Piracy as a quality of service issue
Piracy as a quality of service issue
I am one of those suckers (:sigh) who paid for Youtube since it bundled Youtube Music with it. However, today I used the latter's Revanced version and it was so much customizable. Right from removing menu items to the stupid cast button Google has forced on us; it seems a billion dollar company can't compete with these folks who make their apps so much more serviceable.
I don't wish to go too much into the official Youtube client which too is tacked with things like Remix button and what not.
"We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem. If a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24 x 7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come to your country 3 months after the US release, and can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store, then the pirate’s service is more valuable."
Gabe Newell
I agree fully. I basically never download music anymore, because I can get all the music I can think of on Spotify for a few bucks a month. And when everything was on Steam I just got everything from there. Now that all the games companies are bringing out their own stores and launchers, that's starting to change again.
This is a lesson that the movie & TV industry seems hell-bent on not learning.
It at it's worst in my opinion with streaming services like Netflix and Hulu. They're all starting to get so fragmented that they're not much better than just paying for cable anymore, and that was their whole appeal to begin with. Now you have to sub to like 3 or 4 different services to get all the content you want (sometimes more) and they all seem to be phasing out their ad free tiers. It's like they forgot what made them so popular to begin with.
I agree fully. I basically never download music anymore, because I can get all the music I can think of on Spotify for a few bucks a month.
I recently started music pirating because I listen to a lot of genres and I want to shuffle them. If I use Spotify, I am limited to their shitty shuffler, but if I download my music offline, I can shuffle however I want. My favorite algorithm to shuffle my huge bunch of music is to shuffle them by genre. Now I get to listen to interesting music with full control over the algorithm used.
Also, there are frequent power cuts in my area, so an offline library always proves useful. I also visit places where internet connections are not available.
Also, my pirated game runs without trackers and forced updates. Steam version somehow insist on overlays, overnight updates, and likes to show me ads unless I google how to toggle them off.
"Can't compete" => won't, ftfy :-P
Google got their money, so they are simply "done", unlike software made by people who genuinely care about stuff, and donate their time for free to improve it.
Yes, you are right. Google could if they really wanted to. After all, they bought their Gemini thing(the merits and demerits of it might warrant a separate thread of it's own) when they saw everyone was scrambling in that direction.
They are a company - their obligations to their customers begin and end with extraction of funds to disburse to their shareholders:-(.
Back in the early days when they were trying to ingratiate themselves to the public, they put on a good face - "don't be evil" and all, but the mask is off now. Even now, they still really truly are more ethical (or at least might be, maybe?) than some others, e.g. https://lemmy.world/post/11951288? (but that is not saying very much at all, to compare an evil corporation like Google to a full-on fairly criminal-like corporation that steals artists & other people's content against their will; and I only say "criminal-like" b/c the aging geriatrics in various governments around the world barely use computers much less understand its terminology such as "mobile device", so the existing legal structures remain mired half a century behind what is going on in today's actual world).
Also, I am weird - I will do things like pay for Netflix even though I haven't watched it in months, preferring the high seas that has more content that is no longer there:-P, b/c I want to support continued development of new content (though TV & movies are becoming a dated art form nowadays). That said, YouTube is a VERY different situation, b/c while they do have server costs and what-not, they also are one of the lowest (not THE lowest, but among them... iirc?) contributors back to the artists who actually make the stuff. So a better way would be to find artists that you like, and send them money directly where they would get 100% of the revenue.
Anyway, I like your post that shows that there is more than one reason to support such apps - not just b/c of the content but also more than that too.
I also can't stand the official YouTube client, not necessarily because it's so bad, but because ReVanced simply has so much more QoL features that I can't live without now.
I used to be on Newpipe in the old days. I liked it's simple no frills UI. Ironically, I can still choose my desired video quality(like 720p, since I am on mobile data) but on official Youtube app, I only have/had three options - Low, High and Auto. No way to set an exact video resolution system wide, it could only be done per video. These constraints make almost any third party client superior to the official thing Google is providing.
ReVanced also has the ability to remove the current BS YouTube video quality selector and restore the old resolution selector.
I've known about NewPipe for a long time but I've never really wanted to use it because of the vast amount of missing features. It might be alright for people who don't use YouTube very often or want to preserve their privacy at all costs but I can't use it.
Newpipe is really superior in any way. I can honestly say I haven't visited YouTube.com in years, and definitely not used their app.
it seems a billion dollar company can’t compete with these folks who make their apps so much more serviceable
They are not competing, they are actively trying to kill these apps. Besides, those apps are nothing without this billion dollar company and its infrastructure. Their apps are not great, but you're still on YouTube.
That's exactly what stallman is advocating. That we should control our own software on our own machines. What if you want to add an extra button?
It's really just a practical thing
I find this to be the case to absolutely every app, free versions being filled with adds, selling your data, trying to fry you with more and more dopamine intensive content. And then the paid version, which usually is overpriced, happens to be worse than a modified client of the same app but free.
Youtube for example, doesn't allow you to download content in 1080, 1440 or 4k, 720 is the limit, for a paid subscription. Then you try revanced and oh wow, you can download 4k content for free, how cool is that?
And usually changing the interface to make it more addictive, forcing shorts on Youtube, reels on Instagram, making the base app worse so people go for the paid version, is why people end up with moddified clients/applications, yet the companies are obviously going to blame us, "pirates oh very bad, they steal content and avoid ads, why would they do such crime",
Instead of wondering why their app is 4 times heavier than a couple years back, has 8x the useless crap built-in, and is priced 2x than a year ago. At least this crap has taught me to value actual well built apps by great people, in many cases, out of passion.
Props to Freetube, my greatest discovery last year, I can't even express how much I missed using a useful interface for youtube, instead of what we have now...
Well that's it, no-one should feel bad for using alternative apps when the actual company is the one to push users out of their apps with shitty updates and anti-consumer practices.
Downloading on Youtube reminds me of the Downloads button on desktop website. Those downloads, upto 1080p atleast at my end, are finicky and since they are playable only in the browser, on the odd occassion , I have found sluggish. I personally think that yt-dlp is much superior with multiple config options that Youtube's own implementation.
Yeah, on pc yt-dlp is absolutely the best option, If I remember right, there's even a way of downloading the high bitrate versions of videos spoofing iOS or whatever, but maybe this was using a fork of it
And on android, I used to rock youtube mate
I sail the seas because it’s far more convenient than paying for shitty services. No sign ups, no logins, no figuring out where this show or that one is stationed, no emails, no bullshit.
I've been paying for Prime Video and Netflix and watch them through a HTPC hooked up to my TV with a user agent switcher extension in Firefox to trick the sites into thinking I'm on ChromeOS, so I can get somewhat near 720 or 1080p.. Just started sailing the seas, and seeing content in 4K, was jaw dropping. I've known the difference, but I just forgot because I will never be served 4K, much less 1080p as long as I'm on Linux.
Also I could see what the fuck was happening in dark scenes like horror movies because it didn't have Netflix's shitty data compression showing me large moving grey blocks as the background of a horror movie.
Alternative frontends don't fall under piracy by any definition. Youtube's servers are publicly accessible.
I don't know about that. The ads and telemetry are how users "pay" for access. Removing ads and telemetry means users are no longer "paying".
If it's not piracy, it's definitely piracy adjacent.
Telemetry, advertising, etc. are ultimately web page elements that I can download or block. The paid offering might have a TOS that requires acceptance of such, but those terms do not bind me as a free, public visitor. I think Youtube is doing its best to have people buy its nonsense argument, as part of a wider campaign to shift the public's understanding of web site versus web service. For what it's worth, I don't see them ever putting their money where their mouth is by pay-walling the whole site.
Similarly, I started using Grayjay after paying for YouTube for years. I'll never go back due to the significant QoL changes that Grayjay offers.
It's what drove me to wrestling torrents, The WWE network was great, it had chapters, and the stuff was easy to find, then they sold it off to Peacock and stuff is hard to find, they have no chapters, they censored some of the old controversial stuff, it's just a lesser experience than the old Network. I'm very interested to see how it's integrated into Netflix, and if they move the US to Netflix when the Peacock deal is over.
i started a Plex server to get accurate, properly synced subtitles