Libretube, smarttube and the like. You realise the amount of bloated shit there is on YT when you use one of those. They are like a front end on the infra I suppose. Not familiar with Loops, must go digging!
this post was submitted on 11 Apr 2026
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YouTube is the new cable, and it will take monumental effort to dethrone it. Hosting video at this scale is expensive. And people loathe having to go to multiple places to get video. Users, including people on Lemmy, want all of their video entertainment on one platform. They hate multiple subscriptions. They hate having their games in multiple storefronts.
There are user behaviors that enable these bad things to happen. And people need to start ranting about these factors and educating people about how multiple platforms are good, actually. Multiple options for account servers are good, actually. Multiple video hosts are good, actually. Paying creators for content is good.
The solution is not to hack YouTube and put a different front end on their infrastructure.
Okay, fine, I am ready to come out of the closet: I've been a YouTube Premium subscriber for two years. Lynch me if you like. I thought it hypocritical to crucify YouTube and have a Spotify or Netflix or Hulu subscription, and I found the cost acceptable.
Three price increases and a worsening of service later, I cancelled my subscription as soon as I received the email about a price increase.
Incidentally, I think that's the thing to do: you get a price increase, there is no tangible benefit to the increase, you immediately drop the service. None of that "Whatchagonnado?" stuff. The only thing these services react to is an instant drop of revenue. You can live for a month without Spotify (or YouTube Premium), they can't live for a quarter without subscribers.
We always have to remember that the short-term focus of modern capitalism is their weakness: a stupid mistake, a sudden drop in revenue, and the CEOs are flying out the window faster than Putin's generals.
People don’t know how to vote with wallet anymore.
It’s the reason these services get away with nickel and diming. Look at food delivery. For whatever reason people keep using it even though the fees add up to more than the meal itself. Let alone the markup the restaurant does to cover the costs.
Uber Eats motto should be “For when you want to pay $80 for a $5 meal”
Same thing with like Starbucks. People paying $17 for burnt coffee that needs 45 cups of milk and sugar to salvage.
The services will never change because consumers are lazy. It’s easy to just give their money away. People mock the “stop buying avocado toast” saying. But I think they just misunderstood it. I think the deeper meaning of it was meant to convey to vote with your wallet. You can buy avocados and bread at the grocery store and make an avocado toast yourself for under $1. But instead people go and buy it at a fancy pop-up and pay $18 plus tip for some mustachioed hipster with an artisan apron to make it for them.
/rant
The services will never change because consumers are lazy.
That is not true!
The services get more expensive and the quality goes down.
And yet consumers will still use the services; this was my point. They are too lazy to stop using the service and just go buy food in person. So even if the quality goes down and the prices go up, they will simply pay to continue being lazy and get food delivered.
My boss claims it has "no effect" to choose where to spend your money.
I remind him, voting with our wallets is literally the only mechanism Capitalism provides for consumer ethics.
It's Prisoner's dilemma. When we think 5m people are going to take the action either way, we don't think our singular efforts matter. But as there are 5m of us taking the action, there are 5m singular efforts that DO matter. If people just don't give up on the idea.
Says the guy who still has an Amazon account :/
Says the guy who still has an Amazon account :/
I mean, I still have an Amazon account. I even used it, less than two weeks ago. But that was the first time I actually used it to buy anything for nearly a decade.
People shouldn't hold themselves too strictly to any sort of puritanism. Avoid the worst options as much as you can, but when it becomes infeasible for you, make an exception. That's much better than just always going with the bad option.
I think the key here is to get used to react immediately, because the immediate reaction causes a reversal of the action. We don't have to live with the increased cost and decreased service forever, because an immediate negative reaction means the service is restored to what it was before, with any luck. So everybody skips a downgrade or price increase at the same time, and until CEOs figure out the trick, it's bye bye enshittification.
In some cases it doesn't have an effect. Some things are just so big and have so many revenue streams that avoiding the products means removing approximately 4 cents from their revenue stream per person. Millions of people would have to do it all at the same time and that is difficult to organize and maintain.
This doesn't mean that you shouldn't stick to your guns and not support things you have objections to. Something something integrity is doing the right thing when no one is looking something something.
AAA gaming has in fact been suffering its customers voting with their wallets from what I understand.
So there is hope for the greater, more ignorant population at large.
The problem is, YouTube has no real competition. No one has the same thing they do. And the same applies to a lot of things today.
Another issue is, subscription services can just raise the price and then start charging people more without those people doing anything, or possibly even noticing, which differs from individual purchases where you had to make a judgement about the price each time. Now, people have to make an actively cancel in order to not agree to new prices (or EULA changes for that matter). It should really be the other way around, so that if a service raises their price, people have to actively agree to the new price in order for the service to keep charging them.
Can't speak for Uber Eats or Starbucks though.
I thought it hypocritical to crucify YouTube and have a Spotify or Netflix or Hulu subscription
Revanced. Or YouTube with an ad blocker. While supporting creators by directly buying albums/merch.
But I don't think it hypocritical, necessarily. People can inherently only care about so much. For a long time I stopped shopping at Coles and went to Woolworths instead, because I was pissed more at Coles than at Woolworths over a couple of specific things. Then more recently Woolworths did even more to piss me off, so now I mostly shop at Aldi. At no point in this was it not accurate to say that both Coles and Woolworths are horrible duopolists that screw over their suppliers. But one had at least not been so blatant about its gross hypercapitalism bullshit by marketing the idea of brand loyalty and consumerism explicitly to children. So while both were always bad, one seemed the slightly less bad option. Until it didn't.
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Revanced is free
Newpipe, grayjay and many others too
Youtube is also sending notifications about a coachella live stream, even if the notification settings/preferences are turned off.
Even if you have Revanced.
Luckily it has not happened, yet. Either older version or they're rolling it out in waves once again.
But fucking hell, if any app sends me an irrelevant notification without my permission. It loses it's permit to exist on my phone.
I mean... it's quite literally happened already. I'm not the only one who got the notification so they are definitely doing something. Maybe not with all accounts but 1 is too many.
Sry. It hasn't happened for me yet or anyone near me. So they must be doing it in waves, which is usually done based on location.
I do agree that even 1 is too many, just that it's not as widespread as of now.
Ah, got it.
I wonder if its a location thing. I'm in northern Europe, if anyone got the same notification, let me know where you at
Haven't heard about Revanced before. I'm pying for YT Premium but since I use Spotify for music YT Music isn't helping their case if their raising the price.
According to this reddit thread it also happened to people with Premium https://old.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/1sic32k/getting_coachella_notifications/
Since you haven't heard of Revanced, ignore that and check this one out instead: https://morphe.software/
There was some drama in the Revanced team, a bunch of the devs left and started Morphe. Revanced is on life support right now.
Wait, what's the drama? I've just installed Revanced on a new device in the past month and it seemed fine?
It works fine. For now.
The dev team had disagreements, a bunch left, made their own thing, Morphe. Thats all I know/remember. There was a reddit thread explaining the shenanigans, you should be able to find that fairly easily.
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Cool. I stopped paying for it back when it was still called "YouTube Red", during one of their many crackdowns on creators' freedom in the name of benefitting advertisers. I dumped it and installed an adblocker, and eventually YouTube Vanced and its successor Revanced.
I used to run YouTube Vanced on my phone for years until Google killed it a few years ago. Since I was already paying a monthly sub for YouTube Music (been using that since the Google Play Music days and had my whole iTunes uploaded there) I decided to spend the extra 1-2 bucks a month for the Youtube Music + YouTube Premium combination, since that seemed like less effort than keeping up with ReVanced builds constantly.
Last month I tried getting a student discount for my subscription, but after a day I got an email telling me Google was canceling my sub for an unspecified reason. I decided not to renew it, and instead downloaded ReVanced, and spent a few days redownloading all the albums I only had on streaming, and integrating those along with my old iTunes folder into my Jellyfin I already had set up for movies.
Now I'm saving 15 bucks a month, and have regained full control over my music library. Feels pretty nice, and the Symfonium music app on Android looks 10x better than the ever-changing UIs of YTM ever did.
Also feels great not to give a single cent to an accomplice to Israel's genocidal mania across the middle east anymore. I had already severed ties with Google's mail, photo storage and search a year or two ago. Get fucked Google.
Oh wow! Getting rid of the mail is a little hard. I was trying to do immich for pictures but I'm having a hard time with opening folders to docker. I'm a beginner with docker so I'm on my 4th install try
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Cool. Just canceled my sub. Back to Freetube it is.
Yet the FOSS alts are still free. Hot damn.
You mean front ends to YouTube infrastructure? Or stuff like Loops? One of those two are cool, the other is unsustainable if it were to get popular. Well, maybe both? I guess it depends on how the FOSS infrastructure works about.
My proposal: cancel YouTube premium, donate $1 to Smart Tube developer, donate $1 to Firefox. ublock origin doesn't accept donations as far as I know.
What was the advantage again, except for seeing a few less ads if you are to stupid to install an adblocker?
Orders of magnitude more income per view for the video creators
YouTube music is pretty good. And a good deal of you already pay for another service like Spotify that you can drop
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I would pay a lot for YouTube Premium if it actually blocked all the ads. Unfortunately, it does not. The video itself is allowed to contain ads inside the video, which YouTube does not block. I have heard that if the creator declares it, it can be skipped, but SponsorBlock (aims to) skip all of them by default, and for free.
I have an iPhone — the second worst device for consuming YouTube on, tied with the iPad for the same reason. On my old Android phone, I have Firefox with uBlock Origin. Same with my Macs, and my work PC (which is at work). The worst device for consuming YouTube on, I also own — the Apple TV streaming box (which is ironically the best streaming box due to it not having ads in the OS — I'm dead serious, even if you're Android all the way, you should get one).
On my iPhone, I've deleted the YouTube app. Instead, I have a shortcut to YouTube on my home screen that opens in Safari. I have a Safari plugin called Wipr 2 that I paid $5 for, one time, to a solo developer who uses the Fediverse (Mastodon) and is a woman (this shouldn't matter, but I do enjoy minority representation, and seeing girls win). I occasionally see ads on YouTube, but it's rare, and typically, refreshing Wipr (updating its block lists) fixes the issue.
That's on an iPhone. Wipr2 is not available for tvOS. So mostly, I consume YouTube content on my MacBook, which I can mirror to my TV. Ironically, the TV itself (which runs Android TV) is better at mirroring my MacBook (which is between 1 and 2 metres away) than the Apple TV box, at the same distance. (Make that make sense.) (So, you often hear about Apple and Google being rivals around iOS and Android, respectively, but Apple actually licenses AirPlay to Google for inclusion in Android TV. That is actually a thing, and it works great.) I can also run a Thunderbolt/USB-C to HDMI cable and make my TV a monitor for my MacBook, and just drag a Firefox window up to the TV. But it's a MacBook Air, I still have to keep the lid open, and the screen on (I turn the brightness all the way down though).
Why not get either a DIY Raspberry Pi type media player/server or if you need other streaming subscriptions a licensed Android TV box.
I just remove the adfull google tv launcher and replace it with Projectivity. I then use Stremio and Smarttube, neither of which can work on tvOS.
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I've never paid a subscription for YouTube. It's been, what, like $10/mo for ten years? Can buy a lot of media drm free for that $1200.
You can get a lot for free too if you know what you're doing.
I used to pay less than the single plan for a family plan, split between 5 people. Back when ad-free YouTube was an afterthought and my primary reason for using it was Google Play Music's unlimited music storage and streaming.
The amount they just increased the cost of YouTube is about how much I'd be willing to pay total for no ads. Until then, they're competing against zero ads (but no casting) for free.
Annnnnd it's gone!
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