The only responsible way to let kids use YouTube is through some kind of alternative front end, because YouTube won’t provide the simple control mechanism of an allowed channel/playlist/videos list. Be nice if they’d fix that before blocking off the only OK ways to use the thing.
(Nobody else does either, can’t even have an allowed-apps list on Apple TV, it’s all-or-nothing with totally useless rating restrictions instead, this is the main thing parents need and nobody wants to provide it)
That alternative frontend is the YouTube Kids app. It has exactly the functionality you want. I agree that no other video apps provide this functionality, but no other video apps have very many videos that I would show a kid anyway, so it doesn't make sense for them to implement.
Oh, I’d seen the YouTube kids accounts and assumed it was like that (80% as much awful spammy shit as adult-YouTube, 5% as much good content—totally worthless) so hadn’t looked at it.
Yeah, had one but it was glitchy/crashy and several codec combos for Jellyfin were messed up (supported by hardware, but buggy) so I ended up back with Apple, which is how things usually go.
A quick search reads like you need third party launchers to block/allow specific apps, anyway. Seems like asking for even more jankiness, but at least it’s an option.
Some yt-dlp script with tons of features that adds full metadata and is smart enough not to re-download things. Have its output in Jellyfin, displaying as year-season-names tv shows, a show per channel or playlist.
I would love an allowlist proxy-site (like invidious) that I could redirect most YouTube requests in my house to, but I’ve not seen any that support that.
What are you talking about? This is a standard feature of the YouTube Kids apps. My child can only watch videos that I’ve allow-listed individually or by channel. I have a menu option in the main YouTube app to add videos as I browse. It works well.
As of yesterday March 30, Google has apparently made some major changes to how it authenticates devices for Youtube and thus broke thousands of Invidious instances that were happily used as a daily driver by thousands of privacy enthusiasts including me. Having Invidious (currently) broken makes me wonder where the cat and mouse wars of big tech and privacy devs are headed to
Will also start to feel the impact. My theory is that we will see a bunch of new video hosting sites as youtube itself attempts to lock down its ecosystem. They haven't paid attention in any adversarial way as far as I can tell.
The business of hosting video is not the hosting itself. It's the ad-driven revenue you can derive, which requires eyeballs first.
Youtube's eyeball count is through the roof compared to any new video hosting site. Content creators will not switch off youtube, unless their revenue from this new site is sufficient compared to what they could've gotten from youtube (or they mirror it - in which case, why would anyone go to this new site?).
I've always wondered how those new sites are supposed to survive when the only people who care enough to be early adopters are also the ones who want to use adblock and tracker blockers.
A lot of the costs scale with the number of eyeballs.
"Content creators will not switch off youtube, unless their revenue from this new site is sufficient compared to what they could've gotten from youtube (or they mirror it - in which case, why would anyone go to this new site?). "
There are alternatives (e.g. Nebula) and a lot of creators like them and do post their content on them to get a higher revenue share. Youtube is squeezing a lot of them. You tube is also a pretty crap user experience too.
There are also people whose videos are primarily not being found through Youtube, and those are not looking for ad revenues. There are also other business models than a revenue share from Youtube.
>There are alternatives (e.g. Nebula) and a lot of creators like them and do post their content on them to get a higher revenue share.
Yes but... (1) Nebula "success" is partially owed to Nebula creators building up audiences on Youtube.
And (2) being on Nebula requires an invitation from that platform to join. You can't just be a random unknown. In contrast, you can be an new unknown creator and start uploading videos to Youtube. Then later, if you're big enough and the quality meets Nebula's standards, they may ask you to join.[1]
Those 2 reasons keep it from being a true "alternative" to Youtube. Nebula is more of an extension platform for the portion of audiences that want to pay extra for longer-form videos of their favorite Youtube creators that happen to be on Nebula.
There are also lots of high-quality Youtube creators (e.g. DIY repair tutorials, etc) who are not on Nebula because it doesn't fit Nebula's "documentary" type of content.
[1] Nebula CEO: >If somebody comes to me and says, “Hey, I’m friends with the creator of this channel and they do really good stuff. I think they would be a good fit,” I will take the call. If I get a cold email from a YouTuber saying, “Hey, I have 100,000 subscribers and I want to be on Nebula,” I don’t reply. : https://www.theverge.com/23076663/nebula-youtube-creator-bus...
It's dumb that it requires switching. Why aren't there any tools or services for publishing content simultaneously to every platform? New platform? Make an account and add it to my publishing tool, done. Now my content posts there as well.
I think it's difficult by design. The platforms don't want that, they want the lock-in and switching costs.
seeding other platforms with your content that was meant to be youtube is fine (i'm sure there are tools that could do this already), but the problem is that those new platforms aren't monetized like youtube is.
For a content creator, if they dilute their audience (by saying that their content is available on some other platform), they might have less views on youtube which is the money maker.
They have rss feeds[0] but it looks like it's more for notifications of new content or creators rather than direct downloads for the videos/podcasts. I don't think they'd implement something like direct downloads but idk.
ETA: Accessing content on nebula, I have my feed of videos from the creators to which I subscribe and I select videos to watch from there. It's basic but as someone who never got into watching youtube (I bookmarked channels on invidious instances and looked for new videos there) it's pretty good. They're also open to feature requests and are improving the site.
While Firefox doesn't surface them anymore, I checked the page source and there are indeed per-channel feeds. They don't have direct video URLs, but yt-dlp claims to support Nebula, so you may be able to automate it.
I'd love to see some thoughts and ideas about how to pay content producers while still maintaining control and privacy. The current solutions like invidious don't offer that.
Youtube's value is much more as a payment vehicle than anything else.
Is there a different type of front-end that could be built which still maintains ads or allows you to login to Youtube Premium, but which still gives you control over all the other stuff?
In the old days, you’d put ads in a section of the newspaper based on an expected demographic affinity. Or in certain TV shows.
This could be a situation where Nielsen could be the good guy. Let’s use the information we already collected over the last two decades, and information from volunteers to audit those numbers and assign shopping patterns to subject matters and interests instead of individuals. Maybe then I’ll stop getting ads for very expensive, buy-once a-decade items for months after I just bought one. You’d be so much better off advertising accessories to me. Those I will buy and while your ad agency still works for you.
Quite a few content creators have reached for some combination of tools like Patron and paid private memberships.
Pre-roll and mid-roll ads are also getting more common in both YouTube and podcast content as well. I think one tricky thing is reach, YouTube promises a huge potential audience that you don't get syndicating your own RSS feed and residuals don't usually exist for pre/mid-roll ads like they do for YouTube (if you get much longterm growth).
I’m finding twitter (now x) is rapidly replacing YouTube in direct proportion to YouTube’s increasing suckifucation. At least for new content. Mostly I use YouTube for old content that is or should be in the public domain, and for music, mostly classical which I could get from the radio for free with almost no ads. I think society really needs something like Wikipedia for video.
YouTube was one of the jewels of the internet. Now that Google is furiously yanking it's teats, YouTube has become just another "fuck you, pay me" ad infested hellscape. Video distribution is ripe for disruption.
I'm not sure what you mean by "disruption" here. Offering video content at scale costs a lot of money, it's gotta come from somewhere. And the options are users directly (YouTube Premium), users indirectly (ads), product investment by a large company (old YouTube), or financial investment by VC. Pick your poison?
Nevertheless there are a ton of very high quality, and seemingly successful, streamed-prerecorded pirate video sites these past few years, and One might assume their users be more adblocky than google's users.
Oh and also porn sites I guess, and what's the advertising worth there vs on youtube
Ok, and why should I as a user care about this? No one asked youtube to become a monopoly and I don't exactly have much compassion for the engineering woes that come with this.
I'd be perfectly fine with an upload cap if that reduces the hosting cost in any way. But of course that would be against the "groth at any cost" mantra.
You don't have to "care", but I think this is a huge reason (in addition to the network effect) that people continue to use Youtube. Where else can you store an unlimited amount of video for free, for approximately forever?
Peertube uses Peer to Peer connections between users to share bandwidth and use less managed infrastructure.
But it's not centralized, so capitalists are not happy with it
It's pretty great still if you pay for YouTube Premium (which IMO is a good deal given you get YouTube Music too). The sponsor ads are easy to skip too. Half the videos even mark the ad sections in the timeline or even have an on screen timer to make it easier.
I started using an adskipper Chrome extension called Clear Skies.
I use Firefox and ublock Origin for every other website but I use Chrome/ Clear Skies just for youtube because those dogs are blocking me with Firefox/ublock and even with ublock disabled they are nerfing Firefox by throttling it to make the experience unbearably laggy.
It’s not just the ads now, they slip gross out and shock content into search results because people can’t help but click it.
Really wish Neal Mohamed would realize when I’m searching for recipes to cook for dinner I do not wish to see: black head videos, hair lice infestation, CCTV of a Chinese child dying in a faulty elevator, ear cleaning videos in my search results. All of which Neal Mohans algorithm has served me when searching for recipes and I’ve never clicked a single one.
I know its a purpose build in shock video cos it always shows in an extra box that includes 1 video I have watched before, 1 gross out video, 1 mainstream video all unrelated to the search
I think you're underestimating the popularity of that kind of content, if reality TV is anything to go by.
And personally, I think I may have seen a pimple popping video...once? And I just hit the "not interested in this" button and have never seen one again. Though, I've always made sure to keep my watch history tidy, so the vast majority of recommendations I see are spot-on
Noone is underestimating those kind of videos are popular, but given how much information google ingests (and sells) about us, is it too much to ask to stop being reccomended popular bullshit? Just because 8 out of 10 people watch that doesnt mean everyone needs to be served that.
Looks like YouTube revanced has been blocked as well (at least mine doesn't work anymore). all videos have been replaced with a video playing "not available on this app" over black background.
Interesting, because vanced worked for a while longer on an old A52 Samsung than on my s10+ and the video was this fake video "this client is no longer supported, please upgrade".
Google is holding humanity's cultural heritage hostage and ad-placing the shit out of it.
I wouldn't mind 1 skippable pre-roll ad and the same post-roll.
But not 2 and in-between and unskippable.
And I'll do anything to block those ads.
Google is at war with its users, viewers and creators alike.
All of these projects are on borrowed time. The fact that we have them at all right now is a testament to how good we have it in IT as a whole. Market conditions being so good that I can piss away terabytes of their bandwidth with Newpipe et al and it doesn't worth dedicating one engineer to deploy safetynet on the Android&ios endpoints, and perhaps Widevine on the desktop ones.
It will be a real "don't cry because it's over, smile because it happened" moment when this inevitably happens. Since I won't give them any money out of principle, that will be the end of my days of watching YT.
Widevine video encryption really kicked my ass the other day. It's supposed to be bypassable but I've yet to find a practical option that doesn't require hours of fiddling.
(Nobody else does either, can’t even have an allowed-apps list on Apple TV, it’s all-or-nothing with totally useless rating restrictions instead, this is the main thing parents need and nobody wants to provide it)