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Grayjay Desktop App

grayjay.app

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Re: Grayjay Desktop App

#111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone not very familiar, is there any legitimate reason why they say "Our Apple signing/notarization is not entirely done yet"? It feels extremely suspicious, given that I download lots of other popular utility software from independent devs and I've never had to do that before.

As a platform that basically started as a way to watch Youtube without tracking and ads, I think Grayjay should be sceptical of any third party code signing validation requirements. The copyright lobby has gone after software and its distributors before, even if it doesn't inherently pirate any content without user configuration. I don't know why this app would need Apple's signature in the first place, seeing as it'…

There are certainly valid, conflicting opinions around signing/notarization requirements for software. But notarization does provide end users with some safety guarantees that legitimately make running the software less risky. The scariness of "are you sure you want to run this" prompts is fairly grounded in real risk assumed by the end user.

Re: Grayjay Desktop App

#112
post #80
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Finding content is so hard. All YouTube wants me to watch are "OMG YOU WOULDN'T BELIEVE WHAT THIS COP DID" content. I have no idea why they want me to watch those videos, I never do and I block the videos and the channels from recommendations but they keep coming ... All I get are ads for weird suspect drugs and products, just going on these platforms is such a bad vibe.

Select “not interested” for those videos. There’s also “don’t recommend this channel”. “Like” videos that you like. Your feed will quickly adjust.

> Your feed will quickly adjust.

It does adjust in some way, but somehow it never picks up on the signal that actually made me like or dislike a video. It's very clear that some video-makers have figured out how to exploit this poor signal reception to shove really crappy content at people. Other video-makers, who aren't trying to dominate youtube revenue, are buried and difficult to find.

TikTok, meanwhile, takes about an hour of scrolling and reacting to cultivate a feed that is very tailored to my taste. It's truly remarkable. If the app gets banned it'll be a huge loss for finding people and content with similar interests.

(I also just don't have the desire to watch an entire 10-minute video packed with filler when I'm trying to relax unless it's very dense, and that's the entire revenue model of youtube. edit: I forgot youtube has shorts now)

Re: Grayjay Desktop App

#113
post #102

The best feature of alternative YT clients IMO is "multiple subscription lists". I have so many subscriptions, when using the official YouTube app or site the "subscriptions" feed is overwhelming, and I prefer not to use the algorithmically-generated "home" feed. Since YT has kind of become the de facto "place to upload videos on the Internet", video topics are broad enough to constitute multiple web sites, and I lik…

Did you know that YouTube used to have this exact feature? It was called subscription collections and they publicly promised that they would replace that feature with something better when they removed it. That never happened. It's been 9 maybe 10 years since they said that. [1] The removal of that feature was an intentional push to take away user agency and push them into using YouTube's recommendation algorithm. Th…

Yup. I really liked that feature, but hey who cares about user preferences. the only thing that matter is engagement metrics. it's not like there's any real competition to YouTube you can run to. and the hunt for ad-blockers is getting fiercer.

my workaround to getting different topics separated have been to have multiple YouTube channels inside a single account, each with separate likes/sub channels/recommendations etc. one per Firefox container.

Re: Grayjay Desktop App

#114
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Finding content is so hard. All YouTube wants me to watch are "OMG YOU WOULDN'T BELIEVE WHAT THIS COP DID" content. I have no idea why they want me to watch those videos, I never do and I block the videos and the channels from recommendations but they keep coming ... All I get are ads for weird suspect drugs and products, just going on these platforms is such a bad vibe.

My experience is that YouTube recommendations are heavily weighted based on my watch history. If I watch a single video on, say, videogames, all of a sudden my recommendations are all gamer stuff. Fortunately, you can easily edit your watch history. I just go through mine periodically and remove any kind of video that I don't want recommendations related to. Doing that has given me a very dialed in recommendation fee…

It's biased by your watch history, but it's never just that. In my experience (browsing without accounts, in private browsing with no cookies, on rotating IPs), there seems to be a distinct spot in the algorithm for some inflammatory engagement bait regardless of your history. That bait is not dependent on your watch history and is based on your geographic location by the looks of it.

Regardless of what I watch, in the middle of otherwise on-topic recommendations, there will always be one or two videos that are attempts at getting me to engage with some complete off-topic inflammatory political bullshit. Of course, once you click on that, the "regular" recommendation system takes over and feeds you more of that (which is somewhat fine), but the fact that it's trying to suck the user into this in the first place despite no indications the he desires to be exposed to such content in the first place is disgusting.

Re: Grayjay Desktop App

#115
Launching the Linux release and noticed in the logs:

Directories:User Directory: /home/bisby/Grayjay

And there is a directory there now. I absolutely hate having stuff automatically create anything in my home directory like this. Ideally, this should be following XDG directory guidelines on linux: https://specifications.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/latest/

Re: Grayjay Desktop App

#119
post #28

We always been missing good 3rd party search/trending for online videos. I've been using a youtube frontend called pockettube, where I could make lists(channels) for content I like, without youtube forcing me what to watch. Example. I have an Art and Food channels with my favorite content creators, I get to see the list in order of newest videos first, totally bypassing youtubes forced interface. In fact, if people s…

Finding content is so hard. All YouTube wants me to watch are "OMG YOU WOULDN'T BELIEVE WHAT THIS COP DID" content. I have no idea why they want me to watch those videos, I never do and I block the videos and the channels from recommendations but they keep coming ... All I get are ads for weird suspect drugs and products, just going on these platforms is such a bad vibe.

Watching hobby channels every now and then is very refreshing. I wish YT would recommend me more of those
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