On the road to fully automated luxury gay space communism.
Spreading Linux propaganda since 2020
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The worst part of "new" YouTube is shorts. They stick them everywhere, all up in your face, and they suck. Even with Invidious they're hard to avoid.
I use an extension to remove shorts, it works on Invidious and YouTube, but it works off of their thumbnails. Unfortunately, a number of shorts don't have normal looking thumbnails, and don't get filtered, but it works good enough for me. Not good enough for Invidious to build it in, but still, good enough.
In many ways, YouTube sucks.
They're where video makers can make money though, so it's where videos are posted, so we largely just have to live with them. I exclusively use Invidious though, which makes it a lot more reasonable, though far from perfect.
YouTube also has an insane usership. Unlike a lot of social media, it's not just young people, it's all ages, toddlers to elderly. And with young people, basically all of them use it. More than 99.5% percent of American teens regularly use YouTube.
I spent 2 weeks making myself not watch YouTube and i very rapidly realised i dont care about anything on there except the occasional eddy burback video so i can stare at his moustache
Feels like part of the continued march towards algorithmization of every last major internet service. The ultimate goal presumably being to make it easier and easier to censor things, Facebook style.
I think the removing of dates videos were published was the Rubicon moment in this. It serves the general trend of enshittification in terms of forcing people to eNgAgE with the platform longer, but there is so much independent news and analysis delivered on YT that the capital class doesn't like threatening their media PR empires. They are stripping us of our very ability to orient ourselves temporally; I hate the antichrist, etc.
I wish people would just run blogs (with videos if desired) on their own websites (with an RSS feed). But that is much harder to monetize. People make videos and put them on YouTube because you can make a lot more money off of video ads. But anyone not focused on monetization via video ads should probably not be relying on YouTube.
Besides monetization, there is discoverability. The algorithm handles marketing for you, attracting new viewers and reminding your past viewers that you exist. On the other hand, users have to intentionally visit blogs or sign up for emails etc.
Scumfucks. I started using the RSS feeds for every channel I follow and never looked back. Now I've written a little local program to check those feeds, throw new video URLs at yt-dlp, and I barely even go on the actual site any more. I'm sure they'll take away RSS at some point though
Does your yt-dlp work over VPN? I feel like if I don't have a residential IP I can't watch YouTube at all, let alone use yt-dlp.
I just re-set-up Pipeline in Linux. I'll probably still end up using the YouTube website since it's more convenient still. Pipeline imports your subscriptions feed and displays a grid like the official UI, but it doesn't currently support having multiple tabs or windows open.
Is video hosting really that expensive, or is it the streaming part that's expensive? If there was an alternative where you had to download the video locally to watch it, would it still cause bandwidth issues? Even for those of us with the least possible attention span, I think waiting to download a video before you watch it is better than 3 90-second unskippable ads.
it's not expensive, people want treats in two clicks instead of dicking around with fintube/tubearchivist for couple of hours and then ~~forgetting about it~~ dicking every three months when something breaks
the gui is a treat we should all go back to command line
i mean jellyfin with plugged-in youtube rss downloaders is not that different from nice gui, only without for you sections, adds, login to verify etc. the annoying part is, on tvs, you can't easily have two clients for two different servers bu eh, small steps.
I think ad block can still get YouTube ads, and Invidious also basically blocks YouTube ads.
I had to switch to uBlock Origin Lite recently, and it works just as well on youtube as the full version did.
FireFox, FireFox with custom user.js, any FireFox forks, basically any Chrome forks, they all can use the much better uBlock Origin.
The Lite version isn't better in any way, there's only downsides. It doesn't have like less code or whatever for being "Lite", the main thing is that it is severely limited on the number of websites and ad providers it can work on. It also has limitations on how adblocking works, on the places it does adblock.
But you're right, YouTube is a massive site, so it's on the list, and the tech they develop for the original for YouTube works on the Lite version too.
use one of the reskin chromes instead of actual chrome and the 100% real sugar ublock origin still works.
storage is cheap, delivery is the expensive part
For an individual video and such, it is very cheap. But YouTube operates at such a massive scale that storage makes up an enormous amount of their expenses. Unlike most companies, payroll is actually a tiny fraction compared to even just storage.
A big part of why alternatives don't exist is just how expensive storage is. It's why open source video systems have barely any public instances.
Other social media video places get around this by having short form videos, so they can store a lot of videos cheap. YouTube has a lot of really long videos, in addition to their short videos.
Storage ~~is~~ was cheap
Unfortunately 😢
I think storage is still pretty expensive. It's cheaper than it used to be, but hosting unlimited hours of video indefinitely is not cheap. Especially if it isn't done by someone that owns the disks themselves (paying for cloud storage), and colocation is a pretty hurdle that I can't imagine being done as a non-profit.
Even with newer video compression? If your device just had to decompress the local video wouldn't that help? Sorry, it's been a while since I've been up to date on this stuff because looking into tech spaces is like peering into a portal to hell
Your device receives a stream of compressed video data and decompresses and renders it on the fly. The tech is called Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH). Small chunks are streamed at a time so the server isn't wasting resources sending the entire video file, based on the bandwidth available, desired resolution, and so on. It's why a YouTube video will never fully buffer, it's just sending the next few seconds and then waiting until it needs to send more.
Video is also really expensive. If we were still watching 360p videos it'd be fine, but as computers get more powerful and video serving becomes cheaper, we demand more. 60fps video. 4k video. VR video. And all videos must be stored forever and must start loading in a few seconds max, which means you can't use tape to archive cheaply.
my understanding is that video files are always in their compressed state, and have been since video compression has existed. i.e. it's always the local machine that's decoding the file. that said modern video compression is quite impressive (e.g. the change from h264 to h265), but upgrading all of YT to state of the art codecs is a significant amount of compute, and removing older files might create compatibility issues for users on older HW.
There's just an enormous amount of content, and an enormous amount of users. Even with fancy video compression, it's incredibly, wildly expensive. Afaik it still isn't profitable, nowhere near profitable even with premium and all the ads, it's basically subsidized by Google.
it might be profitable if they enumerated all the datamining they get from it, but there's a variety of reasons to operate at technically a loss