
It is not a strawman because I am disagreeing with the conclusion as quoted, the reasoning being immaterial.
Whataboutism is just fascinating. How myopic must your world view be that when you see one bad thing, you immediately try to justify it by pointing out another bad thing?
Agreed. I was leaving the mall with lots of great goods I had found, but then the guard stopped me and told me I was stealing! Imagine paying that guy a salary just to blackmail me into paying them! This is an outrage.
I'm sure the US government will be appreciative of a Chinese car manufacturer selling free cars in the US to obtain market share, and there definitely won't be calls of "dumping", no siree.
YouTube got to where it is by making intentional moves to be the only game in town. They aren’t the most user-hostile platform by any means, but they have been coasting on the network effects of backlogged content for close to a decade now. Even if a competitor could deal with network and storage costs, and somehow manage to attract a network of uploaders, the platform would be 20 years behind, and there’s certain content (e.g. older content) that you simply wouldn’t ever be able to find there in any appreciable quantity.
Drug dealers invented this business model, they would give heroin to young children for free and then once hooked hike the prices or force them to turn tricks to pay for their habit. It’s effective but not very admirable to say the least.
I've also seen this done for cheese, do you find that equally reprehensible? Or is the argument just rhetorical sleight of hand, where "drug dealers do X, so therefore X must be bad"? Drug dealers also consume food, and you know who else consumes food? You.
Cheese isn't so far off drugs after all: https://www.mountsinai.org/about/newsroom/2015/study-reveals... plus you have to make baby animals to get the milk for the cheese, so some exploitation is going on. I like cheese and youtube, but maybe they're both bad.
Cheesemongers have a bit less impact on society than drug dealers or Google. If Google were raking in hundreds of billions giving kids free cheese then charging them full price for parmigiana some might complain and I would not find fault in that. Scale matters.
It's not that we got hooked on YouTube (that would maybe be ok in a free market), it's that YouTube used "free" to make itself a monopoly. That's what the issue is, that you have no other options now.
Yes, the monopolistic aspect and scale are the parts I’m most bothered by. I think we all agree dangerous chemicals should be regulated, but we lack this sensibility when it comes to many tech products. So far at least. Eventually we’ll catch up. Will there be the lingering legacy, the tech equivalent of super fund sites? Maybe.
I don't disagree that some of these apps might need to be regulated, because they're basically attention crack, but to me that's more TikTok and Instagram rather than YouTube.
I hear TikTok is on the decline, and arguably the forced change of ownership is a sort of regulation. Instagram is owned by meta who has an interest in not letting it overtake Facebook in terms of popularity I imagine. It seems like a sort of hedge against other platforms mostly, but I really don’t know much about any of these platforms tbh. I use YouTube very heavily, but have only used twitter, Reddit and tinder in the distant past. I’ve never been on Facebook, TikTok, snap, etc… To me, irc and usenet were greatly superior and I’m waiting for people to return to their senses.
the only time ive tried to use a feature like that, is when im in the car listening to a podcast or something.
juggling the phone to not only skip ads, but also forcing the phone screen to be active, is a hazard.
In my case this loophole being closed, wouldn't make me pay for premium... but it would make a younger version of me certainly more dangerous on the road.
Do you ever watch videos on a computer? If so, do you ever switch away to a different tab, or to a different app entirely, and keep the video playing in your browser tab? YouTube artificially prevents that exact same action on tablets and phones unless you pay them.
Multitasking is a basic OS feature, no matter what kind of device you’re using. Gating it behind a paywall is user-hostile behavior at its finest.
Then they better have a 'correct' client for all platforms out there because they are filthy dominant at worldwide scale.
In my personal space: I don't think they are competent enough to provide a 'correct' set of ELF64 binaries for elf/linux, you know 'wayland->x11' fallback, 'vulkan->CPU' fallback, OLD glibc ABI, etc (BTW, wayland+vulkan = android).
Imagine trying to take a basic browser function we’ve all taken for granted for decades and attempt to paywall it as ‘Background playback is a feature intended to be exclusive for YouTube Premium members.’
Get fucked. I vote we remove API access to any focus state information.
It upsets me to see YouTube Premium apologists despite all the hostile moves by YouTube. YouTube Premium is an extortion scheme. When there are enough paying customers, YouTube Premium will begin showing ads to them. They won't forget sugarcoating ads as being “unobtrusive” or “environment-supporting” or whatever. But guess what? If you don't want to see them, you can upgrade to YouTube Premium Plus and continue being an apologist.
One might also say it was unsustainable from the start, video is incredibly expensive to host and especially moderate.
All we're seeing right now is the beginning of the end of the ad-financed world. Someone has to pay the bills in the end and advertisement spending is on the way down, more and more of it is going to influencers/TTL instead of traditional ATL/BTL marketing.
While that may be true, subscription services are a capitalist move that’s pricing premium well above profit margins.
‘YouTube is failing because free tier is too expensive to be offset by ads’ and ‘YouTube premium is overly expensive’ can both be true. Shareholders care about maximising profits now, not overall product longevity.
> While that may be true, subscription services are a capitalist move that’s pricing premium well above profit margins.
Agree in principle, but I'd raise the serious question if Youtube is profitable in the first place. Every minute, 500 hours of video are uploaded [1], so the storage growth given 1.5 GB/h is at least (not including compression, duplication across multiple DCs, edge nodes, whatever) 750 GB / minute, 45 TB / hour or 1.080 TB / day.
At 10 $/TB (and that is a figure from before the AI boom making all costs explode) they have to spend 10.800 $ per day just in HDD costs, on top of that comes the server hardware, racks, switches, datacenter construction costs, and then the cost of running all of that - electricity for the servers, cooling, internet egress bandwidth (in total, all video sites made up 65% traffic of the entire Internet pre-AI boom).
It is estimated that YT makes about 36 billion $ of revenue [3], assuming a split of 50/50 with creators [4] that means 18 billion $ end up in Youtube as gross revenue. From that, take off 10% for music licenses (estimated [5]), 25% for taxes (assuming for simplicity an average 20% corporate tax plus 5% VAT), that leaves 11.7 billion $. And that's... not that much, given that R&D, infrastructure investment, advertising expenses, costs of preferential deals with device manufacturers and phone carriers ("zero rating"), operational expenses (i.e. electricity, bandwidth) and headcount (moderation!) haven't been taken into account.
In the end, I think that unlike 2015 [6] Youtube is actually profitable - but barely, nowhere near close to the profit margins of Google Ads. Certainly not enough to appeal to the stonk markets and beancounters, and that is what drives the ever increasing push for ads and premium.
As a side question... I think what irks Google the most is that individual "influencers" can make millions of dollars in monthly income from sponsorships but Google sees nothing of that money at all.
But think how hard it is for them to earn money to make up for all the billions they’ve used to create de facto monopoly in video space? Won’t someone think of poor capitalists trying to squeeze the niche dry?
This is disingenuous - we were all watching flash video for about a decade before that. And before that we were watching (terrible ~160x120) video in realvideo* or asf format using browser plugins, since maybe 1997-1998, certainly before 2000.
* tangiential rambling old-person side-note: RealPlayer was a weird early example of a piece of software that was actually _better_ on Linux: The windoze version was notorious for also installing a thousand other pieces of spyware/adware and other trash, taking over your system and making it worse, to the point that people avoided it like the plague... But none of that crapware supported Linux, so the Linux version was just this relatively clean player that came as a self-contained, easy to install rpm and worked pretty well. I used to use RealPlayer a fair bit back in my early Linux days. When I used to tie an onion my belt, which was the style at the time.
This is annoying of course, but they're still providing infinite free videos. They are entitled to monetize that however they want. They are even entitled to make YouTube premium the only way to watch. Video hosting is not a cheap endeavor. If it's not worth the money, don't pay for it.
This is precisely why I don’t use YT anymore. On top of these scummy behaviour on Alphabets part… the content has taken a deep dive because more and more people are creating it for the “algorithm” and less for the content.
reply