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Piped – An alternative privacy-friendly YouTube front end

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Re: Piped – An alternative privacy-friendly YouTube front end

#71

I am a paying YT Premium customer and am honestly deeply frustrated by their child proofing controls. The worst is having a “Guest” mode on the TV app that you can’t turn off. It lets anybody completely bypass all restrictions. There is an open ticket on this dating back many years. Their best response to date has been ~ “it can’t be done - will share feedback with the team.” The sudden interest/surge in custom YT fr…

> The worst is having a “Guest” mode on the TV app that you can’t turn off. It lets anybody completely bypass all restrictions. There is an open ticket on this dating back many years. Their best response to date has been ~ “it can’t be done - will share feedback with the team.” This sort of thing is exactly why I roll my eyes when somebody suggests that it's the sole responsibility of parents to control what their ch…

I'll take your strawman and raise you one. This sort of thing is exactly why I roll my eyes when somebody suggests that it's a lost cause so you need to give your one-year-old a smartphone.

Just don't give your kid a phone. If he views content he's not supposed to at school or a friend's house, that's not the worst thing in the world. I can't possibly control every single thing my daughter does because she is her own person. But I can mostly control what she does in our home, and no smartphone is a simple solution that prevents all of these other content-blocking problems. Even if she figures out a temporary way to get around it, that's not the end of the world to me. The larger issue to me is the constant oppressive force destroying a child's brain by having TikTok in her pocket at all times.

Re: Piped – An alternative privacy-friendly YouTube front end

#72

I am a paying YT Premium customer and am honestly deeply frustrated by their child proofing controls. The worst is having a “Guest” mode on the TV app that you can’t turn off. It lets anybody completely bypass all restrictions. There is an open ticket on this dating back many years. Their best response to date has been ~ “it can’t be done - will share feedback with the team.” The sudden interest/surge in custom YT fr…

> The worst is having a “Guest” mode on the TV app that you can’t turn off. It lets anybody completely bypass all restrictions. There is an open ticket on this dating back many years. Their best response to date has been ~ “it can’t be done - will share feedback with the team.” This sort of thing is exactly why I roll my eyes when somebody suggests that it's the sole responsibility of parents to control what their ch…

What are they going to be watching if you don't restrict them, and what will it do to them? Why not just talk about it with them?

Re: Piped – An alternative privacy-friendly YouTube front end

#73
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blocking ads is also a perfect example of a Kantian non-universalizable maxim.

I don't think Kant, or any reasonable philosopher, would consider blocking ads a moral dilemma, which is the precondition of a maxim.

Blocking harmful, manipulative, inappropriate advertisements on my childrens' (supervised) use of YouTube is the most moral thing I can do today.

Re: Piped – An alternative privacy-friendly YouTube front end

#74
post #59

I am a paying YT Premium customer and am honestly deeply frustrated by their child proofing controls. The worst is having a “Guest” mode on the TV app that you can’t turn off. It lets anybody completely bypass all restrictions. There is an open ticket on this dating back many years. Their best response to date has been ~ “it can’t be done - will share feedback with the team.” The sudden interest/surge in custom YT fr…

I uninstalled TikTok because it turned into a time-wasting attention sink. I'm fine with YouTube proper, but YouTube Shorts is essentially TikTok in a trenchcoat. There really, really, really needs to be a way to banish YouTube Shorts in your settings, because for me the alternative is uninstalling YouTube.

>the alternative is uninstalling YouTube

I assume you're an iPhone user. In Android we don't even have that alternative (at least not out-of-the-box)

Re: Piped – An alternative privacy-friendly YouTube front end

#75
post #74
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I uninstalled TikTok because it turned into a time-wasting attention sink. I'm fine with YouTube proper, but YouTube Shorts is essentially TikTok in a trenchcoat. There really, really, really needs to be a way to banish YouTube Shorts in your settings, because for me the alternative is uninstalling YouTube.

>the alternative is uninstalling YouTube I assume you're an iPhone user. In Android we don't even have that alternative (at least not out-of-the-box)

You can disable the YT app on Android. The effect is the same as uninstalling the app. YT links open in the browser, the app tile doesn't show up in the Apps menu. This is what I ended up doing to get over my YT Shorts addiction

Re: Piped – An alternative privacy-friendly YouTube front end

#76
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I uninstalled TikTok because it turned into a time-wasting attention sink. I'm fine with YouTube proper, but YouTube Shorts is essentially TikTok in a trenchcoat. There really, really, really needs to be a way to banish YouTube Shorts in your settings, because for me the alternative is uninstalling YouTube.

You can banish YT shorts by clicking the X in the top right corner of the shorts row. And yeah they’re pretty stupid. YT took a bunch of normal videos and cropped them to phone camera dimensions, lol. You can click the author’s name to find the original in their YT page. It’s just idiotic.

They have disabled that x in my region. I can’t even turn them off temporarily anymore. They are probably rolling out the change in stages to see how much angry feedback they get and how many people cancel.

Re: Piped – An alternative privacy-friendly YouTube front end

#77
post #32

How long until YouTube figures out how to block all of this stuff like Piped and Invidious etc.? I feel like a better answer would be alternative platforms.

It would mean blocking the billions of embedded YouTube videos scattered across the world in websites and emails and apps. It would be a catastrophic own-goal. That said, there are still many ways for them to enshittify their service. I worry that in the next few years they’re going to start splicing ads mid-stream. That’s much harder to block.

Re: Piped – An alternative privacy-friendly YouTube front end

#78
post #32

How long until YouTube figures out how to block all of this stuff like Piped and Invidious etc.? I feel like a better answer would be alternative platforms.

When WEI rolls out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Environment_Integrity reply

Re: Piped – An alternative privacy-friendly YouTube front end

#79
post #32

How long until YouTube figures out how to block all of this stuff like Piped and Invidious etc.? I feel like a better answer would be alternative platforms.

The unfortunate answer is that it’s coming, and in the form of the Web Environment Integrity API, aka device attestation. If/when they manage to deploy this to enough devices, they will be able to restrict viewing to only allow ”blessed” clients. It needs hardware-level support, and that has been rolling out for maybe 10+ years now in the form of TPM modules and such.

The future they’re aiming for is that unless you’re using an approved (unmodified) browser on an approved (unmodified) device, you get nothing. It would basically turn large swaths of the internet into a walled garden overnight.

Re: Piped – An alternative privacy-friendly YouTube front end

#80

The privacy argument is extremely important, also in regards to avoiding tracking via ads, but I do not think bypassing or blocking ads is the way forward. In the free democratic world, we really should aim to do better than this, and instead try to actually develop privacy respecting alternatives that is not going to undermine the internet, further empower the big players, or hurt website owners unnecessarily – incl…

There already is an alternative to youtube. Peertube https://joinpeertube.org/

The problem is most content creators are only publishing on YouTube, so that is where you have to go. If you are a content creator please publish on peertube so we have options. If you know a creator, likewise encourage them to publish there.

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