cross-posted from: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/22423685
EDIT: For those who are too lazy to click the link, this is what it says
Hello,
Sad news for everyone. YouTube/Google has patched the latest workaround that we had in order to restore the video playback functionality.
Right now we have no other solutions/fixes. You may be able to get Invidious working on residential IP addresses (like at home) but on datacenter IP addresses Invidious won’t work anymore.
If you are interested to install Invidious at home, we remind you that we have a guide for that here: https://docs.invidious.io/installation/..
This is not the death of this project. We will still try to find new solutions, but this might take time, months probably.
I have updated the public instance list in order to reflect on the working public instances: https://instances.invidious.io. Please don’t abuse them since the number is really low.
I would suggest the devs to be able to create instances from within tor. It would be slow, but impossible to block. Or from any other network that don’t rely on single IP access to YouTube . Or, make a mesh of collaborative home instances. Google can’t block millions of home IPs. Or use any mesh collaborative network capable of it.
TOR exit node IP addresses are well-known. If YouTube wants to, they can just block the TOR network.
Piped extractor already did this by implementing ipv6 rotator
Is it possible to add it by invidious ?
So when do we start just showing up the the doorstep of google employees?
I work for the fucking military industrial complex and not even I would be a bad enough person to work on breaking invidious.
i absolutely despise youtube. these fuckers are putting ads on paused videos now, and then this.
they will never get better. only worse. we need regulations badly.
We need a competitor badly.
rumble is pretty good
fuck off out of here with your nazi platforms
Pretty much every Alternative Tech platform also has a huge far right population Lemmy is an exception to this but has a decently sized far left population instead I dunno how it is now but a lot of people complained a couple of weeks ago about Nazis joining Bluesky and one of the guys from Bluesky covering them
Mastadon has a huge far right population?
Poast is listed as one of the biggest instances You just don’t notice it on Mastadon since a lot of them are defederated
Gab and Truth.social are Mastodon instances, just defederated by everyone else in case of the former, and not federating and pretending they’re their own thing in case of the latter.
that’s true, but platforms like rumble were created to be homes to the far right. we shouldn’t encourage their existence.
I am apolitical
Well that’s not true. You’re very pro-genocide, as long as it’s against Palestinians. That’s pretty political.
Not really, i just don’t want to see another islamist state
Competitor with no content, users is not a competitor. Youtube should be forced to share content they do not own. Just for the sake of competition.
The content isn’t the problem. It’s the delivery system. No one else has the storage and network capacity that Youtube has. And as a result of that, no one else has the built-in audience Youtube has. Putting your videos on YT is simply the best way to get views.
I wish they’d nationalize stuff like YouTube, and online data storage, etc
I use odysee, and so far it’s been nice.
Whatever happened to dailymotion?
iirc they tried to become a tiktok clone, no idea how it went but considering i never see anyone talk about it i doubt it went very well
Dailymotion does not allow for commenting anymore. That’s why I stopped using it.
Does anyone really post anything to Dailymotion besides blatantly unauthorized TV stuff? I can’t imagine it’d be very good vibes for anyone trying to make an honest living with original content over there.
Paying Nebula subscriber here 🙋♂️
Pony up or your call for a competitor doesn’t mean anything. People don’t want ads? Fine. There has to be another revenue stream. Server capacity costs money, making a website and app cost money, and video creators need to eat.
Then isn’t the obvious move to just pay for youtube?
I also do that. But Nebula is more thoroughly creator friendly. 50% of net profits go to creators and are divided by their share of watch time. That is a far more creator friendly policy than YT having a closed ad algorithm and you just get what you get. The YT display algorithm is also famously opaque and has some bullshit nanny filters on it such that you can’t actually make a faithful video about something like a historical massacre without being demonetized and hurting your channel in the algo.
There’s a lot I like about YT and being a premium subscriber does benefit creators there but I think Nebula is a next step in that evolution and it’s off to a decent start.
I pay for both.
Absolutely this. I pay for both my Proton and Notesnook accounts. No ads, no trafficing my data, and services I like and believe in.
I do pony up for other services (not YT Premium because I won’t give Google any money) and support a significant number of creators via Patreon, giving them more money by far than they’d ever see from me from ads. And I’ve spent thousands of hours on my own dime making written content and giving it away for nothing with no ads or tracking. So yes, I agree.
Can you say more about the written content part? I’m not sure I understood. Are you giving YT creators scripts for videos?
You want regulations on ads for a free service?
The entitlement is wild.
Works for Albania.
Its not like google fucking earned that money anyways. You don’t earn billions of dollars.
Think about it. If you earned a million dollars a day, you’d be set for life. If you lived for a full hundred years you’d have only made 1/10th of a billion dollars. Despite the fact that its still more money than either of us will probably ever see.
The people who operate google have billions with an s at the end. Think about the hardest working person you’ve known. Think about how little money they made.
Now ask yourself, what did the people with billions do to earn that money? How hard did they have to work to justify it, and how is that level of work even humanly possible? How would a bunch of spoiled overgrown trustfund fratboys find it in themselves do that work?
They fucking don’t. The only people who get that rich do it by cheating, and stealing, and fucking people over. Those fuckers owe us a lot more than video streaming services.
👌👍
Your math is off. You said one million per day, but your 1/10 of a billion would have it as one million per year
Oof that’s a typo, yeah meant years. Sorry bud.
They’re a monopoly that relies on users to produce content. You see, in a functional capitalist system, when one supplier deliberately hinders competition through unfair trade practices, they are made to change their methods in order to foster competition.
When that system is corrupted and fails to act in a timely manner, all bets are off.
You know where else you can go to find the billions of videos users have uploaded? No. How did it get that way? Just, luck? No.
Yes, we want regulations on ads in YouTube, and it’s an ignorant and arrogant position to call that “entitled”.
You’ll never get upvotes for telling people this reality, but you are of course completely correct.
If only we saw as much enthusiasm for voting generally as we see for taking ads off YT. Maybe we’d actually get a government that was willing to regulate titans.
Free or not, monopolies should be regulated.
Do you pay for nebula?
Yes, and ads should be regulated regardless of whether the service is free or not. Same way you can’t put outright porn on a highway billboard.
Start asking your favourite content creators to post on PeerTube.
And while we’re at it, stop calling them ‘content creators’
Male/female adult online entertainer?
Why? What else would we call them?
To answer the “why”, it’s because the word “content” is kinda meaningless. Instead of making films, documentaries, talk shows, reference guides, cartoons… it’s all just this generic “content” slop that’s just there to feed the machine
What a strange opinion.
Words is funny sometimes.
It’s not that strange, I have a friend who literally said the same thing today in reference to one of his favourite channels shutting down. He preferred to call the stuff on this channel art, rather than content. I agree with the person above too, the term has always bugged me. It makes it sound so mass produced, like your job is to just produce meaningless “content” for people to mindlessly consume. And to be honest, that’s exactly what the mainstream YouTube culture is about.
I mean, you don’t call it whatever you like, but content is the technical definition of it.
I agree with this a lot. I really do not like the term “content”. It is like going to a recipe for some “slop”, like using a term that is just a catch all for everything tossed on a plate.
Art is great. Movies, music are also fine terms. And so is simply saying they made a video. Watering it all down to the term “content” is just so boring and mind numbing.
Not really. The term “content creator” is corporate speak. Google’s ad-based business model has a binary classification: content and ads. It’s not an inaccurate term, but using it implicitly endorses the corporation’s binary world view.
Entertainers. Show women/men.
Show women/men sounds like a 70s porno “medical” exploitation film
Showman/woman refers to a pretty specific type of performer, I.E someone who is on stage typically.
Entertainer isn’t a label I’d necessarily apply to educational content, for example.
Then call them educators, or presenters… teachers, maybe, depending on the nature of their work
Yes it’s much better to use
“comedians/teachers/musicians/educators/entertianers/phonereviewers/sportscommenters/singers/journalists/programmers/documenters/analysts/lawyers/lockpickers/politicians/presenters/trolls”
… than…
“content creators”.
If you find someone that fits all those categories, I wouldn’t begrudge you that
What do you have against creators as a label? I don’t really see these difference myself.
Or just call them Content creators, recognize they don’t really produce value for anyone but YT’s grab on the attention economy and start living in the real world.
Not all content is entertaining. Someone who makes tutorials I wouldn’t call an entertainer. That’s why “content creator” is used as a catch all term to cover all of it.
Call them what they truely are. Digital panhandlers
That’s pretty insulting, a lot of what YouTube creators do takes real skill, and it’s a full time job for many.
In the past maybe, but certainly not these days. It’s overglorified corporate money grab propaganda, that goes around shamelessy guilt tripping viewers when truth is spoken. Much of these so-called content creators do not much else than making face react videos to something they saw and just talk about their likes or dislikes. They get paid lots just to make a soy-jack face and shitty clickbaits. The amount of money some them get paid is large sums insane for little efforts in proportion to what worth it actually ought to be. There people out there putting real efforts and labor to contributions to society to keep it running that paid squat in comparison. Its sad really. Go ahead downvote me, it doesn’t change the truth i speak.
What is the alternative name for someone who creates content for a platform?
Do we need a general term? Someone who uploads their videos to a video platform is probably a “video producer”.
So what should we say when discussing people who make video, audio, text media?
I see their point about “content”, where, on YouTube, for example, it devalues the videos as subordinate to YouTube as a platform, but I think as people use the word “content” it loses that connotation.
video → video producer
audio → musician, podcaster, … depending on the type of audio
text media → author
So what word should we use when describing all of those people in one group?
I don’t have a very good answer to that either tbh; do we really need to do that so often?
Time wasters.
!!!
Well, we start by referring ta work not as “content”, but as what it actually is. Then work from there. For instance, one could ostensibly call Ahoy a filmmaker or a documentary maker.
Bruh that dude is a CONTENT CREATOR, not a filmmaker 😂🤣🤣
His internet videos are colourful animations meant to serve ads while capturing attention and summarizing Wikipedia articles giving some thoughts on them, and I love them, but it’s called content for a reason.
“Bruh” is not a strong opener to an argument
Bruh 💀
… Which is a type of content.
There’s a lot of content that doesn’t fit neatly into a category though, because it was made by someone turning on a camera and making a video without worrying about any commercial concerns. So calling someone like that a creator is a catch all term for anyone making content for a platform.
But don’t you think it’s a bit reductionist? We read books, not analogue text content. We eat meals, not nutritional content. We listen to songs, not rhythmic euphoria content. I don’t think it’s about commercial concerns - in fact, the term ‘content’ to refer to anything and everything is the ‘commercial’ way of putting it.
Someone hitting ‘record’ on a microphone and jamming on a guitar is still music. Why should we treat video any differently?
It’s a technical term, we may not use it in everyday conversation, but it is the correct term.
Right. Call them youtubers! Wait…
I’ll take the name Content Creator over Influencer any day.
Civvie 11 is a old head. How do I convince him?
And then watch the peertube instance die. See also: https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube/issues/5783
on which instance?
And how are they going to make a living to keep producing videos?
I’d say ask them to join Nebula.
Paying Nebula subscriber here 🙋♂️
I can’t stand hearing people whine about wanting everything for free and how DARE people try to make a living so they can eat in between making videos!!!
Remember when people posted on YouTube for fun? It’s only when it became a viable business that the platform turned to shit.
Ah yes, youtube now is just one big ad and sponsorship cesspool flooded with clickbait and misinformation and with highly privacy invasive protocol. Its a souless capitalisic corporate machine. I dont know why people would still use it. Just let youtube die.
Patreon and all the other services creators have at their disposal already.
Don’t think most Youtubers can make a living these days solely on YT as revenue, and are already exploring other avenues.
Direct payment to creators seems like the most simple and efficient method.
I just want the videos no creator makes money on. I expect thats about 50% at least. Let’s start there. Put them in the Library of Congress and YouTube will be free to enshittify themselves into oblivion without complaint.
They can still post on YouTube.
It might take a tiny bit of their revenue away but I doubt it would make much of a dent, especially for creators that run mostly on patreon anyway.
All the people I watch on youtube make the majority of their money on patreon or twitch. Youtube is way too heavy handed with demonitization and copyright strikes to be a trutsworthy income source.
That depends. If they only make a living with YT ads, then it’s going to be hard.
I guess I forgot things like Patreon which could be a valid option. Although I’m neither a fan of subscribing to specific creators nor am I particularly fond of Patreon.
With Nebula my perception is that I pay a monthly fee and they can figure out who gets what depending on whose videos I watched. I don’t need to be particular in my action on who to support.
They also can use sponsors in the video, but that only works when you have enough views.
Yes if a creator’s main living can be shifted into Patreon or their own independent subscription service, THEN you will see them move off of YT because it actually works against them at that point. Mark Spagnuolo aka The Wood Whisperer has made this transition. He’s been around years (decades?) with awesome quality woodworking content. He’s found independent sponsorships. He’s created his own subscription service and takes direct payments but also uses platforms like Patreon. He plays the social media game very well. He travels to trade shows and keeps up with a podcast. He is the gold standard for what it takes a creator to move off of YT and still make a living IMO. His wife is a driving force behind making the business work and I think it’s a full time job for her too and probably a staff of employees. Mark used YT in the early years to build an audience but he does very little at all on YT nowadays.
He also has very little out there now that is free 🤷♂️
You can’t have it both ways
Nebula is a good option, but now you’ve created a paywall. Now only people who can afford it, can watch the content and what is to keep Nebula from upping the price of the subscription?
If ads is out of the question, then content creators need to use sponsors and patrons, if they want to make a living.
An advantage of funding things via a collective like Nebula as opposed to each individual creator managing their own patrons is that new creators can start making bigger, more expensive projects quicker. Even established creators have this advantage, they can take bigger risks on bigger projects with the safety net of a share of the nebula pie.
I don’t think a project like The Prince would exist without Nebula, for example.
a collective like Nebula
FYI, Nebula isn’t a collective: https://scribe.rip/@cameron-paul/who-actually-owns-nebula-952a1c12d9c0
Thanks for the link, it was a very interesting read. While it is disappointing that it’s not actually a collective (assuming this blog post is accurate), having a platform run and owned by 6 creators is still better than YouTube’s governance structure, and still has the advantage in having both the capacity and desire to invest in creators.
Nebula is also priced for the masses. You get an entire video service for one reasonable price. Patreon finally has really low priced options like $1 a month but for the longest time it was like $25/month just for the entry level supporter package and I could never justify blowing all that on one creator. I also hated digging around the Patreon app for the sponsor content and dealing with its stupid push notifications.
I find Nebula is a much more sustainable thing. And I still discover new creators there. Because after all I’m not going to be set for life with one or two YT creators. I want to find new things too. Nebula gives you that.
People want a fantasy world where all the main content is free and two or three rich sponsors support the creator by sponsoring little extras only available to Patreon supporters. The ends will never meet in the middle on that. It’s a fantasy where people get what they want for free because someone else pays for it. Won’t work. Get out your cash, kids. Cancel your Netflix and put the money into Nebula.
Don’t shift the blame on “people wants” as if they’re owed by the people. Most people dont even ask for whatever content that is pushed out. And what’s more content creator is just a glorified term for online digital panhandlers. And they frame it as if viewers are meant to owe them something all while contributing as little to their efforts that amounts to no significance as possible. Imagine paying someone to make a facial reaction and talking for a bit everytime you passed a panhandler and they call themselves a content creator. It’s bogus way to frame or even justify that especially considering they get payed far larger sums comparison to people who actully work for a living while dodging the taxes. And is unlikely any such platform as youtube as well as its big panhandlers are struggling with finances. Youtube gets $15 billion dollars a year in ad revenue and hey greedily continue the push for more ads. And the digital panhandlers calling themselves content creators can make more money in a week than the typical wage slave can in a year.
About half the ads I see on YouTube are already within the videos they post. I wonder what the overall ratio is of YouTube ad revenue versus in-video ad revenue.
Are you talking about sponsors? Because yes, that has nothing to do with YT ads.
deleted by creator
So you want them to take a huge pay cut? To what benefit, just YoUTubE bAd?
Nebula is cool and all, but at the end of the day, it’s still a commercial platform, and those do tend to enshittify and depend a lot on externalities.
As creators grow more dependent on Nebula, Sam and the team of original Nebula creators can wield more power and change the rules.
They already dictate the kind of content that is allowed - for example, Second Thought, one of the original creators behind Nebula, was asked to leave as he doesn’t agree to change public stance on Israeli-Palestinian conflict (he is pro-Palestine). This has suddenly left him without a source of revenue necessary for the production to expand, and has put him into debt.
Solution? Probably independent sponsorships that would go both on YouTube and PeerTube videos. Or a creator reward system like in Lbry/Odysee. Something that would allow to reward creators without going full commercial.
or odysee ig but i cannot find a good peertube instance i can post in
What are your criteria for a good instance? I host one myself, so genuinely curious.
The age limit yeah I think the peertube instances on their site follow the gdpr
Yea, a minimum of 13 years old is pretty common. Also something I agree with, as I don’t think kids under 13 should be on social media.
talking about most of them have a minimum of 16 but 13 is fair honestly its everywhere but i am 14
It’s 13 years on mine, if interested: peertube.wtf
Yeah i already signed up but my videos require approval i registered before this reply
People should learn to live without YT, instead of making an existential drama about it (about its ads, really).
This is the way. Let those content creators sucking up your time be the background noise they were always meant to be.
tell me you don’t work in IT without telling me you don’t work in IT.
YT is more than just thots in shorts and fake scumbag competition game show hosts.
there’s a whole community of educators and creators that are genuinely useful and is the core of what YT used to be used for.
25 years in IT and I didnt need youtube.
BUT, I prefer learning by reading, not videos.
“I didn’t need help when I went to college. these lazy kids just need to get a paper route for the summer to pay for a semester or two. it couldn’t cost more than a couple hundred bucks for books and classes”
what you did over your 25 year long career is irrelevant to what current people are going through. the rest of this is a rant on “boomer” mentality. I’m an xer myself, just sick of people perpetuating the broken ideals of the most spoiled generation.
!
I’ve been in IT just as long but in the last 10 years I have been asked to learn the following under threat of becoming “irrelevant”; cloud computing, big data analysis, cryptographic signing and tracking of data, machine learning, and the most recent artificial intelligence.
how the fuck are we supposed to keep up with this and maintain our family/home and maintain friendships and maintain our sanity all while juggling the roles and responsibilities weighing us down at work.
in 2021 I worked over 3200 hours in the year. that’s double 8s almost every single day. part of that time was training time I was forced to comply with to make sure “the company remains competitive.” it also doesn’t include the 16 hours of training over the weekends that I couldn’t claim because, “if you can’t perform the responsibilities given to you within office hours provided then perhaps you should work from the office under supervision.” I think we all know what that meant. want to know what I did with all that training? I’ll let you know as soon as I use it.
point is, the world got fucked up, and greedy pieces of shit at the top make the smaller greedy pieces of shit greed harder, and so forth. when will it be enough? when can we stop working on frivolous bullshit that’s going to be dropped and abandoned when “the next big thing” shows up? when can we start building shit that matters so much that we can’t just abandon it?
so, what’s this got to do with YT? if I could have watched 200 hours of training videos for free online instead of taking multiple courses, homework, tests, etc; I could spent more time with my kids, or hobbies, or doing whatever the fuck I want. instead, I was stuck doing busywork for some other assholes bonus.
!<
This is insane. My career started three years ago. I’m Gen-Z. Never used YouTube for learning. We get it dude you like videos, most don’t and don’t learn that way.
I’m sorry you got stuck with that. I too worked evenings and weekens. But I left. They ended up hiring three people to replace me.
I took a risk and exited IT. I now manage technical teams and projects in the dental industry.
I understand the usefulness of good video content, I was simply responding to the fact that this IT guy chooses to read rather than watch.
And your rant highlights a very common theme in corporations today. And not everyone has the freedom or the option to slide out from under it.
As for boomers, fuck 'em. I don’t look down on the younger generations. I see smart young people trying wade through the crap us boomers left behind. And trying to navigate a shitty corporate world.
I hope opportunity knocks for you.
I have a BSc in CompSci and an MSc in Cybersec & Dig. Forensics and I’m actively employed as a mid level engineer in the field on a fully employer-sponsored Skilled Worker Visa, doing everything from vulnerability management and triage to GRC for ISO27001 to advising product and engineering teams on implementation details for best practices and compliance for a multinational org to DR&BC tabletops etc etc. I think this counts as IT.
Perhaps even more impressively though: I use Vim btw (to program in C).
I am not necessarily trying to brag very much, only to establish my own perspective, I don’t consider myself particularly talented or intelligent or successful - otherwise I’d have gone into research, but I am currently (and kinda always) studying to improve my skills and stay up to date.
Just recently I decided to take a look into pentesting to learn the l33t side of things more as my education only ever briefly touched on it, I started in August as something to keep my brain sane during studies for the settlement visa (Life in the UK) test, and I’ve made it to Hacker Rank on HackTheBox a week ago or so. I think I watched a grand total of one Ippsec video, the rest of everything I read.
I don’t know where you got the “game show hosts” from my comment, and I’m not aware of this if it exists as some broader trend. I don’t see YouTube shorts it’s all long blocked for me since release haha.
Yes YT tutorials and whatnot are good, but they are only good as broad introductions to a topic, personal opinions, or a particular historical narrative (Dr.Chuck on C’s history for instance). Those are few good nuggets between an endless sea of scams selling you a course or some other grift.
At a certain point you should start going a bit more in depth and reading - actively engaging with the material, move beyond simply knowing or purely copying and pasting terminal commands and understand why things work the way they do.
You don’t become an electrical engineer or something by watching electroboom, you learn what it’s about yes, but the rest you learn by reading and making, even basic arduino/breadboard projects will teach you more.
The best thing about YouTube is how good it is as background noise.
Ahh, that makes sense. you’re not the target demographic of YT. you’re too educated and too driven and you learn through more advanced methods.
that’s OK, great for you and I’m happy that you’re so successful. now, what about the millions of users that don’t have the means to access higher education and training provided by their employers? what about the 18yo kid living in a leaky trailer with their methed out mom or dad that’s looking for literally any way out they can afford.
perhaps in your quest you surrounded yourself with ultra successful people and forgot that there is a whole world with billions of people that do not have the same means as you do.
not trying to diminish the hard work and efforts you have clearly applied, but just because you did doesn’t mean everyone can.
by removing easy access to content provided by these communities, even if they are wholly or partially incorrect, it only deepens the chasm between long term professional success and endentured struggle.
I will not support any action that denies a life the opportunity to rise above their status and claim a better life for themselves and their family. for every one person who stands above their born status increases the potential successes of those around them, and even cooler, it’s a feedback system. your successes become their successes, and their successes become our successes.
Just to make it clear, I’m not trying to diminish your success I’m just trying to establish my perspective on your perspective so that we can share in a perspective that includes our success.
Oh no I totally understand that I’m privileged as all hell.
That said I also learned a helluva lot more outside of my degree during said degree and after.
Formal teaching is really like YouTube and it’s meant to introduce you to what you don’t know more than anything, and as I said that’s a good thing as an introduction, but the vast majority of content is written, and you learn far more from it.
Self hosted option is a docker image. Probably not difficult to set up.
yt-dlp still works.
A spark of hope in a dim world.
I’ve seen it go down in some cases on VPNs, so it could be a matter of time (or they’ll find a solution again and the back and forth will just continue).
My god, what if its on google’s chopping block next?
Donate to the EFF for fighting that fight in court already.
I often consider the scenario.
What would I do if Google straight sniped and headshot every single method of piracy, even embedding the ads into the video?
"He’ll pay now!*
Nah, never. People are more momentary, at least I am. I don’t care if I’m being entertained by “X”. If “X” isn’t worth the trouble, there’s “Y”. The days of everyone even caring to digest the same media as anyone else is over unless your main drugs are pop music, Asmongold reacting to politics and influencers.
People can always just stop using YouTube. It’s getting laughable the level of Stockholm syndrome people have for that shit service.
As someone who does a lot of DIY what are my options? I can’t learn from reading and have nobody to show me how in person. Other platforms are so incredibly limited I can’t ever find any content helping me learn something. What other platform is seeking to ACTUALLY compete with YouTube by offering fair compensation and exposure to the masses? It’s so incredibly expensive to try that nobody is.
Don’t know what to tell you. I’m Simply saying that I personally refuse to support any product that I would actively complain about online in social media posts. And if I’m willing to yell at people online about how shitty something is- yet continue to not only use it- but contribute to the financial success of said company-
I’d have to admit that I was a hypocrite.
Because “there is no other option for me to watch a video” isn’t a good reason to support a platform that treats its content creators like utter garbage, and alienates its user base seemingly daily.
Pay tor youtube or watch the ads.
Or, if you’re not a moron, you can Firefox, and ublock that shit.
Or use freetube/new pipe
I pay for Nebula and, although there’s a lot to watch there, skimming through the boring stuff is horrible.
It’s good to see alternatives. I am not at the point where I need to see online videos badly enough that I’d pay for it- but it’s good to know that it exists.
Same. I mostly watch a handful of channels:
- various TLDR channels
- Morning Brew - not a fan of the hosts, so I’ll catch maybe one/week
- LegalEagle - anything not about celebs
- the Friday Checkout
- NotJustBikes and other city infra-related channels - they don’t post often though
- RealLifeLore
- Wendover/HalfAsInteresting - the host annoys me a bit, but the content is usually pretty good
There’s a ton of nonsense there that I don’t like, but now that I found a set of channels I do like, I mostly just look in the “library” tab so I don’t have to see the other crap.
I also hate the UI tbh. I want the front page to be my subscriptions. Instead you get a weird horizontal scrolling panel on a secondary tab. I wish I could get an inbox, RSS style, so I could either watch them or skip/mark as watched.
Nebula also suffers from the homepage being cluttered with old videos that are no longer relevant. For example I don’t care to watch news and tech videos from 2022.
Knowing better and Philosophy Tube are both rather good as well. I do miss Casual Criminalist from YouTube, otherwise Nebula has my bases covered.
The problem is, there’s just no (good) direct competition. The audience will follow creators once enough of them switch to the same alternative platform. But as long as there’s no platform with a comparable amount of money behind it, most people will continue to use Youtube.
Eh, there are some competitors:
- Nebula - costs $5/month; can get a discount if you find a creator’s discount code (I used NotJustBikes, can check out LegalEagle, HalfAsinteresting, or any of the others if you want; I got 50% off a year sub)
- Odyssee - pretty much the OG alternative to YT - I follow a few there
- Rumble - much better funded, but caters to conservatives and far-right, but there are some more moderate videos there (I like Glenn Greenwald, except for anything related to Russia); I think it’s funny that it has been blocked by some countries for allowing pro-Russian content, while also being blocked by Russia (this year) for not removing content
I sub to some channels from each (as well as Twitch and YT) though Grayjay, which seems to work pretty well. I’d say about 50% of my video watch time is on YouTube, 15-20% on Odyssee, 20-30% on Nebula, and a little on Rumble. I try to watch Nebula videos on the Nebula app so creators get credited with watch time, but I honestly prefer Grayjay.
I’ve been trying to cut down on how much I watch anyway, so hopefully I’ll be able to slowly eliminate YT from my life.
I know about Nebula, but you have to admit, the barrier to entrance is a lot higher for most people because of the subscription fee, so it’s not necessarily a direct comparison. Some of my favourite content creators are on there.
Didn’t know about Odysee. As far as I can see, that platform uses crypto for payments, which could also act as a deterrent to some people.
As for Rumble: Personally, I wouldn’t touch anything related to JD Vance with a ten foot pole (he’s a pretty big investor). And one of their biggest channels seems to be by Andrew Tate (ew). To be fair, I couldn’t tell you for sure that Youtube doesn’t take money from any of them in some form. But they seem to be more of an equal opportunity offender lol.
As far as I can see, that platform uses crypto for payments, which could also act as a deterrent to some people.
I’m confused, what I’m hearing is:
- YouTube - don’t want because of ads and ownership by Google
- Nebula - don’t want because of required subscription
- Odysee - don’t want because of optional crypto payments
- Rumble - undesirables use/invest in the platform?
- PeerTube (not mentioned) - not enough content
That seems unreasonable to me. All three of those alternatives have no ads and have content that you would probably enjoy. You don’t need to use crypto to use Odysee. You don’t need to watch Andrew Tate or support JD Vance to use Rumble. You do need to pay for Nebula, but you can pay for a single month if you just want to try it out.
But at the end of the day, these alternatives need to get paid to survive. None of them are perfect, which is a big part of why I use Grayjay, which lets me sub to creators from all of them without having to see those services’ front pages. I pay for Nebula and I donate to creators I like at Odysee outside the built-in crypto system. I don’t like JD Vance, but I also don’t particularly care if we invests in Rumble, that really doesn’t affect me in any way. My goal is to reduce my YT use, and I’m not going to get there by continually moving the goalposts, so I decided to just pull the trigger and try them all out, and they’re fine.
Rumble - […] I think it’s funny that it has been blocked by some countries
Rumble is blocked here in Brazil, not because Brazil blocked it (although there was once a strife between Rumble and Brazilian Supreme Court due to a half dozen far-right influencers) , but because Rumble themselves blocked us.
Yeah, my understanding is that they blocked Brazil due to some stuff they disagreed with. They’re certainly a mixed bag.
There doesn’t need to be direct competition. Just stop watching YouTube. If someone cannot do that- they have an addiction, and ads are not their biggest problem.
Because there’s absolutely no valuable information that exists on YouTube, right?
Nice straw man, but I never said that.
Youtube is my main source of entertainment. I don’t watch regular TV, and I barely watch any movies or series. Doesn’t have anything to do with an addiction, it’s personal preference lmao
Oh look! Here’s one of them now!
Lol, ya dickhead
Many people don’t understand that youtube has a lot of use cases. But it is the new cable teevee… Got to have it.
I don’t really think Stockholm syndrome applies here. I don’t watch YouTube out of some irrational bond with the platform. I watch YouTube because it’s literally the only place the creators I watch upload. I would absolutely follow the creators I watch to whatever platform the content is available on. Until then, I’m stuck with YouTube and ad blocking extensions.
I’m not saying it’s exactly the same. But there are definitely people that whine all day and night about it, and then go pacify themselves by watching even more YouTube videos.
If I hate something as much as people seem to hate YouTube, I can easily stop using it. But then again, I have enough strength of conviction to do so. I’m certainly not going to financially support them by patronizing their service. And this futile attempt to circumvent their add service was is only making them more clever about blocking people from doing so.
YouTube will always win this.
Period. End of story.
The only way to beat them is to not play. I guarantee you if the lose 50% of their viewers. They’ll change their tune.
That’s a fair point. There’s a million things you could do, and watching videos on YT is just one of them. Watching videos online has become a large part of peoples lives. Surely it has a lot to offer, but we should probably not forget it also replaces a lot of things, things we would spent are time on otherwise, if we didn’t have YT as an easy time-drain, and those other things are presumably equally rewarding or more so.
Youtube isn’t just a thing people use to waste time, but a source of educational content. That actually matters, and there isn’t a good alternative to much of it.
That being said, I agree that people could at least drop it (or reduce their usage) if they are just using it as a time waster.
YouTube will not change until people stop using it. And people do not want to put up with the inconvenience of not having a YouTube type service again for the amount of time it would take for YouTube to change or a viable competitor to take their place, it really is that simple.
Are YouTube and Google terrible? For sure, but it only got this way because the only backstop to holding them accountable, the consumer, has proven that they will choose putting up with shitty products and services in the name of convenience 9 times out of 10.
Same reasons that ad tiers are gaining a foothold in streaming services like Netflix. The consumer has shown they are fine with it.
Same reasons that ad tiers are gaining a foothold in streaming services like Netflix. The consumer has shown they are fine with it.
Yep, I remember when Netlfix first put it out there that they would start with the ads, and everyone on reddit was like, “Canceling my Netflix right now!!”
Netflix is doing just fine without the 5 redditors who actually did cancel it. lmao
the problem is so many people are willing to say they’ll take a stand.
but when the time comes, the mindnumbingly overwhelming majority suck it up, because they must have their precious shiny and can not suffer even the mildest of inconvenience.
Its my biggest gripe in gaming, but its a enormous gripe just in general, with everything. because it doesnt matter if you are talking about appliances, creative software, video games, streaming services, stores, etc.
this is the primary reason i advocate for more piracy, and even legal protections for piracy, in some capacity.
It’s one of the few spaces i consider to be a “truly free market” when it comes to economics.
I’m more and more inclined towards the idea of piracy myself as time goes on and media continues to shave itself down into more and more ridiculous, unrelated shards, that you have to subscribe to just to be able to SEE if they have what you want.
I don’t actively do it actively since I dont really know where to begin, and things I have found have been to sketch for me, or requiring memberships or even payments to join.
if you’re looking for the babies first torrenting introduction, dbzer0 has a pretty comprehensive guide on it.
Might be worth looking into i2p as well, if you don’t want to spend any money on it at least. Usenets and closed trackers are a weird one, usually based on memberships, but with good quality control of members and content so.
there’s also the *arr stack but im sure there’s a write of that one up on github or something.
I poked around dbzer0 and found a few streaming sites, Nothing which carried anything i was particularly interested in.
Navigating this stuff without my ISP getting pissy is another hurdle, too.
It was much easier 20+ years ago when you just searched KaZaA or Limewire, or back when piratebay was the site (and before it got drowned in virus traps)
To summarize what I was telling another person. The number of people who care are far outnumbered by the number of people who don’t. It doesn’t matter if you or I or all 10,000 (just a random number for the sake of argument) of the people subscribed to a sub like this were to cancel when r/justworks or r/normie (made up subreddits for the sake of argument) has 100,000,000 who don’t give a damn about computers, privacy, or anything else beyond the service working or not.
I agree. Tech communities have a habit of drastically over estimating how much everyone else cares about the details of tech.
Even something as simple as PC gaming scares off a lot of people because of the perception that you need to be some kind of tech wizard in order to cobble everything together to make a game run. Actual cobbling together of software to pirate (no matter how simple it seems to people in the know) is just a bunch of technobabble.
I have people whom I still need to explain copy and paste to on a regular basis. Trust me, I understand.
I know you weren’t using the number 5 as a hard example, but a thing that people still don’t seem to realize is that the people in threads like this are the people that actually care. Even if the few thousand redditors who subscribe to a subreddit where they discussed that topic were to all (and I mean 100% of them) cancel there subscriptions. That is still only a drop in the bucket for Netflix. Losing a few thousand subscribers is still nothing if they made more money with the addition of ads.
Losing a few thousand subscribers is still nothing if they made more money with the addition of ads.
It’s the same with increasing the price of a service. Usually, the extra revenue from the price increase is far greater than the revenue loss from people that unsubscribe. If a business has a choice between a large number of customers with a small amount of profit per customer, and a small number of customers with a larger amount of profit per customer, they’ll always pick the latter. Fewer customers reduces other costs, for example less support load, less bandwidth usage, etc.
It is interesting to me that the chorus always talking about “switching” to piracy after every incident is also intimately familiar with piracy already. Almost as if it’s just people who already pirate talking to each other about how hard they are going to pirate. Meanwhile general audiences don’t care.
these are also the people who would pay more for quality service if it was available.
“Socialist Chaos Trow” lol
While I agree, I have a hard time seeing how people will stop using it until the field changes. Maybe in 10 years it will the the MySpace of the sitcom era, but right now it’s still growing. That growth is giving it carte blanche to manipulate the users as it sees fit. Regulation might impact it, but it’s still a bit of a Goliath.
- Compared to 2023, YouTube’s user base has grown by 20 million this year, representing a 0.74% increase. From Global media insights
Also the active user base is 2.7 billion people in 2024 from the same source above.
The alternatives are out there, but just not in the same league.
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I’m having a hard time seeing any bill get passed that supports the rights of users to watch videos without the ads that support the creators and the platform that they’re watching.
We should reach a compromise of having skippable ads in the beginning only, for example. In other pages it could be that ads cannot be bigger than 10% of the content being delivered on the page.
It’s not always all or nothing, good regulation listens to both sides and reaches a compromise in the middle, but good regulation is getting harder and harder to come by.
regulations for ad quality, and privacy, are almost certainly what they mean by that.
I don’t think this requires an act of congress. I think you might see more consumer advocation on the part of FTC (although it doesn’t currently regulate online broadcast), or potentially the CFPB.
Admittedly it’s more likely to see the EU do some regulations, but it all depends on the election.
I think it needs regulation, the whole streaming industry needs to be regulated! It can’t be that the competition is made using exclusive content and you have to live with privacy infringement tech to consume cultural art legally.
In my opinion, in a capitalist system, the market competition should be about delivering the content the best way, not about what content they deliver.
Right now, they can made the delivery as shitty as they want, because what takes them apart from competition is the exclusive content, not the tech.
Agreed, now the fun part of coming up with a legal basis to do so and convincing regulators.
I think in the EU one could achieve something like this a la appstore opening rule, where streaming services are demanded to give other streaming services access to the library, lime some sort of roaming 🤔
Or you split the distribution from the company producing stuff
So many possibilities 😂
Luckily I am in a pirate friendly country 🏴☠️
I see we’re pretending the government doesn’t have regulatory power today
Time to pirate YT content and upload to usenet to be automatically downloaded using sonarr
Honestly, it would probably be easier to just build a *arr program specifically for downloading YouTube videos directly. Tie it into the rest of the *arr suite, with naming conventions for Plex/Jellyfin.
Yes but literally throwing together a script to download the days subscription videos to a jellyfin media drive would be stupidly simple.
Sure, but not as convenient 🤷🏻
“Stupidly simple” might be overselling it when it comes to the masses adopting it. Not everyone is adept at “throwing together a script.”
That being said, I’m all for helping the masses adapt.
“Give me a Python script using yt-dlp that I can run on a cronjob that will download the videos from any of my subscribed channels since the last time the script was run”
You can use the following Python script to download videos from your subscribed channels since the last run. This script uses
yt-dlpand stores the last download timestamp to track new videos.First, ensure you have
yt-dlpinstalled:pip install yt-dlpThen, create a script called
download_videos.py:import os import json import subprocess from datetime import datetime # Configuration last_run_file = 'last_run.json' download_directory = 'downloads' # Ensure the download directory exists os.makedirs(download_directory, exist_ok=True) # Load the last run time if os.path.exists(last_run_file): with open(last_run_file, 'r') as f: last_run = json.load(f)['last_run'] else: last_run = datetime.now().isoformat() # Update the last run time to now current_run = datetime.now().isoformat() # Command to get videos from subscribed channels since the last run command = [ 'yt-dlp', '--download-archive', 'archive.txt', '--output', f'{download_directory}/%(title)s.%(ext)s', '--date-after', last_run, '--no-post-overwrites', '--merge-output-format', 'mp4', 'https://www.youtube.com/channel/CHANNEL_ID', # Replace with your channel URL ] # Run the command subprocess.run(command) # Save the current run time with open(last_run_file, 'w') as f: json.dump({'last_run': current_run}, f) print("Download complete. Next run will check for videos since:", current_run)Setting Up the Cron Job
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Make the script executable:
chmod +x download_videos.py -
Open your crontab:
crontab -e -
Add a line to run the script at your desired interval (e.g., daily at 2 AM):
0 2 * * * /path/to/python /path/to/download_videos.py
Notes
- Replace
CHANNEL_IDin the script with your actual channel IDs or use a playlist URL if preferred. - The
archive.txtfile keeps track of already downloaded videos to avoid duplicates. - Adjust the paths to Python and your script as needed.
Another example, which i can personally verify has been working fine for months. It works a bit different to the above, it downloads the latests 2* vids that are not already downloaded and runs once every hour with cron. I also attempted to filter out live vids and shorts.
Channels i am “subscribed” too are stored in a single text file, it also uses the avc1 codec because i found p9 and p10 had issues with the jellyfin client on my tv.
looks like this, i added categories but i don’t actually use them in the script besides putting them in a variable, lol. Vid-limit is how many of the latests vids it should look at to download. The original reason i implemented that is so i could selectively download a bulk of latests vids if i wanted to.
Cat=Science Name=Vertitasium VidLimit=2 URL=https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHnyfMqiRRG1u-2MsSQLbXA Cat=Minecraft Name=EthosLab VidLimit=2 URL=https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCFKDEp9si4RmHFWJW1vYsMA#!/bin/bash # Define the directory to store channel lists and scripts script_dir="/.../YTDL" # Define the base directory to store downloaded videos base_download_dir="/.../youtubevids" # Change to the script directory cd "$script_dir" # Parse the Channels.txt file and process each channel awk -F'=' ' /^Cat/ {Cat=$2} /^Name/ {Name=$2} /^VidLimit/ {VidLimit=$2} /^URL/ {URL=$2; print Cat, Name, VidLimit, URL} ' "$script_dir/Channels.txt" | while read -r Cat Name VidLimit URL; do # Define the download directory for this channel download_dir="$base_download_dir" # Define the download archive file for this channel archive_file="$script_dir/DLarchive$Name.txt" # Create the download directory if it does not exist mkdir -p "$download_dir" # If VidLimit is "ALL", set playlist_end option to empty, otherwise set it to --playlist-end <VidLimit> playlist_end_option="" if [[ $VidLimit != "ALL" ]]; then playlist_end_option="--playlist-end $VidLimit" fi yt-dlp \ --download-archive "$archive_file" \ $playlist_end_option \ --write-description \ --write-thumbnail \ --convert-thumbnails jpg \ --add-metadata \ --embed-thumbnail \ --match-filter "!is_live & !was_live & original_url!*=/shorts/" \ --merge-output-format mp4 \ --format "bestvideo[vcodec^=avc1]+bestaudio[ext=m4a]/best[ext=mp4]/best" \ --output "$download_dir/${Name} - %(title)s.%(ext)s" \ "$URL" doneYeah this is more elegant and closer to what I’d actually want to implement. I was more just showing what could be done in literally thirty seconds on the can with ChatGPT.
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It already exists, even as a Docker. Not as simple as an *arr style interface, but it works great one you set it up.
Well you know what they say “Great minds think quicker than mine and probably have already had that thought.”
Sad to hear. Newpipe is still working fine (as of a couple minutes ago) if that helps. That’s through a residential IP. I will try yt-dlp from a data center IP when I get a chance. I hope they haven’t blocked that.
Wow all this bullying is really convincing me to go back to their shitty platform.
If i can’t access my fav creators anymore itl just motivate me to do sm productive, like building web3
Haven’t you heard? web3 is going great so far!
Oh no, the execution and information thus far has been horrible. You are alluding to blockchain are you? When i look at the website you post i see absolutely nothing that i even recognize as web3 its all cryptostuff.
I don’t get why everybody is so hell-bend on blockchain based internet (sure its decentralized but come on, we’re creative enough to do better). Its like people don’t get the point of “user owned” and are expecting companies to build a better internet for them without serving their own interests.
No, we are going to need to do this ourselves, self host our own data and services, open source everything.
Lemmy and the fediverse are the closest i have seen to being proto web 3 in spirit and there are also still far from perfect.
I have read the “What is web3” from that site and could not disagree on the definition more. I would not be suprised if both the blockchain cults and this website are part of the propaganda machine that is stopping a free internet from happening.
My web3 is aligned much more with this: https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/user-liberation-watch-and-share-our-new-video
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I don’t judge people who give in to the oppressor. Life is hard and you have to pick your battles, more important stuff then blocking ads for “normal” people.
For me its largely a disability/accessibility thing. The whole site is not usable.
Its not that i want to die on this hill its that corporate bullshit is measurably detrimental to my health. My hill is the only one i can exist on.
I’ve also ran into some issues simply accessing youtube through my vpn, but that’s been going on for a while.
Login to prove you are not a bot!
Not just invidious, they’ve just de facto blocked video embedding:
If you’re wondering how a viable competitor could arise, other companies needing a video hosting solution that they can rely on to run their storefronts is a perfect use case. This is the Humble Bundle storefront, and they could pretty easily spin up a peertube instance. If that became commonplace, it could be one way for peertube to become ubiquitous.
I watch embedded videos all the time. Literally hundreds this weekend. Embedded is not “de facto blocked”.
other companies needing a video hosting solution that they can rely on to run their storefronts is a perfect use case.
Many companies use Vimeo for this.
rain world???
yo rainworld i used to have a friend that was a fan of that game
What happened?
I dont feel like i wanna say it on lemmy
I wasn’t curious about your friend until this comment lmao. Cheers friend.
Alr enjoy your day
It’s a 10/10 for me! Amazing game but definitely not for everyone
True
aww, thanks!
-rain world
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Sure but it’s really common to see embedded youtube videos on storefronts, and if storefronts en masse abandoned it that’s one more piece of the market that youtube has lost.
They can’t keep locking it down and not lose market share, is my point. They’re enshittifying so much, so fast, and eventually there will be a tipping point.
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“Massive increase” I think needs a source.
And they rely on the network effect to be the de facto standard video hoster. Every little bit of that network that they carve off while they’re enshittifying brings them closer to the critical point where people can afford to ditch them.
The logic that they can “afford” to lose marketshare is exactly what will make them keep losing it until people migrate en masse and they lose all of their marketshare.
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Source for what? The network effect? I gave you a link, you can read.
And youtube is enshittifying.
These are both well-established effects. My sourcing is finished now. It beats your “pure speculation” unless you have something else you want to add.
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Youtube is now big enough for not caring about the network effect.
- Start companies
- make a free product with network effect
- gain a lot of users
- now that you have your user base, user growth is not as relevant anymore and therefore network effect is not needed anymore
- enshitificate for more ad revenue, more tracking and direct subscriptions
- profit (finally after decades)
Capitalism is just fucked 🤷🏻🏴☠️
Seems it’s fixed now?
Could be, maybe it’s intermittent, but the more times they try to lock this shit down and it stops working for storefronts, the more unreliable it becomes.
What percentage of visits can they afford to have this error happen before they seek alternatives? If it were my business and I didn’t know how many customers were closing the store page because the video didn’t play and they lost interest, I would be immediately looking for an alternative.
is that a possible workaround? Also, a tip from my school trying to block YouTube (idk if it applies here) is that you can ‘add to queue’ to where it plays in the corner then there’s a button to make it bigger.
Oh that’s why no videos would load.
Damn it
many instances of piped and invidious still work though
