this post was submitted on 16 Apr 2024
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Privacy

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submitted 5 months ago* (last edited 1 week ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
 

Google warns users of these apps that their experience may deteriorate soon. They may "experience buffering issues" or see errors such as "the following content is not available on this app" when trying to watch videos.

Similar to Google Search, ads have become insufferable for many users of the service. There are too many of them, they may break the viewing experience, and they may show inappropriate content.

YouTube Premium is expensive. What weights more for some users is that its functionality is severely limited when compared to third-party apps.

The cat and mouse game continues.

For those looking to avoid ads or improve privacy, here are some options for free, open source, privacy-friendly frontends to YouTube without advertisements:

https://www.privacyguides.org/en/frontends/#youtube

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

Freetube with sponsor block is a godsend.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

Even problems to watch a lot of Videos in FreeTube, it listed the Videos, but don't reproduce them. Because of this I put SMplayer as extern player, which don't have problems to reproduce almost everything. Other possibility is to search the YT video in Andisearch, which permits to watch it sandboxed without ads in the searc results, or embedded and proxied, if the Video is restricted outside from YT (clicking on the video in this case). Front ends certainly are going worst, the best which stil work fine are LightTube and ViewTube, PokeTube for some Vids. In YT Itself you can watch it still without ads, tracking and/or nags, using these scripts in Violentmonkey or Greasymonkey, Tampermonkey is also valid, but it is proprietary soft.

YouTubeVideo&music&kidsAdBlocking

Ultimate YouTube Ad Remover and Detection Bypasser

A lot of YTubers are changing to Odysee because of this crap.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 months ago

It'll take a hell of a lot to deteriorate the experience to the point where it becomes just as bad as the regular youtube app.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

They already try, so you just update to the next version. Revanced recently had a thing where every video you tried to play would redirect to another video saying to update your app. I did and it worked.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

I switched invidious and everything is perfect since then

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

As long as Invidious continues to work I don’t care about what they’ll do

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

They'll try, spend allot of money on it and they'll fail. And even if they don't, they won't their money back.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Btw they are not actually failing: just a few weeks ago Invidious was completely broken, but a guy posted a PR to fix that like the day after...

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago (2 children)

That sounds a lot like failure to me..

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

Their goal isn't to completely shut this down, Google is fully aware that that's impossible to achieve. They just want to annoy enough people and make it complicated enough so that the userbase doesn't grow any further.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

I meant that without these people who constantly work on it, Invidious would instantly die, we shouldn't take them for granted...Google is constantly making changes that breaks it.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 5 months ago

Look how well that turned out for Reddit.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

Lmao, what you gonna try this time, Google? 🤣

[–] [email protected] 24 points 5 months ago

Google warns users of these apps that their experience may deteriorate soon. They may "experience buffering issues" or see errors such as "the following content is not available on this app" when trying to watch videos

you can just feel the evil corporate Cheshire grin behind this paragraph

[–] [email protected] 17 points 5 months ago (1 children)

If the streaming apps will be deteriorated the only option left will be yt-dlp and mpv left

[–] [email protected] 9 points 5 months ago (1 children)

as long as the content is publicly available they cannot block yt-dlp, buffer at best.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (2 children)

I wouldn't be surprised if at some point they start doing something like what Twitter did and require login to view the content.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago (1 children)

They might but if they do they'll lose a huge revenue because a lot of website have Youtube videos embedded. Imagine you have to login to view an embedded video. Even website owners won't like that because their videos won't load automatically and they will start to seek alternative options. So I don't think Google would take that risk soon.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago

It may not be too bad for users: a lot of people are simply always logged on, so they'll not see any difference. What is the current share of Chrome?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago (2 children)

I think yt-dlp lets you use your login credentials?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

Yes. The thing is that then you are no longer anonymously using yt-dlp.
The next step would be trying to detect that case.. maybe adding captchas when there's even a slight suspicion.
Perhaps even to the point of banning users (and then I hope you did not rely on the same account for gmail or others).
It'll be a cat and mouse situation. Similar as it happened with Twitter, there are also third party apps, but many gave up.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

Yup, it has a --cookies flag to either use an exported cookies file from your browser, or if using Firefox just tell it and it'll grab it automagically.

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