this post was submitted on 16 Aug 2023
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Privacy
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Not to be a downer but... how did people not anticipate this happening? Google is likely going to do everything they can to shut down non-official clients like Piped, since they're sidestepping all of YouTube's revenue streams. Hopefully they don't take the nuclear option and somehow lock down the API and make it much harder to download videos via tools like yt-dlp.
I'm pretty sure most people anticipated it at some point. I just seems to be starting now.
Yeah we're basically hurting their revenue by using Piped and other ways to bypass Google's ads. They wouldn't be profitable if everyone stopped watching those ads
Noooooooooo! The poor google 😢
their $412,378/s has been reduced to $412,367/s! 😭 😭
They’re making plenty of profit selling all of our data  and getting ad revenue from the 95%+ of other users who aren’t blocking them.
I'd wager that it's closer to 99.999%.
Yeah since i don't have any figures I just went sort of conservative with the estimate
Exactly, you either get my data or my money. That's how I feel about every service nowadays, I don't think its unethical to subvert payment requirements when they have been selling my privacy for years.
Well, if they implement their web integrity DRM thingy in Chrome and Youtube then that will prevent anything that's not a real approved browser from accessing the website, and with that the video streams. Not only Piped/Newpipe, but anything automated trying to access any website will be automatically locked out unless the website approves of it. New search engine bot? Archiving crawlers? Any type of third party program that accesses some website's content without approval? Dead.
I'm not going to be popular saying this but how is the service supposed to survive without a revenue stream? It takes a shit ton of bandwidth and storage to keep YouTube running, that ain't free.
I get that the ads are incredibly annoying but if you truly watch as much YouTube as some people in this thread are claiming, maybe it's worth paying for it? I bit the bullet and for basically the price of my cancelled Spotify subscription I now have no ads in YT and an okay streaming service with yt music.
Of course Google could do things better. And actually I think it would be important to have a competitor. But I wouldn't expect that one to be free either.
If youtube fixed their content ID system and stopped falsely demonitizing all the creators I watch then I would hapily pay for youtube red (or whatever they call it now). As it is though I'm not giving them my money just for them to pay copyright trolls with some of it. I'd rather give my money to noone than risk having some of it go to the people leaching off the completely broken content ID system.
It's called RedTube now.
Or just pay for Nebula or some other independent video site run by Youtubers.
YouTube should be public infrastructure.
How many people are using Piped, revanced, or the like? I doubt it is the majority. This move is highly likely more greed than anything.
Does Google care about our user experience? The short answer is no. Look at the intrusive ads, how long they are, them suggesting DRM, right wing pipeline, and more.
Look at how they treat their content creators. Demonetization, channel and copyright strikes, etc.
The list goes on. Youtube should and needs to be public. Internet is a utility and needed to survive by everyone. A video hosting service like Youtube is needed as well. Through every perspectice, Google is, ultimately, wrong in doing this.
This is c/privacy. Are you really advocating for pouring money on the company (Google) that's doing everything it can to get to know everyone and use the information for showing deceiving ads, among other things? Or the company that supports false political propaganda? (In the form of paid advertisements). Support your creators, thats a very good thing, but for the love of god please do not fund this data mining machine.
I really am! If they don't get money, and they don't get data, and they (obviously) don't get donations, how are they supposed to run the service? Out of the goodness of their hearts?
They get enough money already. They are even spending on military tech research (google ventures), lobbying, and of course on their investors who have an unfulfillable hunger for money.
Leave us nerds an opening. The 99% that can't figure out how to put in an adblocker should be able to cover us nicely.