Just curious why is this entire thing even in the Android community? This is a privacy topic or a YouTube topic etc. There’s nothing about it that ties it to Android. Can we keep stuff like this out? It’s just one more topic that devolves into politics, scare speculation etc. Just read the comment threads if you need to see.
Exactly. People needs to know Android is not Google
Hard to escape Google unless you are willing to use a custom rom which is getting harder and harder to do with devices with unlockable bootloaders becoming rarer. Google also has a pretty big influence on the direction of Android.
Even GrapheneOS that is talked of often requires purchase of a Google phone.
when over half of the bug fixes and security patches come from Google, it’s a Google product.
and I’m saying that as an android user from /e/OS
Thats a google product but google apps and android are two diffrent product or atleast should be
Should be but at this point basically aren’t.
You can’t run AOSP on most phones and if you could you wouldn’t get the user experience most people expect from a phone.
Friendly reminder that Tampermonkey has a script for this:
https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/521089-youtube-age-restriction-bypass-stealth-version
Cool, if GrayJay could integrate similar functionality that’d be great.
There’s really
45 spaces in the main internet:- the public corporate web (YouTube, Facebook, twitter, Reddit, etc)
- the private corporate web (requires login to view any content, Software as a Service, Cloud Apps, etc)
- the public web (Wikimedia, Wikia, Archive.org)
- the indie web / small web
- private web - inaccessible except through login or through VPN or TOR/Onion, but not corporate (media servers, email servers, darkweb, file servers)
And currently the main issue is that the corporate web is intentionally trying to strangle the other spaces on the web.
But there are some movements against it, https://indieweb.org/ and https://neocities.com/ and https://smallweb.cc/
Edit: missed one of the spaces
What about the darknet?
That’s just private web with extra steps, really
And those extra steps make it wayyyy more private and secure.
But not any different in the context I’m talking about
At that point, you’re almost talking about a private web.
Accessable public information seems to me to be a different beast.
I’m slowly making peace with the thought of losing the internet as it is. Maybe it’ll become something broken you wade into from time to time, some sort of blinking, blabbering wasteland to scavenge valid, valuable information from and return to your oasis. Some people will stay trapped in there forever, but it’s useless to try to communicate with them.
So real
That’s what I said about my IP. Now I can’t watch YouTube. I mostly just use PeerTube
What do you even do there? I can almost never find anything to watch on PeerTube.
For me there are actually some people making videos I like. For example thelinuxexperiment, Veronica explain, privacy guides yeah not much though
Oh, me? I do more posting than viewing, honestly. If we all do the same, it solves this concern
If you mostly care about tech and especially Linux and Open Source there is some good content there. Other than that, good content is unfortunately few and far between.
Also good for homesteading/permaculture and anarchism it’s not all tech
I don’t understand what you do on YouTube.
I don’t enjoy it. I’ve never enjoyed it. I truly don’t understand how people can spend time watching it
Gotta support alternatives such as Peertube, Nebula… so there are nice places to find videos as YouTube becomes worse and worse.
It’s almost impossible for any of those to suceed beyond being niche because its not viable to run against the economics of scale and the practicality of the corporate solutions provided by the Big Techs companies in capitalist countries.
Believe me, I’ve tried to talk to real people about the dangers of sending data to a single company like Google (Alphabet) or Facebook (Meta) and depending on that for media comsumption, how it can and how it’s really used to manipulate public opinion on countries… The fact is that for non-tech and non-privacy minded people (which I’d sure Must be 99.9% of the population) they really don’t seem to care, they just wanna a “free” service that they turn on the TV and there are the videos of their “influencers” or YouTube channels to watch, on YouTube I really hate how it shoves ads like there’s no tomorrow nowadays every 5 minutes, but I also understand there’s a cost to run their business, I, myself, if were to pay for similar service provided without ads I’d pretty sure the YouTube Premium offering would still being a bargain since Google’s infractucture and running costs are really optimized.
So yeah, I really don’t believe any capitalist country can compete with the Big Techs companies, they are probably deeply rooted into common user behavior in all capitalist country, in the capitalist “democracies” it’s impossible to lobby against them in privacy concerns since they can easily sway public opinion in their favor with invisible chances to their content delivery, so anyone trying would have to have a lot of resources to do so (a popular movement without money funding in a capitalist society is basically doomed, theres a very pow chance to suceed imo) and any national alternative, or any actual alternative to their services is almost impossible to suceed since they already have their economy of scale set up with minimal costs and they can also run years on and on with a loss untill any competition does due to being unable to compete with their lower artificial prices.
I don’t know how or why you see ads on YouTube. I have been using firefox and before that whatever else, for a very long time. I have not seen an ad of any kind on YouTube in many MANY years. And since sponsor block came out I’ve only seen a few that managed to slip through. I just fast forward. But why would anyone suffer YouTube with ads? You’re volunteering for it at this point because it’s insanely easy to block them.
Imagine YouTube telling you to submit ID to prove that your 20 year old account is 18+ lmao
Also, imagine living in a country pretending that it’s amazing while they treat their citizens like they do… United States of North Korea vibes
Reddit does if you are in the UK, and reddit marks loads of stuff suited to under 18s as NSFW. News about what Israel is doing in Palestine for example.
following the facebook method.
Youtube/Google/Alphabet out of aaaaall the companies out there, should already have a mindblowing amount of info on 99% of its users. There’s no need at all to even ask for ID.
They want solid evidence for authorities, remember USA has gone full Nazi from the very top all the way down
It’ll be super weird to pirate free youtube videos, but I’ll fuckin’ do it.
How do you even do that?
Grayjay and Newpipe (and its forks) can do that, as well as just watching it like regular youtube, but also the option to select from other platforms - like peertube, as one example - to watch.
I guess yt-dlp everything lol
I’m assuming that mandatory ID checks would make yt-dlp not work
Unless you have access to an age-verified account(that is not yours), in that case you can just pass the cookies
Hunter2, that’s your time to shine!
They are going to start permanently banning people from YouTube by ID if that becomes popular enough
There’s PipePipe.
Between the age of my account and the fact I pay for premium, if they ever ask for ID they can go fuck themselves and I’ll go back to as blockers and fresh accounts
Lol “paying for youtube”
I mean, people pay for Netflix or Amazon or whatever, why is YouTube different? It’s my primary video platform and I watch more than 50 hours a week (I’m low balling that number to hell as well).
While paying is more convenient for me than breaking their shit, I’ll pay. Also means creators actually get paid for my views as well
nothing wrong with that.
you support the people you watch without having to see ads. also, comes with YT music.
it’s a pretty good deal
But then you end up giving Google even more information compared to using it logged out.
yeah, that is definitely a trade-off
It also monetarily feed into the youtube network effect of there being no other viable options. Maybe youtube becoming completely unprofitable for creators is a necessary evil so there becomes less and less incentive to put content there.
I mean yeah if everyone would coordinate. We’re such a small minority on here it doesn’t really do anything on its own. If we got the creators themselves onboard…
Look into browser Finger printing. The logged out parts does not do much nowadays.
Yeah, but having a Google account, tying payment to it, and having viewing history all tied to it is even worse. There’s a reason Microsoft wants people to use an account on their OS is tying stuff like extended support to it because a dedicated profile is still more reliable and accurate than trying to rely solely on finger printing.
One is so good you don’t even need to try to finger print because you already did all the work for them logging in.
I agree. All I am saying that in the limit where we all use services that respect privacy and stay away from big tech, we still have a major issue that we currently don’t have a solution for and is very hard to avoid or eliminate completely.
Yeah, but taking approach of its all pointless just give in isn’t good either.
Not paying and not using an account is ways to reduce how much is given to those companies.
And the paying user average revenue for creators is higher than ad users. At least it was when I last looked.
Tipping your creators 5€/month or smth is even better. No google, Amazon in between, no charges…
yeah except if I watch a random video from somebody they wouldn’t get any money with this method.
I can’t afford to give everyone 5€ per month
You guys pay for that ? No ads here on you tube
Do you need to borrow a flashlight? It seems you’ve gotten far enough up your own butt that you might need some help finding your way back out again
Lol do you pay for youtube?
You know you’re gonna have to go elbow deep to hand them that flashlight. . ?
I still have the original Google Play Music All Access intro deal of $7.99/month from 2013.
They contractually can’t raise the price on me ever. 12 years so far.I couldn’t keep paying for it in good conscience when they killed the original Play Music app and along with it: their awesome selection of curated playlists, the best library organization I’ve seen before or since, and the critical one, the ability to upload your own music that wasn’t available already. I just can’t stand YouTube as a music organization platform.
Edit: Oh! And not to mention the I’m Feeling Lucky button that somehow no one else has managed to replicate.
But in exchange for loosing those music features, I gained ad free YouTube Premium.
So yah, I keep the subscription.I really miss that “I’m feeling lucky” button. I found a lot of good music with that.
You pay each month that amount for music ,😂
That’s how much I pay for YouTube Premium.
I also buy CDs, or Bandcamp downloads directly for those I really like, and want to donate to.
I “curate” whole discographies of stuff that I want to “archive”.
But when someone recommends music I haven’t heard of, I load up their most popular stuff on YouTube Music and listen to a bunch there, ad free. Then decide if or how I obtain more.I use newpipe or metrolist on my phone,freetube on my PC , never have I seen ads from yt.
I’ve tried those. They aren’t as good as YouTube Premium.
As a newpipe user myself, are we now pretending this doesn’t happen for 90% of videos?
Have just tested it with totally random subjects, such as grapheneos, supertramp, Hollywood undead, interstellar, trump, everything in working order. Tested with mullvad VPN on (exit zwitersland), or off (belgium)
Try reinstall newpipedeleted by creator
I alredy quit youtube when commercial crap hit the fan. Never used Zuckerbergs surveillance anyway. Very happy to spend more time on my real life
i watch it, but it has to be adblock, otherwise it becomes intolerable.
protip: if you wish to watch on your android TV, get an app called smarttube next. You’ll need to side load it (so i don’t know if it will work much longer with this shit that google is up to. don’t know if their block on sideloading affects android tv), but once it is installed, it auto updates and shit. no more adverts on youtube.
The good news is Google seems to have completely forgotten about Android TV so they probably won’t tamper with it or if they do there won’t be any compelling reasons to upgrade
Gonna be fun if they ask me to verify my age. My account is old enough to drink.
Yeah. I’ve never been asked but now I wonder if that’s why. Haven’t heard of anyone with a drinking aged account having to do this.
I will use free tube as long as it functions. Wish my creators would go somewhere else.
Quitting Reddit was hard in several ways.
Quitting D&D (because of WotC being assholes) sucked because I was an Eberron/Keith Baker fan and have a lot of money sunk into D&D.
But I don’t know if I could quit YouTube. If that happened, I’d try to find ways to hack my way around it. I might ask my favorite creators to migrate to other platforms. But if I had no options to get their content but to give YouTube my ID, I might honestly have to do it.
I’d give YouTube an ID, but never my ID. They probably just have AI checking them to see if they look real enough. As long as it’s a convincing enough photoshop, it’d probably pass the litmus test.
I thought the days of needing a fake ID were decades behind me
Just like mom pants, fake IDs are back on the menu, boys!
Why quit D&D? Whether WotC is stinky or not, it’s just books and resources you can get anywhere… So acquire the books in ways that don’t support WotC and have the best of both worlds, no?
- I wouldn’t want to encourage others to patronize WotC. (And, if I’m running a 5e campaign - which I did for a short time - players who want to play are going to want books even if only the PHB.) So I wouldn’t want to run 5e. I might play 5e as a player if invited. But I’m kindof a “forever GM.”
- Yeah, I’m good with acquiring stuff in ways that doesn’t support WotC. I don’t consider buying used to be permissable, however. If I buy used, that’s one used copy that won’t be available to someone else who may instead resort to buying new from WotC. And WotC profits directly from DM’s Guild. Piracy is the only way I’d be ok with it. (And if I don’t want to run 5e, and given that I already have all the core books, the only WotC content I’d be interested in pirating would be Eberron stuff. If I wanted to support Keith Baker without supporting WotC/DM’s Guild, I could just pirate and join Baker’s Patreon. Assuming I can find a good place to pirate that stuff from, of course.)
- I specifically do want to participate in TTRPG ecosystems that are more explicitly dedicated to more sane licensing schemes and have very explicitly Ulysses Pact’ed themselves in no-takebacksies ways. Like maybe Paizo/Pathfinder 2e for instance. (I’m currently between groups… and have yet to acquire the PF2e books… and honestly am enjoying a bit of a hiatus from GMing… but when I get back to it, I’d love to do either PF2e or… I dunno. Something not 5e. Even though the 5e system is pretty decent, I think.)
- There was a short period of time during which I thought WotC was backing down after the OGL 2.0 debacle, and if they hadn’t immediately proved themselves 100% evil with the Pinkerton fiasco, I would have ended my boycott. But they did, so my boycott remains.
- I haven’t seen the D&D movie, nor do I intend to. And I’m not just boycotting WotC. I’m boycotting Hasbro. So, no Transformers movies either.
youtube may be the last american tech that i unhook from, there is simply no where else that has so much video content in one place
i don’t understand how france for example stopped 2 big media companies joining for fear of a monopoly while youtube easily gets far more viewers and watch hours than the two of them combined
I wish Nebula were an alternative, but there’s no way for new creators to start out there the way they can on TikTok or YouTube. And being paywalled, they’d be taking a lot of really important educational information away from public access, essentially restricting themselves to preaching to the choir.
Would Twitch work?? I don’t love these options.
Another thing is youtube’s value isn’t even career creators. Its random people uploading stuff because they thought it’d help someone despite no expectations of any career or monetary compensation.
Im sure lot of us have searched some fix on youtube then been helped by the video posted by a channel where that’s the only video there. So not everyone is looking for a netflix alternative from youtube, but its the encyclopedia of knowledge it offers. I’ve had professor who uploaded their lessons on youtube so people could refer to it.
Same for me. I’ve been using YouTube for long enough that my over decades curated subscription feed is my primary source of both entertainment and learning, and while I’m successfully degoogling all other aspects of my life, this one will be hard.
Who on youtube are you that attached to, out of curiosity? I definitely follow a few creators that would hurt to lose as well, really just looking for recs haha
Well, I guess just to list off who I watch frequently, kinda sorted into categories:
TTRPG:
- Critical Role - Really famous. Live-play of TTRPGs. It’s really a huge investment of time to keep up with it, though.
Just people I have parasocial relarionships with:
- Any Austin - Kinda “philosophy of gaming” is how I’d describe his latest content. I’ve been a huge fan of his for many many years and am way more invested in him than the content he currently makes. But he’s really fascinating. His alternate channel “The Excellent Man From Minneapolis” is music he writes/records. Good stuff as well IMO.
- Memoria - Gaming entertainment content. Found her when she was featured on Austin’s channel.
- gl;hf - A podcast that Austin and Memoria do together. It’s about everything and nothing.
Long form deep dive investigative and social commentary stuff:
- OKI’s Weird Stories - Cool expos on things like conspiracy theories and cults.
- Fredrik Knudson - Similar cool expos on things like gaming communities, fandoms, niche infamous figures, scientific experiments, etc.
- Folding Ideas - Somewhere between expos and social commentary. Does stuff about flat earthers, gold, cryptocurrency, etc.
- Contrapoints - Insightful and really well-edited/highly-prodiced left-wing social commentary stuff.
- Philosophy Tube - Quite similar to Contrapoints but different. I’d imagine if you like one, you’d like both.
- Munecat - Also similar to Contrapoints and Philosophy tube.
- Innuendo Studios - Maybe discontinued, but really really good source for info on how the alt-right “works” and how to fix (particularly American) fascism.
Tech/hacking:
- Ben Jordan - Stuff about privacy, police tech, fighting scraping for gen-ai training, etc. Informative.
- Marcin Plaza - Hobbyist mobile computing device prototyping. Quite entertaining as well.
- James Channel - Fucking hillarious. Mostly game system modding content, but way funnier than that makes him sound.
Satanism:
- The Satanic Grotto - A small satanist group based in Kansas that made the national news big time not too long ago holding a “black mass” at the state capitol. I’m just fascinated by all the legal fallout of the whole thing. And… I think the Satanic Grotto is the good guys. “Part of the solution” if you will.
- Behemoth X - Just really dark and atmospheric content about rituals to commune with demons. Dude 100% believes demons are real and powerful and he does blood sacrifices to them and talks about what wisdom he claims they’ve shared with him. Also life advice. Lol. Really interesting. Only major downside to the guy: he’s really leaned into using AI art in his videos lately. It’s pretty cringe.
Other creepy stuff:
- Tales From The Trip! - Substance use trip reports. Only bad trip reports.
- Night Mind - Essays on horror media. Mostly video games and ARGs.
- Nexpo - Similar to Night Mind, but occasionally does stories about grisly murders or creepy cults.
- blameitonjorge - Similar to the above, but with a lot of focus on lost media.
- Nick Crowley - Mostly creepy internet and TV history rabbit holes.
Vidja gaming content:
- Summoning Salt: History of speedrun world records. Way more interesting than it sounds.
- Pointcrow - Bit of a guilty pleasure. Popular Twitch streamer who does speedruns and challenge runs and stuff. Quite entertaining, but a bit sophmoric.
I’m sure I could think of more if I thought for a bit. I should mention that I don’t usually log in to YouTube. I keep my subscribed-to list in NewPipe on my phone. But I also do a fair amount of just searching by topic or happening across YouTube content on Lemmy or Hackaday.
Any Austin is great
Oh awesome breakdown thank you! We have quite a few in common actually, looking forward to checking the others out! It’s funny, Any Austin was actually the first person that came to my mind. I feel like anything he talks about he just breathes so much life into the subject
It’s wild to meet Any Austin fans in the wild. I was watching his stuff and supporting him on Patreon when he was really obscure. Now that he’s really popular, it’s a whole different thing.
Well hey thanks for helping him get off the ground! I forget which, but one of his “unremarkable places” videos went viral and that’s how I first got on board
Was that speed runner historian the guy who had a massive falling out recently? I only heard about it in passing.
Point Crow or Summoning Salt? Either way, I hadn’t heard anything.
I do know Point Crow used to do a lot of content of games like Breath of the Wild with mods that would do things like multiplayer mode or “the floor is lava”. And Nintendo recently got YouTube to mass delete lots of modded Nintendo game content. (I don’t think mods of Nintendo games are even illegal, but Nintendo is known for calling the perfectly legal illegal.) And Point Crow’s channel was pretty hard hit because that made up a lot of his content.
Man. Maybe I should consider boycotting YouTube. Heh.
Edit: Oh. Speedrunner historian guy. You’re asking about Summoning Salt. I can’t read. Yeah, I don’t know anything, but I’ll look into it. You’re not thinking of Karl Jobst, are you? He was sued by Billy Mitchell, but Mitchell is 100% provably in the wrong. And a liar. And a scammer. And a cheating cheater who cheats. (If you aren’t familiar with Mitchell, I recommend starting with the documentary “King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters”.) Also, unless you’ve heard something I haven’t, I would recommend Jobst’s channel. It’s mostly about cheaters in e-sports and speedrunning.
Subscribing to Nebula will be a good start. Quite a few of the channels you mentioned are there already and more keep getting added.
