Fuck GOOG for normalizing surveillance capitalism
Fuck YouTube in particular for making it basically impossible to usefully host an Invidious proxy any more and for their algorithmic manipulation
PeerTube is the Way
A big problem with peertube is monetization. There should be some sort of mechanism that'd do that automatically. Otherwise there won't be much content ever. Don't get me wrong, I'm really happy that it exists but just don't see it replacing even few % of YouTube as it is.
If you want monetization and scalability, you're gonna have to get ads. Ad-free subscription services that actually benefit the creators are exceedingly rare. Very few people (less than 0.1%) are "making it" on Patreon and the like. The bitter truth is that most users can't afford to financially support their favorite creators, and damn near zero creators could get the level of exposure needed to be sustainable without an ad-based platform backing them.
Video hosting is expensive af. Ultimately, small-time content creation is completely dependent on corporate benefactors. This is why every video platform that's tried to compete against YouTube has failed. Nebula is trying, but that's only useful to creators who fit within its specific niche.
I'm not saying this as a vote of support for the current system. Just an observation of how the market has played out so far.
I have to hand it to them, they are really good at finding new, innovative ways to make the platform worse.
Deactivated Premium recently. I used their music app when driving – expecting some ads now - nope, it just doesn’t allow running in the background anymore.
Seems like such a hostile thing - I’d like to think running ads would be a positive net income for them. (Now that I think of it - maybe they don’t have it built out into their music service.)
Makes me long for the days of google music. It just worked. Streamed stuff and even allowed you to stream your own library that you had stored in drive. I would use that in the car. Then they ditched it for YouTube music, which was a worse experience and lacked the features.
That old days when Google was cool and not evil.
If you pay, the platform remains great. I get a discounted YouTube premium membership through my mobile phone company. I think YouTube is great, I never see ads, lots of features.
Just to offer an alternative view.
I pay nothing for YouTube and don't get ads. YMMV
So is it YouTube family or YouTube household?
Either way, probably need to setup site to site VPN and route YouTube traffic through a central location, if you can block geolocation.
So nice of them. They help me cut the strings to the last google service I was not quite committed do drop
GTK. I think they flagged my account since I share it with my spouse and some of my basic features disappeared recently like mini-player in the browser. I might need to unsubscribe and just rely on Firefox with an ad blocker. Nebula and Patreon are good alternatives as well.
I noticed that too. Thought it was just regular YouTube jank as usual.
There are people actually paying for this crap?
I have a hot take. I pretty much exclusively watch YouTube as my form of TV entertainment. On most days, I watch many hours between putting something on to go to sleep or actually watching stuff in the day such as training courses or whatever. Sure, I could easily set up my TVs and devices to work around it, but I think it's actually worth it to just pay for Premium and not have the hassle. I feel I get more than my fair share out of it.
Run a personal VPN server at the home address and have external users route through it. I'd think it'd work for any subscription service doing this crap. I'm surprised nobody has started selling a turnkey self-hosted VPN device that even a non-techie can get running in a few steps - all the end users would need is an app that does split tunneling for the media players.
I'm thinking of doing the same but the issue is setting up the policy based routing so that only YouTube goes through that VPN.
Well fuck. It never crossed my mind that YouTube would do this since I don’t view it the same as other traditional streaming services. This will really suck for my friends who I’ve happily let mooch off my plan for years.
It's always nice when the garbage takes itself out. And if you're inconvenienced, I feel for you, but the writing has been on the wall for years. They will keep trying to suck more money out of you every way they can until you cancel your subscription, and because that's going to happen in the end, why not cancel it today.
NewPipe told me I was IP banned last week but it went away.
I'd rather stop using than give them money.
Meanwhile I installed the User Agent Switcher extension for firefox to change my user agent every 30 seconds to something random to avoid tracking. A few websites don’t accept it. I just quit those websites and find a non-billionaire-owned alternative like Kagi or Fastmail. So far it’s working out well.
How are they able to tell if you are in a different household ? If the user use different VPNs then it shouldn't be able to tell the different between that and being in different locations. So are they gathering internal network data, are they spying on the LAN and wifi ?
Anyone who actually pays for this shit has it coming.
Ahh classic, punishing paying costumers while pirates don't have to deal with any of this shit. I guess the beatings will continue until profits increase!
It's called Premium Family, not Premium Household for fuck's sake.
Sure, it takes a bit of effort. But if you replace your routers with ones that have open-source firmware or actual workstations acting as gateway routers and running business-class open-source software, you can create a personal VPN between everyone involved that shows only one exit point to world+dog.
The trick is with ensuring that all YouTube stuff gets properly and comprehensively funnelled through this exit node - VPNs can easily leak data if not configured properly, and sometimes do so despite good configs - and implementing this even on other devices that require individual VPN connectivity (roaming, like phones).
Plus, having a mobile device’s VPN auto-recognize when it’s connected to a known good network, and have it automatically disable itself in favour of the VPN on that network, is not something that’s easy to do.
Finally, doing so without a high-quality, high-speed ISP plan can easily lead to an unusably slow VPN. The “mothership” exit node, in particular, would have to be gigabit or better - and symmetrical as well, so fibre and not cable - because it has both the node and connections to other homes and devices. If everyone started suckling the YouTube teat at the same time, things would likely slow down pretty fast on anything significantly less than a symmetrical gigabit connection.
I have been using (re)vanced for many years, it's free and takes a lot less effort.
Seems there is a market for spoofing specific IP addresses out there. What if they don't know you are not at home? I ha e no clue how any of this works...
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