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Vanced: YouTube adblocker for Android

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Re: Vanced: YouTube adblocker for Android

#311

Asking this question in good faith and in the interest of a productive discussion: Can someone give me their reasoning for why to use this over just paying for YouTube premium? They're providing a service that you value and spend enough time on to warrant looking for a way to not have to view ads, and if everyone were to start using Vanced overnight, YouTube wouldn't be able to justify staying up indefinitely. It fee…

I used to have no adblockers on anything, and I was fine with it. Then I had kids, and I wasn't really comfortable with bringing them up in an environment where when you tell a computer to do one thing ("Play this video") it does a different thing ("I will do that, but not before I do what I want to do"). There are a few websites that have ad supported videos that I am ok with my kids watching, and putting uBlock Ori…

Having a kid is what put it over the top for me too. That, compounded by Google's ads being all over the map in terms of content, location in videos, and most importantly, length. I've put on a kids video and mid video there's a ten minute ad playing and a two year old absorbing some content I did not approve.

Re: Vanced: YouTube adblocker for Android

#312
post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The implied arrangement is that you watch the ads (at least the first five seconds until the skip button appears) in exchange for them doing all the work of collecting, hosting, and delivering that content to you. What if the delivered content is subpar? I have watched ads (ie paid with my attention). How do I get my money back?

No refunds. You can't demand a refund from a movie theater because you hated a movie, and you can't return a new game to Best Buy because you hated the game. I don't understand why you'd imply YouTube content comes with any "satisfaction guarantee."

A move or a game is a piece of art. A newsarticle can have objectively incorrect information, which makes it like a TV with broken pixels.

Re: Vanced: YouTube adblocker for Android

#313

Funny how people want content but don’t want to support content creators via ads or paying for YouTube Premium. The internet in a nutshell. Ironically if people weren’t so avoidant of paying for digital content, ads, and the subsequent tracking, would’ve never emerged.

I used to pay for Youtube plus. But I found that most videos still had built-in ads. That irritated me to no end. That's what made me switch to vanced.

Re: Vanced: YouTube adblocker for Android

#314

Funny how people want content but don’t want to support content creators via ads or paying for YouTube Premium. The internet in a nutshell. Ironically if people weren’t so avoidant of paying for digital content, ads, and the subsequent tracking, would’ve never emerged.

The best way to support creators actually is to support them directly. Youtube takes half the ad revenue, and ad revenue generally doesn't pay much anyways.

For reference, Linus Tech Tips/the rest of their channels get 18% of their revenue from YT AdSense versus 32% from their direct merch sales. That's a pretty big deal since their direct "pay to watch videos" offering on Floatplane is only 4%.

https://twitter.com/LinusTech/status/1486918784401088515?s=2...

Re: Vanced: YouTube adblocker for Android

#315

Funny how people want content but don’t want to support content creators via ads or paying for YouTube Premium. The internet in a nutshell. Ironically if people weren’t so avoidant of paying for digital content, ads, and the subsequent tracking, would’ve never emerged.

This is why if you develop software, you should develop it for Mac. People who own a Mac will actually pay for your software willingly. Example: https://cleanshot.com/ If he made this exclusively for Windows no one would have paid for it. But since he's made it for Mac, he's racked in hundreds of thousands of dollars.

While I generally agree, some software punches through, eg. mIRC. Although there is this super easy-to-find 50% discount page that's been up for at least 9 years now: https://www.mirc.com/register.php?coupon=MIRC-SWV0-MNKL

Re: Vanced: YouTube adblocker for Android

#316
post #8

Vanced is pretty good. It seems like it's just the official YouTube app but with premium for free. Newpipe is another ad-free YouTube app. https://newpipe.net/ It's FOSS and doesn't use your Google account, or any of the YouTube APIs. You can still manage subscriptions but you have to import them manually.

Unfortunately it's very buggy and still not ready for full time use. Crashes all the time, importing subscriptions is hard. But it's FOSS and I still use it regardless cause vanced concerns me because it needs access to my account

I assume most of NewPipe crashing when trying to open a video, is Google changing the YouTube video page to stop non-official clients from being able to watch the video.

Re: Vanced: YouTube adblocker for Android

#317
post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're allowed to be ignorant of trespassing statutes too. But you can still be kicked out of someone's business.

That's quite different. In criminal law, ignorance of the law is explicitly not a defence. In contract law, you have to sign up to the contract. One side can not just assert that the other side agreed to some terms unless they can show that this happened.

Browserwrap agreements don't require the user to click on anything though.

Re: Vanced: YouTube adblocker for Android

#318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't feel any obligation to allow Google to use my own device and internet connection to serve me ad content that I don't wish to see. That's disingenuous because you're omitting the other half of the transaction: You are choosing, voluntarily, to consume the content that they are offering on their website. The implied arrangement is that you watch the ads (at least the first five seconds until the skip button a…

I don't know what to tell you other than I simply don't agree. at a high level, the YouTube website is a wrapper for endpoints that serve ads and endpoints that serve content. nowhere in the flow of clicking a video from the homepage and watching it does there appear any language saying that I need to hit both sets of endpoints to use the service at all. they merely make it inconvenient not to do so. this is essentia…

I agree: In a way (but not legally), YouTube does basically give you the ability to watch without ads. The reason this is generally allowed is because Google knows that the perceived value of keeping their stranglehold of viewers allows them to keep their monopoly on those viewers' eyeballs, thus forcing creators to keep uploading their videos to YouTube (lest they upload to eg. Nebula and get 1/10000th the viewership). If they did do something extreme, they risk triggering some mass exodus from YouTube to other platforms; their monopoly on non-television video advertising would crumble overnight.

Now, i'm sure that if everyone did suddenly download Vanced and Youtube's largest profit funnel, mobile devices, ceased to exist, they could quickly whip up a system that does all it can to block video views without an attestation ticket vended when the ad server thinks you've watched the ad(s). At that point it'd be pretty clear cut that watching without any sort of indirect or direct payment is not allowed.

Morally, if you really get that much value out of YouTube, you probably should be paying for Premium even if you use Vanced or newpipe, if just to resist YT's shorts feature or other features that don't improve the quality of the main video experience. Premium views payout much more money per view to content creators than any ad would, especially if you have otherwise never bought something by clicking or engaging with the ad.

Re: Vanced: YouTube adblocker for Android

#319
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dont use vanced but I am looking into it. Allegedly vanced has an iOS alternative. My reasoning is that Google is disgusting and has created a defacto monopoly. There is no way to outcompete a free product at scale so there basically can’t be an alternative. So I obviously use video and that means I use youtube. I dont want to support google, never want to see an ad and I honestly don’t care about the creator. If i…

I use Musi with YouTube. With it, I can play videos in the background, and there are no ads in the video. There are in the app itself, but pihole takes care of that. I also use Hyperweb, so all YouTube links in safari open in Musi automatically.

Thank you! I dont have pihole but i think i can figure out something. I didnt realize there was a way to declare how to treat links in iOS. This was so helpful!

Re: Vanced: YouTube adblocker for Android

#320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The algorithms which do things with your data you don't know are far worse. I'd love an example.

Credit scores, racial profiling and other data based discriminations

>Credit scores

At least you started off with by far your worst example. The alternative to credit scores is only the wealthy getting loans, full stop. Any alternative would require a human being combing your finances for hours, which would obviously substantially raise the cost of loaning money.

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