This is the best summary I could come up with:
The company shut down one of the most popular third-party apps, “YouTube Vanced,” in 2022.
Vanced takes the official YouTube Android client and installs a duplicate, alternative version with a bunch of patches.
It also adds features the official app doesn’t have, like additional themes and accessibility features, “repeat” and “dislike” buttons, and the ability to turn off addictive “suggestions” that appear all over the app.
Rather than going after the projects, Google says it’s going to start disrupting users who are using these apps.
The company continues: “We want to emphasize that our terms don’t allow third-party apps to turn off ads because that prevents the creator from being rewarded for viewership, and Ads on YouTube help support creators and let billions of people around the world use the streaming service.”
If you remember back to when Google aggressively fought to keep third-party YouTube apps off of Windows Phone, the company seemed to take a similar stance against all third-party YouTube clients, even if they wanted to integrate ads.
The original article contains 344 words, the summary contains 170 words. Saved 51%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Some of the youtube channels I watch also have channels on Peertube instances or on Odysee. Both options allow me to follow using RSS. I prefer my views to go to these platforms, so hopefully more content creators see these as viable hosts for their videos.
Peertube is also federated, so you can follow channels from your Mastodon account (and I think Lemmy too). You could also spin up your own instance if you like too.
I assume you help and financially support your instance of choice to help them with server costs? Video platforms are much more expensive to host than text platforms like mastodon or lemmy.
Not again … Well, let’s wait a week or so for the clients to fix that.
That content does not belong to YouTube. And they also do not pay for 99% of it.
YouTube depends on people to use it for it’s existence. They also depend on those users to upload content so that YouTube can then treat that content as if it is its own and monetize it.
If I was in such a precarious position I wouldn’t go about making the experience crappy for those users that I’m desperately dependent upon.
Also, use greyjay. It’s fantastic.
youtube hosts, handles bandwidth, provides creator tools, deals with monetization, handles royalties, and creates the platform…
That’s nice. Do they also create the content for the platform that is by far the most costly part of it? Or have they simply found a way to monetize content that does not belong to them?
a) without youtube, creators wouldn’t have a platform b) they’re monetizing it to pay creators.
Does every single creator get paid for their work and the value that they add to the platform? Or does YouTube arbitrarily get to decide who gets a tiny piece of the revenue from the content that YouTube doesn’t own?
why would you NOT get youtube premium? it’s $22 for 6 users and you get music and ad-free youtube it’s honestly the best streaming service
i do think that channel subscriptions should include ad free watching for that channel, similar to twitch subs. so if people want to subscribe to just one channel they can get ad free viewing for that channel
You dropped the /s
nah
I have 3 friends sir. Where do i find 6 users
Imagine buying premium to watch videos riddled with ads and sponsors in the video itself.
This format just isn’t making any sense for me, they would’ve implemented something as sponsorblock years ago
Youtube isn’t some one of a kind miracle. There’s at least a dozen already-established streaming platforms that would take its place. There are thousands of websites that have no problems hosting gigs and gigs of porn, so it’s not as difficult as people think.
It kind of is. YouTube has decades of history. Unfathomable amounts of video. No indie platform will ever come close to hosting more than a fraction of a percent of YouTube’s library and be as accessible and as fast. It would cost an unbelievable amount of money in servers and maintenance let alone moderation. The problem is this is a service, like many others that exist today, that does not bring in more money than it costs. YouTube exists because it’s a branch on a megacorporation tree, but even Google will eventually need to find a way to make it profitable. It is impossible to fund this for free or anywhere close to free.
No indie platform will ever come close to hosting more than a fraction of a percent of YouTube’s library and be as accessible and as fast.
The number of times I’ve heard “XYZ will never happen” in the area of tech from one person or another over the decades (or made the mistake of thinking so myself) is high.
Youtube will either become reasonable in their practices again (which could include a pricing adjustment for ad-free access), or will be replaced as the de facto video service. It may not happen in the short timespan we’d all like to see, but it will happen.
History would suggest that, but I’m starting to believe we’re in a tech service bubble that’s ready to pop. I touched on this in my comment, but it’s becoming clearer than ever that the vast majority of the services we use today are not sustainable on a number of levels. Economically, they’re all a mess.
Food delivery services are bleeding money constantly in the hopes that one day they’ll find a way to profit. They won’t. It’s an insane business model. The actual cost of the service is many times the price of the food you’re buying. Uber/Lyft already isn’t keeping prices low enough to be a cheap option anymore because they’ve coasted too long on VC funding and it’s time for them to start making money. But they still aren’t and if they charged what it actually costs to operate, no one would use it. Many online platforms can’t sustain themselves despite being major social media hubs. Streaming services spend more on buying up movies, shows, IP rights, and other streaming services than their subscriptions bring in.
The endgame of all this means everything will become unaffordably expensive for almost everyone, the services utterly nosedive in quality as companies cut costs and fire staff, or they go bankrupt and collapse. I think we’ve already had it as good as it’s gonna get and we’re going to go through a period of corporations slowly pulling back everything they’ve pushed into our lives with investor funding over the past decade. It’s not just Lemmy’s favorite buzzword “enshitification.” I think a lot of what we expect from the Internet is not sustainable and it’s not going to stick around in any form we would want.
The endgame of all this means everything will become unaffordably expensive for almost everyone, the services utterly nosedive in quality as companies cut costs and fire staff, or they go bankrupt and collapse.
While you’ve got some reasonable points, I’m about 14 years into using exclusively the OS everyone tried to tell me would never be viable on the desktop as my only desktop OS, and have been able to find opportunities to deploy it in my day job also. Haven’t used Windows except when paid to in all that time.
And we’re conversing here on Lemmy, which may be objectively “worse” than Reddit by some metrics, but not any metrics that matter to me, nor, I think, to the majority of its users.
When I’m done typing this I’m going to fire up my Jellyfin client to connect to my free and open source Jellyfin media server, and watch some content on that system which does everything I’d ever hoped a media server would do, even though I was confidently told by many people when it first forked from Emby (after Emby was enshittified) that it would be dead in two years, and certainly could never begin to compete with Plex. (I have never missed Plex for a single minute since moving to Jellyfin)
Those are just three recent examples that I could think of without much effort. As you may be thinking, all of them are far smaller in scale than youtube, and yet, all three of them are things that quite happily serve my needs without spying on me or requiring exorbitant fees to feed someone else’s greed. I can (and do) support them financially, and in other ways, because I choose to.
I’m not listing more examples because I’m too lazy to, not because lots more don’t exist.
More broadly, I grew up during the time when very nearly everything regarding using a personal computer really was controlled by corporations, and was exorbitantly expensive. I had a computer because I was privileged enough to have parents who could buy me one, but the only free or inexpensive things to do with it were: Piracy (via locally copying each others’ games in most cases), Bulletin Board Systems, and learning to program. Shareware and Freeware existed, but with some notable exceptions tended to be not so good for various reasons, and the selection was not especially broad.
There was no free/cheap equivalent like the Raspberry Pi to play with, but if you really wanted to pinch pennies you could build a PC with a kit from Heathkit or Radio Shack, for a fee that was still out of reach for a great many people due to cost or skill. There was not a global internet where people could collaborate and teach each other, and to whatever degree things like BBSs and Quantumlink (which eventually became AOL) might have been capable of providing those sorts of interpersonal connections, the critical mass wasn’t there in a way that it is today.
We have Linux. We have cheap and/or open hardware. We have a vast trove of Free (not just gratis: libre) software that anyone in the world can use to run on that hardware, and improve on their own without penalty. We can share knowledge with others at a rate unheard of for most individuals decades ago. We have numerous examples of users who keep such services and products going, and thriving, without needing to siphon money out of the public as fast as possible to appease shareholder value.
I predict that any such collapse as you describe will be transient, and it will pass far more quickly than it would have in the past. We (gesturing broadly) have the technology, the capability, and (I think) the desire to move past reliance on many of these services and corporate-controlled environments, and various individuals are already doing so. What emerges on the other side after such a paradigm shift as you predict won’t be Youtube, but that won’t mean it’s a step backwards, either.
we’re going to go through a period of corporations slowly pulling back everything they’ve pushed into our lives with investor funding over the past decade
I’m not convinced that’s a bad thing overall.
It’s not just Lemmy’s favorite buzzword “enshitification.”
Enshittification is a concept that has a little bit more depth than just being Lemmy’s favorite buzzword.
I understand where you’re coming from. I’m not personally a Linux user despite a lot of what I value overlapping with the Linux community broadly. I do think much of the technology we use today can and should be replaced by open source alternatives and I’m optimistic about growing interest globally in that regard. I’m not at all suggesting we submit to the new corporate-controlled Internet or go back to a pre-2000s lifestyle.
But I think we’re talking about different things, so let me just bring it back to YouTube. A lot of what we can do is limited by inescapable expenses: server costs and labor. We can say labor is optional because a lot of open source projects are developed and maintained by volunteers. But people do need money to live, so this project becomes the side gig, not the full time job. YouTube’s already a mess with moderation. Imagine a video platform with no full time staff to review illegal uploaded content, DMCA requests, comments, etc. But the bigger issue is the scale of YouTube, trying to make billions of videos play seamlessly at all times all over the world and just work. I can’t fathom the infrastructure needed for that. It would cost far more than it would make in donations if that was all it was accepting. No ads means the budget is that much smaller. If the small percentage of users with YouTube Premium doesn’t bring in enough to keep things running, the open source version wouldn’t either. And fewer people would be willing to pay for it.
This is what I mean by services that are unsustainable. Yes, clearly the technology makes it possible. But there is a cost to it and I think we’re entering a time when we don’t get those things for free anymore.
I think the primary difference in our views is that I don’t think Youtube needs to be replaced by something like it to be replaced. I don’t claim to have a viable approach in mind, but I’m certain one exists.
I would love a federated network of video platforms as long as they can all be searched collectively. Would be great if videos could even be migrated to other instances if storage becomes too limited on one of them. Yeah, it probably isn’t ideal that YouTube is all one platform, but it certainly makes it easy to find what you’re looking for most of the time.
If the modern internet teaches us anything, its that everything is ephemeral even when you stringently catalogue every last byte of data. People just dont need access to 90% of YouTube’s library, yet Youtube has to pay big money to make 100% of that library available 24/7 365.
There’s already rips at the seams of these systems. Time is not on the side of YouTube.
Video hosting is still rather expensive, live streaming even more. Not sure that even youtube is profitable. Until some new tech comes along I think only amazon would be able to support some kind of viable alternative - and not sure they will be much better.
Like which?
Google “Odysee”.
It’s currently my preferred YouTube alternative. Granted it obviously doesn’t have as much content as YouTube. But several well known content creators post to both YouTube and Odysee now.
Some of the ones I follow include: Louis Rossman, Anton Petrov, SomeOrdinaryGamers, and Zach Star Himself. Just to name a few.
And there’s also a browser extension called “Watch on Odysee” which adds a button to the YouTube video if the video is also found on Odysee so you can “watch on Odysee” instead of YouTube. Which can help you locate your favorite youtubers on the platform and let you follow them.
And there is also an Odysee mobile app if you like watching videos on mobile.
This is just one example, but I hope it helps ;-)
Gotta love this shit. Conservatives/companies: “Let the market decide!” The market: “We are tired of you cramming ads down our throats and fundamentally do not want it and will actively fight you on it.” Companies: “Waaaaaa, they are fighting us.”
Conservative companies promoting free market economy: Government, make it a crime to not use our products!
“A company should be able to decide not to do business with individuals for ideological reasons.”
Twitter, Facebook, etc. start filtering misinformation and banning offenders.
“Mah freedoms are being infringed!”
The problem with YouTube Premium is the pricing tiers are completely out of touch with what people are willing to pay and what services they’re willing to pay for.
Let me compare to Discovery+. For $9 a month, loads of shows that ran on TV for decades can be streamed at 1080p (or whatever resolution they were available in), on up to four devices at the same time. They still have some original shows that they spend money to make. This service does not have ads.
Let’s also compare to Nebula, which like Discovery+ also has original content funded by the platform. Every content creator there is also an invited owner of the platform, so their cost structure is a bit different, but they still have to sustain the costs of running a streaming platform while compensating the creators of said content for views. Nebula is a microscopic $5 a month per user with no ads.
YouTube is a platform with entirely user-generated content (costs YT nothing except bandwidth) that is already supported at the free tier with a gratuitous amount of ads. This service has been available completely free with ad support for nearly two decades. The lowest “premium” tier they offer is $14 a month for one person to stream ad-free, at a better 1080p bitrate, be able to download videos or watch them in the background in the official app, pay creators for every view, and have a music streaming app thrown in for good measure. The only other tier is all the same stuff in a $22 monthly family plan for six users, but they all have to be in the same “household” or you’re technically breaking TOS, so in practice it’s often more like $22 for three people, and heaven forbid any of you travel for work.
Two of the “premium” features should be free anyway. You can’t watch a video without downloading it at least once, so the bandwidth cost is the same. If you download it and play it more than once, that actually saves YouTube bandwidth, and therefore cost. Any video that’s played more than once is probably going to be played a lot more than once, so this would add up, especially if the app downloads the ad spots ahead of time. Background play doesn’t cost them any bandwidth at all and is a trivial feature to implement, so it’s put behind a paywall as an artificial restriction for no other reason than to annoy users for not paying. Both of these are anti-features; to charge for them is anti-consumer. They engender spite in users, making them less willing to pay for Premium and more determined to find alternatives.
Instead of trying to figure out what people are actually willing to pay for, which is the expected behavior of a market actor, Google continues to behave like a monopoly that can dictate terms to its users. This is why people refuse to pay for Premium. If they made the anti-features free, and introduced a Premium tier that is $7 a month to one user for nothing more than better bitrate streaming with no ads, people would sign up in droves. There could be a $9 tier for streaming boxes like Roku or Chromecast that offers Premium service for any account viewed from that one specific device, without having to sign up each individual account for premium, which satisfies another niche. The $14 tier could remain for those who also want music streaming (an extra $7 is still much cheaper than Spotify premium), and the $22 tier could still be a significant value proposition for actual families.
It’s not that the price offered for the $14 premium plan isn’t reasonable for what it offers - the issue is that what it offers doesn’t match the actual needs of many people who use adblockers or third-party clients, on top of insulting users with anti-features. Until YouTube management can be made to understand this, they will continue to screech impotently about ad-blockers while driving users away and leaving potential revenue on the table.
Ofcourse you always get youtube music with the subscription, which they claim ads extra value. But I dont want youtube music, I already pay for another service. So for me it would be a waste of money
I pay for the family plan and they use google music. I use pandora because my station is older than my 16yo niece that’s on my yt plan.
Never!
Removed by mod
My newpipe 😔
I’ve mostly only noticed that the comments won’t load, not a big loss imo
Likewise but im sure it wont stop there
I think Google engineers drag their feet on this.
Like - Google’s pre-installed corporate Firefox and Chrome both have ad blockers. Ublock origin is installed by default on Firefox (I can’t remember what was installed on chrome, I only used it for the work suite/cloudtop and did everything else on FF).
Nobody I worked with at Google liked ads… But I didn’t work at YouTube. So maybe it’s different there.
But I suspect the engineers are doing it just to show management that they’re doing something but it’s half hearted.
Real efforts and real threats of it getting locked down, sure, but half hearted effort.
There’s already a patch for comments in the release candidate for the new version
I switched them off by default.
Will they actually be able to block users that watch it without logging in?
Damn, I got my setup so perfect on the TV with SmartTube. But I will not be able to tolerate ads. Then I’d rather only watch on Firefox with uBlock on my laptop.
Then pay for premium?
Then youtube wins. No.
So you want to use YouTube to stream videos, but don’t want to pay or watch ads?
You just want people to give you shit for free?
On one hand, I think that by now it is by far a public service, in private hands.
On the other hand, yes you do already pay by providing them information on your interests and other personal matters.
That content does not belong to YouTube. And they also do not pay for 99% of it.
YouTube depends on people to use it for it’s existence. They also depend on those users to upload content so that YouTube can then treat that content as if it is its own and monetize it.
If I was in such a precarious position I wouldn’t go about making the experience crappy for those users that I’m desperately dependent upon.
Well, it seems like you aren’t part of the target audience.
Luckily there are other options out there for you!
Not OP, but heck yeah free stuff! Special thanks to the people providing us Lemmy for free :)
Yay free stuff for sure, but what happens when no one is paying for something?
How did Google manage to buy YouTube, and then make YouTube the video monopoly it currently is ? One of the pillars of that foundation is open source software used by Google, for free. Some of that open source software maintained for a long time by unpaid and sometimes burned out software developers. All the YT video watchers commenting here in this post wanting to pay content creators and wanting content creators live off that : Google is run by a few laughing billionaires who probably care most about shareholders and being able to make more money by exploiting ads on the billions of hooked end users. Besides paying YT and content creators consider supporting small scale open source projects as well. Help out wherever and whenever you can with open source software. Take back your digital sovereignty. Big tech is not your friend. Open source empowers and shares with others as in sharing is caring.
I did for many years. But then I moved to Korea and they don’t allow family plans and paying 4 individual ones is just not in our budget. Then probably just no YouTube for me.
Fuck them. I’d rather donate quadruple the money for premium to my favourite creators directly than give a single penny to this parasitic mega corporation.
The issue is not only the ads, it’s the stupid shit it throws you to keep you hooked, it’s the stupid shorts that literally no one asked for, it’s every stupid little thing that fights for your attention. Basically the app doesn’t work for you, it works against you. That’s not the case with third party apps, they have you, the user, in mind, not their profits.
