321–330 of 422 posts
I setup newpipe this week thinking maybe I should wean myself off being logged into yt (I've become disgruntled with its actions, and I don't want to contribute to it anymore). "But I can't give up sponsorblock!" I told myself. Ha. Vanced (and user made hax/mods) was a big reason I chose android. One more major reason lost. Soon I'll be back to walking around with a laptop as a my personal media player.
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The difference is in the bait and switch tactic they employ. They started by offering the service for free and without ads till there were no good competitors. And then they switched to showing obscene amount of ads. Most users and a good bunch of creators are unhappy about the way they ruin the viewing experience. If YouTube declared their true intentions at the beginning, we wouldn't be yearning for competent alter…
I dislike ads as much as anyone, and I use adblockers aggressively. If I can't use something without regularly seeing ads, I usually stop using it. With all of that said, Youtube operated at a loss for a long time, which is impossible for anyone but a government or a charity to sustain indefinitely. According to this article, Youtube was not profitable in 2015, nine years after Google bought it: https://www.wsj.com/a…
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The number of people willing to put many months work into a project like this, with substantial legal risk, and no possibility of getting paid money, is very small. And of that small set of people, the number who already live in Russia is even lower...
Is it necessary to actually live in Russia, though? If I ever managed a project like Vanced, or any other initiative that might trip a big company such as Google, I would definitely seek hosting on a country like Russia or similar, even though I am not there. That, and trying to run everything anonymously, not with my Github username. I'm curious, where exactly are the Cease and Desist letters delivered, when they ge…
NewPipe [1] is an open-source alternative, although latest versions of Vanced will supposedly keep working for the foreseeable future [2]. [1]: https://newpipe.net/ [2]: https://nitter.net/YTVanced/status/1503055442506915846#m
I would venture it's not going to be so hard for Google to detect and obsolete existing Vanced installations some way or another.
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I really don't understand what they were thinking. They made such a big deal of the site being mobile-friendly, yet it's unbelievably slow and laggy. It's a lot of marketing that quickly falls apart in practice.
It's probably fast on the current gen iPhone and in their local test environment so they called it a day.
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Wow, how did I just find out about Sponsorblock? That makes this news even sadder. :(
I draw the line before sponserblock. At that point you are taking money directly from the content creators, not YT or other platforms. I held out on blocking ads for some time, until it became impractical to avoid drive-by attacks other ways and the amount of stalking involved got _really_ creepy. If sponsor segments irritate me enough that I'd consider sponsorblock then I choose between paying for the content direct…
Further, if I manually skip the ads, how is that functionally different to automatically skipping the ads? What if I turn off audio or avert my eyes? Are you arguing that I should have my eyes and ears glued to the screen when the ads are playing?
There aren't many moments where I truly feel dismay at the end of something's lifecycle, but this definitely is one. Vanced made mobile YouTube tolerable. I have NewPipe but it's not the same. Hopefully as the tweet says, it will stay functional for a while longer.
For me, it made YouTube so tolerable that I would spend significant amounts of time on it. Sometimes I get the feeling that a side effect of adblockers is that they unintentionally act as enablers for addicting platforms. At times, it's worth thinking about what you're using adblock to accomplish at a higher level. For me it was subjecting myself to YouTube's recommendations for several more hours per day. Luckily I…