cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/40372957
fyi:
- https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp lets you download videos (from youtube and also hundreds of other sites)
- for desktop, https://mpv.io/ is free and lets you watch youtube (or any other video) at even more and faster speeds than youtube premium does, among many other features
- for android, https://newpipe.net/ lets you play youtube in the background (and download videos, and block ads, …)
- https://ublockorigin.com/ blocks ads everywhere (and yes it does still work on youtube, at least in firefox anyway)
Ehhhhhh. I don’t love youtube plus but a giant expensive service charging money seems pretty reasonable.
Video hosting all content imagineable is costly.
I’m unsure how being asked to pay for an expensive product is dystopian.
google’s offer to accept payment for these “features”[1] (each and every one of them) is predicated on their assumption that many people are not in control of the software on their own computers.
they haven’t completely won the war yet, but the extent to which their assumption is correct is imo pretty dystopian.
these aren’t really even features: google is offering to disable anti-features which they are choosing to impose on people. ↩︎
That feels dystopian in the same way that a car mechanics offering services like brake pad replacements is dystopian, which is to say, a pretty big stretch. My uncle and his buddies would giggle, a la, Hank Hill if anyone suggested taking that stuff to a mechanic. But for 90% of people, that’s the norm.
We’ve chosen to spend our time on other skills, just as some people are happy to spend their time not learning the intricacies of software on their computers.
To each their own I suppose!
the war on general-purpose computing isn’t akin to car mechanics offering services. if you want a car analogy (😬) it is more like car manufacturers attempting to restrict which roads which cars are allowed to drive on (and selling license keys to enable access to other roads).
A road analogy only works if it’s their private road which youtube maintains at the cost of hundreds of millions a year.
Why on Earth does youtube owe you unfettered access to its product? What nonsense is that?
Not offering a service, on their own product, is not a “war on general-purpose computing” and to claim so is pretty darn childish.
Their desire to restrict how you interact with their “free” service necessitates eliminating your fundamental ability to tell your computer what to do - not just for “their private road”, but in general. This is what the “war on general computation” is about. (I assume you haven’t watched the talk linked in my earlier comment? there is also a transcript here…)
To be clear, they have not won this war yet - which is why all of the software linked in the body of this post is still able to exist! But, they are continuing to move in that direction and offerings like YouTube Premium are predicated on their (correct) assumption that, for many people, having agency over their own computers’ behavior is already unimaginable.
So, re: your earlier comment:
I’d say this not at all like car mechanics existing and offering brake pad replacement service. Rather, it is akin to it being made intentionally more difficult and/or outright illegal to replace one’s own brake pads - and also to have them replaced by any local mechanic who does not pay a recurring fee to the company that manufactured the car.
Kid, a private service can offer you what it wants. Youtube doesn’t owe you the ability to watch its videos however you want for free.
When youtube takes away the programs on YOUR computer, you’ll have a point. But restricting how you get to interact with THEIR stuff is different.
There is difference between “what you would like” and “what you are owed.”
I would be fine with that, but they are actively removing features we got for free before and put them behind the paywall. And they also actively ignore the wishes of the community. Nobody wants auto-translated video titles and autogenerated dubs without an official way to disable them.
But why are we owed that stuff for free?
We are not. Those features were already free and require no maintenance nor development. Now they are getting paywalled.
Today you use your calculator on the phone for free. Tomorrow it can be paywalled. You are not owed free stuff.
Thank you. I have no idea why people are surprised that a service that costs hundreds of millions to run would start trying to monetize itself.
Youtube is as free to shutdown as it is to restrict access to its wares.