1y ago

YouTube is finally cracking down on third-party apps that enable ad-blocking

Just a moment...

The company's team clarified that their terms prohibit third-party apps from disabling ads, as it denies creators their due reward for viewership. Although the announcement did not specify any app by name, it's plausible to presume that third-party YouTube apps such as NewPipe, YouTube ReVanced, Piped, and others might be implicated.

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Is "creators" Youtube's version of "think on the children"?
- Yes it is
Get off of Chrome
Get off of YouTube
Get off of gmail
Get off of Google
Theres a whole big internet out there. You don't have to limit yourself to one single company.
- YouTube is the only one that doesn't have an alternative. I mean, there are other video hosts yes, but the content isn't there.
  The creators need to start moving. Their fans will likely follow, since it's not YouTube they are there for. But I don't think anyone else offering free, large scale video hosting does much more, if even that, than what YouTube does. Even if it sucks, it's better than nothing, so there is no incentive to move for anyone.
  
  Problem being that there is no real incentive to do so, unless PeerTube finds a way to pay content creators. Until then, switching away from YouTube means loosig their revenue stream...requiring them to take up jobs to pay the bills and eventually have less time for content creation.
  Living on donations and patreon alone is hard...
  
  Nebula is trying to be the alternative. It's a paid subscription and not as plentiful as YouTube is (and maybe never will be).
  But it's a good try, give it some support, if you can
  
  Most of their fans won't follow. Convenience is a powerful thing.
  There also really aren't other options. Anyone being able to sign up and host video for free is an extremely expensive service to provide if people take you up on it.
  
  I tried Nabula twice. The latest in 2020.
  Service is fine but their UI + search and discover is awful. Like I can barely find creators I like when I search for their exact channel name.
  
  Some of the creators I follow are moving.... Kind of. Most of their videos get taken down for some stupid ass reason so they're going to places like patreon and whatever other platform you have to pay a monthly sub to. Which at that point, I just don't watch them.
- Sort of true, except YouTube. I watch almost exclusively YouTube few hours every day. If it opens by mistake in a browser, it is totally unwatchable with ads inserted even in short videos. I hope reVanced will manage to avoid detection somehow, otherwise it is quite hopeless. Yes, I can pay for premium, but the app will be full of stupid crap and no gesture controls.
  
  Youtube in the Browser? uBlock Origin. Never have any ads.
  Edit: I am on Firefox.
  
  There is also newpipe
- Getting off youtube is pretty difficult with no true alternative.
  You forgot to add get off Android, which would also mean just going Apple. There is no good alternative there either.
  
  I'm excited about Linux phones like the Pinephone, but they're really not ready for anything more than Linux enthusiasts to flex. I was hoping to switch, but I need a new phone now, so I'll probably get a Pixel and put GrapheneOS on it. At least that way I control what data Google gets access to.
  
  No, GrapheneOS is a great Android OS tbh
  
  We have to make the alternatives. As Lemmy is an alternative to reddit, PeerTube could be an alternative to YouTube.
  
  I guess an AOSP-based rom, if one exists for your phone?
  
  YouTube is not a mandatory necessity. We live in a world of infinite sources of recreation. Get off YouTube has absolutely no requirement for an alternative to exist. Like alcohol, music, books, or whatever, you can only just not do it.
- YouTube is the internet for me. Of my internet usage over 95% is watching YouTube
  
  Same; ever since I left reddit I just can't find any other platform besides YT that satisfies my need to be addicted to a website.
- That's a stupid point to make tbh, because the most important information, knowledge and entertainment is on their platforms in a quality and quantity that is unprecedented. Meaning you can try to avoid it, but from time to time you have to use google/gmaps/yt/...
  And that's coming from me.. someone who degoogled their smartphone.
  
  Realistically Google Search and Google Maps don't provide anything unique that isn't provided by competitors, although a) they may provide a superior experience, and b) the competitors are not necessarily much more palatable (that is, Bing Search and Bing Maps are hardly a great ethical improvement).
  YouTube is probably the only Google service where this is a genuine monopoly of sorts. That is, content that is on YouTube is not generally available on other platforms, and if you want to watch that content you have to watch it on YouTube. We might all live for the day when all content creators are dual-hosting in PeerTube or the like too, but we're a long long way from that right now.
  Although I write that as someone who only very rarely actually uses YouTube, because largely the content isn't to my interest. Other than my local football club's channel, I can't think of anything on there that I actually seek out.
  
  Did you De-qualcomm it too, or not affected?
- Problem is, there's shitton of content that needs to be archived and moved from YouTube, if YouTube stops to exist then all tutorials and teaching videos and all previously produced content will be gone, people want this content, so only true solution is somehow archive all YouTube videos and move them from YouTube, until it's done, YouTube will have monopoly, and it's bad situation we've found ourselves in
  
  Peertube might be a fediverse-friendly place to archive such content.
  
  If it's educational, it could go to Wikicommons.
- I can't get off of YouTube because there's 20+ creators that are like family to me.
  
  Check if they have channels elsewhere, a few of mine are on Odysee or Nebula. If that's the case, look into Grayjay, which is an Android app to access a bunch of video services with one interface. It's still a bit rough, but it's serviceable, and it allows downloading videos, which is cool.
  
  Keep those, but find new ones elsewhere.
- google meet and google forms are the only thing that still makes me use google from time to time. youtube is another story since idt there is a good alternative for that, nope not peertube sorry.
- Off Google - super easy Off Gmail - you'll still be fighting to get into someone inbox but there are many options still Off Chrome - getting harder and harder, the only option is Firefox Off YouTube - sorry, nowhere to go
But Youtube already take more than half of what creator should earn.
- Which is at least less than all the other big platforms are taking.
- I googled. Isn't it 45% Youtube and 55% vid producer?
  
  If they don't get demonitized or falsely copyright claimed.
- Do you know how much it costs to build and host a video platform?
NewPipe works by fetching the required data from the official API (e.g. PeerTube) of the service you're using. If the official API is restricted (e.g. YouTube) for our purposes, or is proprietary, the app parses the website or uses an internal API instead. This means that you don't need an account on any service to use NewPipe.
So NewPipe doesn't use yt API and it never accepted its terms, so NewPipe is safe (from my understanding)
- What about ReVanced? Should be safe, since it's just a modded version of the official YT app, right?
  
  Unfortunately that's more likely a strike against them than in their favor
They're not doing a very good job
- And I'm here for it. uBlock Origin, NewPipe, and Grayjay all work fine. If those stop working, I'll also stop using YouTube.
- But they tried so hard...
  
  And got so far, but in the end it doesn't really matter
- Silence!
  Don't tell the holy secret to the world!
- They probably will eventually, but it's just not priority. Most people interact with YouTube via Chrome (or one of the 400,000 rebranded Chromimum browsers) or the YouTube app, both of which Google can more tightly control. Firefox, with it's smaller market share, just isn't worth chasing... yet.
- Still dont know what the big deal is, libretube and freetube still work fine. Same with firefox and uBlock.
  
  I use Revanced. Out of curiosity, I tried going to youtube.com on Firefox + Ublock origin on my Samsung a70. Full screen, "double tap to forward 10 seconds", "double tap to back 10 seconds" and captions work.
The company's team clarified that their terms prohibit third-party apps from disabling ads
Most 3rd party apps dont disable it. They just dont implement it
- I googled. I read that Youtube took down Vanced. True? Can Youtube use the way they took down Vanced for Revanced?
  
  Vanced got taken down due to trademark violations.
  They need something more substantial for revanced. Especially since it's only a set of binary patches and there is no redistribution of YT source code.
YouTube already denies many creators of their due rewards from viewership over trivial things like saying the word "hell" in a video. it's obviously something more considering it's Google we're talking about.
"Finally"?
I knew it was only a matter of time before alternative YouTube clients started getting banned. You can't "stick it to Google" while still relying on their servers to host the videos. We need to support Lemmy-like services that are distributed and host their own content and communities for video.
- That's peertube, right? A slight problem is that a lot of the popular content is only on YouTube for the money. Better patronage or sponsoring systems would help with that. For ones not in it for the money, knowing there's a solid service with community would probably suffice.
  
  There is more cntent than you hake time to watch. Look to peertube and suyport what is there.
- Revanced still works fine for me Idk why people are losing their minds
Honestly, I pay for YouTube Premium but I still use Revanced and NewPipe for the extra features. Why can't they just leave me alone?
Finally?
- I admire your optimism. I don't share it, but I admire it.
- How? Do you think channel with 2M subs will move to Vimeo? Why would anyone do that?
- Unfortunately that's hard to happen
Good thing Firefox for Android allows plug-ins now. That's been my go-to mobile YouTube viewer ever since. It's almost as good as my desktop experience.
Am I weird? I don't mean ads, I have no problem with them.
\ Just make me use an open source client.

95 comments