Anyone else remember when new technology used to be fun and exciting instead of miserable?
Long gone are the days when I used be excited to read update notes for new features… Now I just hope they don’t god damn force an update on me.
I went back to an old APK of Twitch and refuse to update to the current dumpster fire.
I use PurpleTV and it’s been great. It’s a Twitch fork modified to block ads, reduce bloat, and include customisation for chat, player and other components.
Don’t know if we can share links here but the APK can be easily found online, still being updated semi-regularly. I won’t come back to the official app as long as I’m able. :)
Xtra is great https://github.com/crackededed/Xtra/
Just use Free and Open Source Software!
It can always fuck up with updates, but usually you just get more free stuff and it’s awesome.
Somewhere along the line, maybe the early to mid 2000’s they stopped making products “for” the end-user and flipped it around so the end-user (their data) is now the product, and the customers are governments, corporations, and share holders.
Absolutely. Although, this is just making old technology worse because web 3.0 and AI aren’t performing to corpo expectations.
Soon: when you pause a video, it starts playing a video ad with audio, to make sure no silence time gets wasted from your speakers.
And your speakers are on subscription plans that charge you for every second that they play noise. Better upgrade to the next tier if you want to listen to anything else!
That’s fine, the ad co struck a deal with speaker co to not bill for those sound-seconds.
God I hope my adbock holds up…
If it doesn’t goodbye Youtube. I love the creators, but hate you as a platform.
Yeah, uBlock Origin not working would take me from liking YouTube a fair bit to making it unusable.
- I use Proton but keep legacy Gmail accounts around to ensure I still have access to accounts I may have forgotten about or people I knew a long time ago sending a stray email. The only other usage is logging into YouTube.
- I use a Captcha solver extension.
- I use uBlock Origin to block all their ads.
- I don’t use their DNS.
- I use DDG over their search engine and Firefox over their browser.
- I don’t use Google Drive or their office suite (I think the latter is abysmal to use tbf).
- I use DeepL over Translate.
- I use NewPipe for YouTube on mobile and have a subscription to Nebula.
- I no longer use Google Maps, opting for OSM instead.
- I still use Android and unfortunately can’t unlock the bootloader but have degoogled as far as I know how, including never even registering a Google account with it (F-Droid + Aurora Store).
YouTube is far and away the biggest means by which I interact with Google, and that falls off a cliff if I’m forced to interact with a mess of their ridiculously shitty ads every time I have to use it. uBO has likely saved hundreds of hours of watching ads over my lifetime (and probably thousands of dollars from not being subconsciously influenced by ads), and I’m not paying a subscription fee to such an unethical company to get rid of the ads. This would bring me from YouTube as a timewaster to YouTube only as strictly necessary. Even though I don’t support them directly through ads, I do support them by supporting creators I like monetarily, by sharing links and maintaining the network effect, and by giving them plenty of metadata by interacting with their service. If they do this, they ensure that I continue to monetarily support competitors like Nebula and permanently lose a grip they’ve had on me since I was a kid.
Captcha solver add-on? Had no idea about that. If a captcha can be solved this way, why is still being used? What’s the point?
If it doesn’t I will make something that records the entire f****** stream and removes the commercials out of it the old fashioned way If I have to. Not my first rodeo.
Yt-DLP and it’s variation (Seal, YTDLnis, etc.), newpipe and it’s variation (Tubular, Newpipe Sponsorblock, etc) already allow you to do this without having to get manual.
I will find text versions of everything I need to learn about and create my own video, and then watch it.
Video content never changes, but the order and content of ads do. Automated browser, record the video 2-3 times. Diff the frames and slice out the ones that don’t match between runs.
Most likely, I just dedicate an old laptop, a 4k HDMI capture device, store off MP4 and feed it through comskip then take it h265 and store it off.
If I don’t do anything tricky with the browser they can’t detect that I’m doing anything tricky at all.
The only thing I’m a little concerned about is that they’re going to start doing advertising like broadcast TV did and put quarter screen commercials up for other shows in the middle of running shows.
So you want someone to broadcast, and you’re willing to pay for it, but not willing to support the content creators in any way?
Like way to kill your platform for anything educational where you want to pause to look at a graph.
Look at the article linked to it. It has a render of a pause ad being a banner that shrinks the video player somewhat, but the paused video is viewable.
That’s a lot of faith that the ads would be SFW, let alone not distracting.
YouTube wants you to keep watching the videos. The more time you spend on the site the more ads you see. They care about finding the balance of acceptable ad load to maximize ad space, which requires a consistent user base. I have faith that this is their objective. Also, videos take time to load and a user hitting pause is unpredictable. A light weight display ad is probably the best technically feasible way to grab a user’s attention in that brief moment of hitting pause. Especially when pause means a user wants to mute audio to do things like take a phone call, a video would turn off users to the platform.
What if you paused so you could see something? You’re not allowed to read that text in the background because ads
