While I can easily understand people's aversion to tracking and advertisements, I think projects like this are really unsustainable. Storing videos, transcoding them, and then using large amounts of bandwidth to serve them isn't free; it's fair that YT is showing ads to make up for that.
I would add that if you hate advertisements, you can pay for YouTube Red or whatever they call it, and remove them. I think that's a good compromise: either you use it for free with ads, or you pay to remove them.
> They argue it is wrong for them to be tracked aggressively across the web.
sums it up.
a long time believer of seeing ads here. that way, i don't have to subscribe to bazillion of platforms i tend to visit. but this view started to shift when i started seeing ads from my alma mater's football team everywhere. the "why am i seeing this ad" link told me that "i gave my information to the advertiser".
Think of how different everything would be if YouTube wasn't a part of Google. They would no doubt have ads but the entire Google universe wouldn't have access to the viewing habits of 2 billion people.
It also probably wouldn't exist anymore. last time I heard anything about it YouTube was in the red and only sustained with income from other Google services. (I might be wrong on that, if so please correct me)
I heard that Google was able to get it to break even after a substantial investment to improve efficiency (custom ASICs for transcoding, machine learning models for prioritizing allocation of storage and computing resources).
I think I agree that it probably wouldn't exist. Not very many companies would invest that much to just to break even.
Is the tracking part not a cover argument? For me I went full adblock because forms of ads became obnoxious and contents unpleasant.
I wouldn’t mind being manipulated into buying a clunky life improvement gadget that I use exactly once as much as being forced to watch a guy screaming at me for 15 seconds. On second thought, isn’t the latter straight up jumpscare?
I clear all cookies up to 5 minutes after I've closed a site. I get asked to give my life away everytime I open youtube with no way to just block the request as it used to be possible. To make matters worse, I am unable to select that I don't want to be tracked because when I select "Agree", it simply goes to YouTube, when I select to opt out it goes to Google's tracking servers which are blocked across my home network because I don't want to be tracked. So I'm left with no choice to press agree, or alternatively I can simply use an alternative backend.
Not to mention the extra cognitive load in dealing with all these opt-outs and configurable cookie settings. Everyone one of them is different, everyone of them is located somewhere else, and there is no sensible way to simply say to websites, with a single checkbox in your browser: I don't want to be tracked.
Well there was of course; the do-not-track header.
So now we fight back with ad-blockers and other privacy preserving tricks (like clearing cookies) to keep our sanity and make our compiled profiles a lot less valuable (although Google will probably still profit from it by pretending I do see ads and are influenced).
Personally it's very convenient for me, because I never have to opt out of anything. Nothing bad has ever happened to me and as a person who knows how the targeted ads business works, I'm confident in saying that nothing ever will. It's seriously liberating and worth considering.
If you think "nothing bad has happened to me personally due to aggressive tracking measures" is at all a reasonable argument, then I can only assume you are incredibly ignorant on the implications of it. I don't despise tracking because I'm afraid Google is interested in me personally. But the implications at a societal level are ENOURMOUS.
When you have data on one person, you can sell them ads. When you have data on everybody, you can change elections, culture, and widespread opinions as you see fit. Even if that isn't being abused today (which it probably is) the fact the Google has the capability of doing that one day is scary enough that we absolutely shouldn't let the practice continue.
Do you have an example? IMO the benefits massively outweigh the downsides. Swaying elections has been done historically with newspaper and television. Fox news is still far, far more influential than Facebook for political opinion. Why is this different?
Ah, the old "Let me track you using this cookie so that you don't have to sign in and let us track you" trick! I'm guessing between IPs, browser fingerprinting, and usage/viewing habits it's beyond trivial for google to know the computer opting out at 3:00pm today is the same one that opted out this morning before clearing their cookies, and the same one that opted out yesterday for 16 hours and the same one the day before that, etc
Nope, google is legally obligated to not do that, and in fact they don't. Google has much more to lose in this than you do, and a strong incentive not to lie.
How'd we ever know if they did? Are there independent audits or would discovery that they have been doing that depend on a whistleblower? If we know anything about corporations it's that they have zero problems with violating laws as long as they'll have mode more money than the slap on the wrist fine or class action settlement they'd pay out assuming they are ever caught in the first place.
I disagree that they would make more money by lying directly and explicitly like that, and yes it would be very difficult to cover up a lie like that. Literally millions of people would know, because any employee at Google or anyone who inspects the code of any google web app would learn of the lie.
That's just an issue with it being associate with Google, though - recommendations are based on your viewing habits and that's done server-side. Most people use recommendations at least somewhat, and don't find absolutely all of the videos via just the subscription and search features.
> I would add that if you hate advertisements, you can pay for YouTube Red or whatever they call it, and remove them. I think that's a good compromise: either you use it for free with ads, or you pay to remove them.
The problem with that logic is that people don't just hate ads, they hate and/or distrust Google.
People are not going to give money to a company they hate and/or distrust if they can avoid it. That's why it's important for businesses to not engage in unethical behavior/things their customers hate.
Of course, in Google's case (and peers), they're largely immune to market forces thanks to years of anti-competitive behavior. So the consequences of being evil/unethical/shitty/etc are usually minor or non-existent.
That's exactly why projects like this are good. Because it's the only way (a tiny subset of) consumers have (a negligible amount of) power to have an impact on bad business practices, since the usual "vote with your wallet" tactic doesn't work.
And if creators lose ad revenue because people use a project like this, well, tough luck. In the short term, some of those might make less money or go out of business, but if this ends up changing (or bankrupting!) youtube, it will ultimately help creators in the long run if it means new business opportunities once the monopoly is gone and/or some of that bargaining power goes back to the consumers.
I'd argue that it's unfair for Google to use their market power in search to subsidise their video hosting products, thereby limiting the number of competitors, and then start forcing people to participate in their unethical privacy invasive ad network to consume video content online. Using services like this is a way to protest that injustice.
How is it unfair that they invest their legitimately obtained profits into a new business? The people who are unsatisfied with this don’t know how hard it is to launch a search engine and plan wisely for the future they enjoy today. Just start a new search engine and then you can spend your money as you want, as you too are entitled to the sweat of your brow, just as Page and the other giants of our time are.
Replacce “unfair” with “detrimental to the ecosystem” then. We’ll never get good alternatives if they have to compete with a player with infinite money.
IRL dumping is illegal, arguably we are in a similar situation.
The distinguishing quality of predatory pricing is that it's an unsustainable tactic used to push competitors out of the market before raising prices at a later time. It's not predatory pricing if the price never changes and in the case of YouTube the price to consumers has always been free, even before it was owned by Google.
Not really, with ads the price has changed, you just pay with your eyeball/brain time. From videos starting instantly, to waiting twice for 8-seconds pre-roll (minimum). Or you can pay $12€ / month.
Well, I'm not fond of Google and I'm not willing to run it's proprietary code. I'd pay for the video hosting service but I'm actively avoiding Google in my life and would rather avoid giving it money. I also don't like ads and tracking. I'd normally boycott a Google service but YouTube is where the content is (network effect).
These alternative frontends at least avoid part of the tracking (ads are already taken care of by uBlock Origin anyway) and the non-free Javascript code. With respect to the business model, I don't feel especially guilty, Google has way too much money and power and I'd rather have an unsustainable YouTube replaced by a federation of PeerTube instances with a power diluted across these instances.
These alternative frontends could be seen as a temporary, partial solution while YouTube is up.
On the technical side, they are way easier on underpowered devices than YouTube proper, including the PinePhone.
Beside ads the main problem I have with Youtube on my Desktop is I hate watching videos on a browser. I prefer using a dedicated video player like MPV.
Given previous incidents where renowned sites spread malware via ads (eg. bbc), accepting ads on your system is simply unacceptable from a security point of view.
I've never heard of anyone being reimbursed by a website that unwittingly infected them. Websites that take responsibility for their ads, that's different. But those are very few and very far between.
Right now, surfing without an adblocker is like going to a swinger party vowing not to use condoms.
(Actually, I think your browser is already intimite with more domains upon one average visit to one average website than that...)
This is my preferred option: Simply pay (in the worst case, a subscription, in the best case, a one-time fee) to get rid of the ads. If I spend more than 10 hours a week on a platform (e.g. YouTube, Reddit, Twitch), I will gladly pay to keep the ads away.
Given the direction Google is heading, it is quite unlikely but not unthinkable that they'll start locking the accounts / blocking the emails of people who spread "misinformation".
It is a good time to have a commercial relationship with an email service. Less likely for politics to get involved.
It just sucks to know that even premium paying subscribers still get surveilled as aggressively as the free users. It's the same with Spotify, major news outlets, financial institutions, etc.
Trying to figure out why "Individual" is $7.99/month, but "Business Starter" is $6.00/month. I see Business Starter is 30GB of storage. There's no figure cited for the Individual plan that I can see.
You do need a domain for Business Starter, but that cost would be less than the savings over the Individual plan.
"Business Starter" accounts are a different category of account that can't join or create a family (To share YouTube Premium, YouTube TV, etc). Also, if you stop paying your email account gets suspended.
Individual is a "normal" Google account and doesn't increase your storage from the default 15GB or support custom domains. But if you stop paying you still have a valid @gmail account and just lose access to the additional features.
>Also, if you stop paying your email account gets suspended.
"Business Starter" uses your own domain..."Custom email with your domain". So, yes, you would need to export the emails, but you retain your email address.
Do not buy any kind of gmail add on, subscription service, or anything.
I did, and when Gmail turned off my billing (for my own protection), I lost the ability to send and receive emails, because I was exceeding my drive quota by 1,200%.
I have to send them a passport photo (my ID is expired) and hope that they bless me with the ability to pay for additional storage again. But I realized it’s safer not to pay for anything.
Calendly replacement, designed email templates, and video call collaboration features for $8/mo… interesting! So accustomed to Google’s “everything is free” approach that I’m curious to see how this does.
My Gmail has been throwing up a “Workspace” splash screen when it launches. I think I’m paying a few dollars a year for Drive storage, so maybe they rolled me in to that.
I switched from Gmail to using a Microsoft O365 business subscription with my personal domain name. I don't like the UX or the fact I can't append +<any string> to my address to have infinite test emails, but at least I'm paying for a product instead of being the product.
> I would add that if you hate advertisements, you can pay for YouTube Red or whatever they call it, and remove them.
This only removes the ads inserted by YouTube. Nowadays even moderately successful you tubers are inserting their own ads into their videos. This will not be skipped using youtube red.
The cost to subscriber is out of line with the expense to provider.
Same is true of digital newspapers, magazines, etc., the subscription fees are way out of proportion to what they made from ads per reader in print or made in CPM online.
While this might not matter for one publisher, it prevents users from accepting pay-for-use as an alternative model across the range of media they consume unless through an aggregate subscription like the one acquired by Apple.
(While on the subject, the various ad-free streaming providers litter the offerings with more and more ads to the point you can’t trust your shows will indeed be ad free. It’s hard to say if this is on purpose to undermine and kill that model or not.)
For what it's worth, I built something very similar to this and it ran for 7 years until Google shut it down for violating the terms of service. Here's a blog post I wrote with specifics, I case it also applies to your service. https://critter.blog/2020/08/04/a-farewell-to-toogles/
I think the difference here is that Piped is using a custom backend server (piped-backend) which scrapes youtube html to obtain the video content/metadata (a-la invidious), while your app was using the youtube API. Google is allowed to shut your app down, but AFAIK can't police who can and can't consume their publicly available HTML.
I can't tell based on the GitHub description whether this is a website or some code you run locally. Like, I don't really know what a replacement front-end is. Is it a Chrome extension? I clicked the documentation and that didn't really answer anything for me. It's a Java backend, a Golang proxy, and a JS frontend? How do I actually use it?
I tried Googling "piped" and "piped youtube" and couldn't find any reference so I assume it's not a website. I could imagine using this, but not if I have to run it myself.
Essentially you self-host it and it operates, I assume, via YouTube’s API or scraping.
Invidious is another alternative frontend to youtube. I use it because it loads much faster than YT and it has an API that makes it easy for me to batch download my playlists. However it occasionally gets authentication errors and I have to restart the service manually.
Ah, Docker. Looks like you have to run a minimum of TWO servers (or containers). You need a Java 11 server, and at least one golang proxy. Looks like "self-hosting" means, in practice, cloud hosting.
I don't use Docker or systemd. I don't need to rehearse my objections to systemd; I object to Docker because it's a proprietary skin wrapped around open-source container mechanisms.
I run Xen VMs, and I don't want to dedicate two VMs to something like this (my VM host has 16GB of RAM).
I'm not saying this solution is no good; it's just not a match for me.
I could use LXC; I looked into it about 5 years ago, and it looked reasonable. But I can only administer a limited number of technology bundles, and I went with Xen for virtual hosting. If I deployed Piped as LXC, I'd have to figure out how to do it (LXC is not The Docker Way, and the installation instructions are for Docker).
I don't mind admin work - I quite like it - but for me, it's pure overhead, since I run nothing else under LXC.
The now-largely-unusable (thanks to API key limitations) mps-youtube command-line utility still remains the most useful interface to YouTube I've ever used.
- Enables full search, can be limited to music posts only, includes both content and account search. That is, you can search for content matching terms, or for a username / account matching a term. Also playlists IIRC.
- Can play based on a given account's videos / postings.
- Individual items can be saved to a queue. Those may be ephemeral (session-only), or saved to disk.
- Content can be downloaded if preferred.
- No YouTube account required, no play history on YouTube.
The only feature missing that I can recall is the ability to blacklist specific accounts. A chief problem with clickbait, propaganda, baiting, and radicalisation channel proliferation is that the activities carry little risk. Yes, YouTube itself occasionally removes high-profile cases, but people themselves cannot say "never show me anything from this source again", at least last I checked. Curation of sources, and killing high-noise sources, continues to be my most effective techique for boosting S/N.
That said, mps-youtube was and remains the best interface I've found for searching for, curating, and managing online video access to my interests and without any tracking or ads, both of which have massive negative social externalities. I'd used it fairly extensively for my own preferred use of the site: finding lectures (and occasionally book-readings or similar content), and queuing up playlists or downloading archives of those. Works on absolutely minimal hardware.
YouTube apparently did all they could to kill this, and have largely succeeded.
The key difference is that with mpv, content discovery is external. With mps-youtube, you're using the console tool itself to discover, curate, archive, generate playlists, and play back media.
With mpv, you have to have the URL to hand it first.
To mpv's advantage:
- It works on a wide range of sources, unlike mps-youtube which is specific to YouTube
- You can often throw the URL of a page containing the media in question and have mpv automatically detect and extract the correct media entry. (This works less often than I'd like, and I have some curl | sed one-liners which I throw at numerous cases, often starting from:
Interesting, I always liked this approach. Let the tech company do the hard work of making a seamless UX (or one of the great open source alternatives) and then just syncing the subscriber list from them, instead of having to manually plug in and manage it all in a separate app.
When you see the front page without being locked in, that can be pretty jarring, and to me a little insulting that they would show this crap to anyone.
But for me the value is that if I need to know or see how anything is done, learn about anything I like, hear any song or rewatch any news clip I can find it on youtube.
Unless you mean to also cover related videos in recommendations. Those are normally pretty useful.
No, their recommendations to me are their worst selling point. The recommendations I get must be paid promotions cause they are nothing like the things I watch, and seem to be clickbait.
Not sure what you're doing then, because my recommendations are great and never clickbait. My only problem is they're too much like what I've already been watching, rather than a little deviation from it.
Another part of it is that clickbait YouTubers continue to push clickbait and are associated with other clickbait. Just don't watch anything from them, and you tend to get less clickbait overall, because your recommendations are more likely to come from less trashy sources.
Whenever I aggressively clear search/watch history, delete YouTube browsing data, watch incognito, and/or try to protect my "privacy" from YouTube, the recommendations unsurprisingly turn into complete drivel.
Unsurprisingly, if I just watch what I like watching from the official UI, with history turned on, without removing searches, etc, the algorithm invariably just shows me more like what I've watched and works very well.
A reimplementation of the invidious api based on a youtube-dl backend, together with a js-light frontend. I'm working on something similar, but leveraging youtube-dl to actually be platform-agnostic.
No Invidious official release since 2019 and it had huge memory leak issues that was unresolved for months last time I checked. Public instances were constantly restarting docker instances to work around it.
> YouTube has an extremely invasive privacy policy which relies on using user data in unethical ways
I just want to weigh in a counterpoint to make sure that this isn't the only voice people ever hear.
I think that Google using data to personalize ads and recommend videos is ethically ok. I think this is a case of straw-manning potentially legitimate complaints about Google's service by using the word "ethics" to skip the work of making an actual argument.
Further I think products like this are actually unethical. They are an unethical use of the data produced by Youtube creators, who miss out on ad revenue which they worked hard to earn.
EDIT: I work at Google (not on ads or Youtube) and have worked at other large ads companies in the past. I work at these companies _because_ I think ads are ok, not the other way around. My views are my own.
Google (your employer) and other ad companies have already lost the war against ad blocking. Users have the right to limit the content they see, whether it be through a private self-hosted instance of Piped, uBlock Origin, Pi-hole, or an ad-skipping DVR.
Even Google Chrome includes a built-in ad blocker (which only blocks ads on sites that display non-Google ads), so Google would have no moral standing to claim that Piped is unethical:
Google aren't the good guys (no big company is good) but they are still one of the least evil big companies out there. Even Apple is more evil. Apple doesn't personalize ads, but they are instead working hard to kill open computing which is way worse than personalizing ads in my opinion. Of course to an individual who can easily afford them choosing Apple today is better for you, but Apple winning their war and implementing their vision is way worse to you than Google winning theirs.
> Google aren't the good guys (no big company is good) but they are still one of the least evil big companies out there.
May be it is their lobbying and marketing that has you convinced?
> Apple doesn't personalize ads, but they are instead working hard to kill open computing which is way worse than personalizing ads in my opinion.
Both these companies want to protect their core businesses and attempt to commodotize each others advantages all the time. It seems you are comfortable with personalised ads and that may be has skewed your opinion.
Is ethical to not disclose in this comment that you work for Google? 1% of the posters here at most will check that and the rest will assume you are an impartial observer.
I feel like it's not absolutely necessary, but it would be courteous to do so. Working in the pixel machine learning division (what I infer from 'computational photography for next-gen devices') likely means they have very little exposure, if at all, to the kool aid available to the Google Ads or YouTube teams.
Being paid good sums of money by Google will certainly drive a positive bias towards whatever the company does. In publications you typically describe conflicts of interests you know, you might as well do it here too whenever you give an opinion if you have a stake in the company people are commenting about.
Should people who have never worked on ads or with user data in any significant capacity have to disclose that too?
"I want to say that Google is unethical and ads are evil, but I've never actually worked on ads and actually don't know what data means in this context"
Not working on ads isn't a conflict of interest — there's no metaphorical paycheck for dodging Google. As you point out, it could predict more ignorance, but it doesn't predict financial incentives flowing to their direction.
Also, would you morally expect your doctor to disclose that they're on the payroll of the company that develops the medications you've been prescribed to take? Regardless of the answer, disclosure here isn't about whether or not a doctor is capable of their own opinion, or whether or not they are speaking in any official capacity for other companies.
Ethical appearance is part of professional ethics.
Similarly, it doesn't matter if a judge is capable of independent opinion while having financial interests tied to the cases they preside over. The mere appearance of financial entanglement can stink up professional credibility. It would also be quite silly for a judge to respond with, "But I've only recently been receiving paychecks. I hardly know anyone at the company."
It does not matter whether you worked on ads or not. The fact that you have many friends at Google and spent years there has already shaped you as an employee to believe that whatever Google does is "probably not evil". This is not specific to working at Google, by the way, we all rationalize what our workplace(s) does.
I'm okay with anyone thinking about ethics, as long as they don't call themselves an "ethicist" :P
I'm just pointing out that we all have our biases. As somebody who understands how targeted advertising works from the "inside" I see a lot of commentary that is factually inaccurate and conceptually off base.
Do you think the fact that no one on the "outside" knows how it works may be the reason for that? Also, do you think that if we did know how it works from the inside that we would agree with you?
Well fortunately you and other commenters have handled that for me :)
I don't work on ads or Youtube, and you have cause and effect reversed actually. It's not that I'm okay with ads because I work at Google. I was ok with ads long before I worked there.
What does not make sense to me is that YouTube Premium does not let you opt out of any tracking.
So Google asks that people pay $12 a month to not see ads, but still uses watching behavior to build a user profile to advertise to in all other mediums.
Do I have this correct? How does google explain the value proposition? Is the real cost of YouTube (sans tracking) greater than $12 a month?
With or without YouTube Premium you can opt out: if you go to https://adssettings.google.com/ (and signed in, as you would be if you're a YouTube Premium user) and click on "Advanced", there's a checkbox that says:
> Also use your activity and information from Google services to personalise ads on websites and apps that partner with Google to show ads. This stores data from websites and apps that partner with Google in your Google Account.
Unchecking this means (as I understand it) that, among other things, your YouTube watching behaviour will not be used for ad targeting on non-Google websites.
(That's about non-Google websites, but as I type the above, I just realized that maybe by "all other mediums" you meant other Google sites, like Google Search etc. But those already covered under "Ad personalisation" (the main toggle at https://adssettings.google.com/) so I'm not quite sure the premise of the question is correct.)
I think that's a fair point, and that's the primary reason I'm not a Premium customer.
However, it's important to distinguish this completely reasonable point, that the product may be overpriced or provide less value than it should, vs an argument that Google is "unethical" for offering it.
Another explanation though, and this is from my inside view at other companies because I know nothing about Google's business model here.
I would speculate that the average and 95th percentile customer experience with tracking is so astronomically better on average, across nearly all dimensions, that even after paying, fewer than 5% of users would prefer the no-tracking/personalization product experience.
Personalized ads isn't just about getting you to click more. It's also about showing you fewer irrelevant ads. In fact on many sites that's way more important.
96% of US users opted out of app tracking in iOS 14.5. iOS has a majority market share in the US, and over a quarter of the mobile OS market worldwide.
Based on this data, it seems extremely unlikely that 95% of users would prefer the "customer experience with tracking" on YouTube or any other mainstream social media site.
By the way, my personal opinion on this is that Apple is extremely astute, and this is their highly effective strategy for growth and entrenchment.
From where I'm standing, Apple masterfully manipulated their users into adopting a worldview that transfers future cash flows from other tech giants to Apple.
It's great for me as an Apple shareholder, but just another punch in a bout amongst the titans.
Apple is definitely doing this to make money, and as a fellow shareholder I don't mind (I brought the shares based on their successful transition to ARM, but any growth is nice).
I am not really sure they manipulated me into switching to the iPhone, as much as they produced a product that advertised the things I want, and that I can get nowhere else.
Yes it's an interesting counterpoint, but as a former Facebook employee I can say that those users will almost universally have a worse experience on the app, as measured by self-reported enjoyment.
That is, if you run a randomized AB test where some users lose personalization, then ask everyone "are you enjoying Facebook", the responses are much better for the users who have personalization.
Because the number 96 is large, it's not the case that some ads-averse subpopulation made an individually optimal choice.
You either have to reject my empirical claim about surveys, or you have to agree that these users made a choice that is worse for them on timescales of 1-2 months. (There's room for an argument that they're worse off in the short term by opting out but everyone will be better off in the long term, but then we're no longer debating individual preferences)
This is like A/B testing people with heroin to see whether they like a higher or a lower dose, finding out they like the higher dose, and then thinking that you’ve found out how to improve their lives.
This comment assumes that Facebook is actually an enjoyable product as opposed to something that has morphed into a platform for engagement at all cost.
The people who are being presented with rage inducing topics that they feel their circle of friends are fighting agaisnt from personalization of their feed from a mix of old and new content is likely to say they enjoy Facebook over the old feed where a friend of a friend from high school is posting baby pictures again and people are actually just living normal lives not being shaped by a desire for clout.
>You either have to reject my empirical claim about surveys,
Facebooks personalization seems to just send me to more and more content that makes me angry. Some people may find some pleasure in that, I suppose, but rejecting the temptation is not a suboptimal choice, like rejecting the 3rd beer is not a bad idea, even if you want it right now.
And I don't think it is unrealistic that ~everybody is adverse to ads, but I think it is fairly likely that everybody who has seen apples privacy ads are going to think what Facebook and others do as creepy and opt out based on that.
Finally I nearly always say no or give a low rating for those popups, because I find the popups annoying.
Dupuit explained it all in four simple words. It's not out of vindictiveness, or even saving money Instead, it all boils down to this: "To scare the rich."
...
It is not because of the several thousand francs which they would have to spend to cover the third class wagons or to upholster the benches. ... [I]t would happily sacrifice this [expense] for the sake of its popularity.
Its goal is to stop the traveler who can pay for the second class trip from going third class. It hurts the poor not because it wants them to personally suffer, but to scare the rich.
His insights on nonrivalrous public services and induced upselling apply across any number of goods and services. That would include informational and online ones.
This is before one considers the inherent bias of A/B testing and "market choice" mechanics generally to short-term highly-attractive options, and disregard of long-term value, long-term risks, and of less apparent or manifest value and benefits (see Robert K. Merton on manifest vs. latent functions).
The problem with personalized ads is they give an unfair advantage to the seller. It’s like if you were to walk in to a car dealership and the dealer was given a 100 page file of information on you. Anyone with a basic understanding of human psychology will tell you that human beings are by and large irrational and should not be in the position of walking through a minefield of targeted psychological bait. It’s unethical.
ads are not unethical per se. what i find unethical is the on by default tracking apparatus/personalized ads following me around and trying to learn what i like/want. show me random ads like billboards first, and if i want tracking, i'll tell you.
> I think this is a case of straw-manning potentially legitimate complaints about Google's service by using the word "ethics" to skip the work of making an actual argument.
I don't think that they're straw-manning, I think that they're simply not trying to persuade. The tool is meant for those who are already sold on privacy, and they didn't want to waste time that could have been spent explaining the tool.
What if we the YouTube viewers (Google's ad targets) give the YouTube creators (Google's source of free labor) our moral and financial support directly, without letting the Google middleman take a cut.
Viewers can opt out of ads personalisation but can uploaders opt out of "monetisation". Morever, can viewers and uploaders opt out of surveillance, data collection and how the collected data is used.
YouTube as a platform adds value for Google and advertisers. No one is free to host files witout agreeing to monetisation on Google and advertisers' behalf.
advertising is itself on ethically shakey ground since it so often crosses the line from providing information into outright manipulation. Targeted ads can be especially unethical when it involves the invasive tracking of individuals, the compilation, buying, and selling of dossiers, and it all taking place in an environment where much of that data is sold to the state directly or taken from companies by force and in secrecy (national security letters).
Even if you could be 100% certain the ads being pushed on people against their wishes were not harmful to them directly, (and there is plenty of evidence that ads have caused great harm to people and their health) the entire system that enables and sustains targeted advertising is downright abusive and dangerous. Only the most narrow view of the issue could support the idea that it wasn't an ethical mine field and google's implementation specifically is full of problems.
The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality ... to users. .... For this type of reason and historical experience with other media [Bagdikian 83], we expect that advertising funded [services] will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.
It is okay if it were only for ads personalisation, but everyone knows that isn't the case. They have too much data just for personalising ads, Google knows way too much.
So to me, that's the preview of an argument, but not a complete argument. What is the actual bad thing or bad state that will be caused by Google knowing this information about individuals, or in aggregate?
I think that when we weigh the harm against the good, we're likely to disagree about the balance. But I think I have more information about the good than people who have not worked at Google or Facebook, and I have just as much information about the potential and actual harm.
For one thing, all Googles data is presumably stolen one way or another by the NSA, which use it for things like industrial espionage, supporting regimes like Saudi Arabia, probably a modern version of COINTELPRO and god knows what else.
I am not sure I'd subscribe to that theory. I am no friend to google but they have some very sharp people working in security to the extent I wouldn't be suprised if NSA tried to poach them.
NSA getting caught pwning google would be a snowden-esque nightmare for them. Now some backroom deal between NSA and google for SOME data would be more believable, it never hurts to align incentives and have a three letter agency owe you a favor when senator so-and-so starts banging the break up & regulate big tech drum.
> They are an unethical use of the data produced by Youtube creators, who miss out on ad revenue which they worked hard to earn.
Substitute "creators" with "collaborators" and maybe it'll be more obvious to you why this is a flawed argument. Anyway, I don't think you can even opt out of Youtube inserting advertisements into your uploads anymore, but back when you could it would result in a discoverability penalty.
I don't follow. I still think it's unethical to serve monetized content without paying the original "collaborator".
If you made a band and sold me a recording on the condition that I not resell it, it would be unethical for me to resell it. I think it would be undesirable and annoying of you to resort to DRM to prevent me from reselling, but I'm still the one violating our agreement. I have no special "human right" to listen to your music (or watch your Youtube videos), but you should have the right to enforce agreements whose nonenforcement would harm only you.
huh, guess I'll have to break it down Barny style: you are effectively trying to wave a bloody shirt with the "think of the creators" bit. If your system of morals allows you to deny Youtube advertisement revenue on the basis of an aversion to invasive spying, then the "creators" aren't victims - they're collaborators in the spying. Of course not all of them draw advertising revenue...
> I still think it's unethical to serve monetized content without paying the original "collaborator".
So you're not even going to seek the refuge of "their payment is the free bandwidth" argument and admit that Youtube is screwing a lot of people over?
> ...but you should have the right to enforce agreements whose nonenforcement would harm only you.
lol, "harm". Sure, you have a legal right to argue over the definition of "harm" - but you know you've retreated from "ethical" to "legal", right?
I don't see it as a retreat, I'm using a different conceptual framework because we don't agree on the meaning of "ethical".
I agree that under your moral system, it's not wrong to deny the creators value, but that's sort of just a restatement of the fact that we disagree on the acceptability of ads in the first place.
In general I don't assign the label "unethical" to something unless I'm aware of a convincing case that the thing causes more harm than good, harm without appropriate equity, violates some other axiomatic principal that I agree to, etc. I just haven't heard a convincing case that ads meets any of those criteria.
You can add the use of "retreat" in the context of a value judgement to the list of disagreements, but the reframe into a legal argument makes our exchange largely pointless.
> ...unless I'm aware of a convincing case that the thing causes more harm than good...
Ah, yeah - we definitely won't agree on much of anything. I'm more of a first-principles/universality sort of guy... whereas it sounds like moral relativism is more your thing.
>> I think this is a case of straw-manning...
> I just haven't heard a convincing case that ads meets any of those criteria.
See what you did there? You created a strawman. There is a difference between "ads" and "Google using data to personalize ads". I've got no beef with the former, but you are arguing in defense of the latter.
I'm not a relativist, I believe morality is a real objective thing, but that it's socially constructed. Morality is more like language than it is like physics.
To your last point, you can substitute one for the other, I stand by the original point in either case. I haven't heard a convincing case from first principles as to the wrongness of "Google using data to personalize ads". Generally the principle I hear in these cases is very close to "tracking or targeting is inherently wrong", which I reject.
> Morality is more like language than it is like physics.
Not as you've described it, as a real objective thing that is a social construct. I agree that it is a social construct, and I agree that it is "like language", because I'd describe morality as, at the very least, an internally coherent social construct. "more harm than good" has no logical constraint and easily permits the violation of every prior principal while affording no solid ground upon which to build, by design.
> To your last point, you can substitute one for the other...
Cool, so long as you're aware that there exists the possibility of data-hoard-free advertising - and that it was common prior to recent Internet centralization.
> I haven't heard a convincing case from first principles...
That is because, like ad-blockers, it isn't wrong. Good luck trying to construct on internally coherent system of morals that blesses the present state of data-broker panopticon while at the same time condemning ad-blockers. If you can do that with something beyond "might makes right" then I'll be impressed.
That's true, you can't opt out of YouTube ads on your own uploads. YouTube still has documentation on how to turn off monetization: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6332943?hl=en but since November 2020 they've updated their terms to now say:
> Right to Monetize
> You grant to YouTube the right to monetize your Content on the Service (and such monetization may include displaying ads on or within Content or charging users a fee for access). This Agreement does not entitle you to any payments.
> For channels not yet in the YouTube Partner Program:
> We added this new section to let you know that, starting today we’ll begin slowly rolling out ads on a limited number of videos from channels not in YPP. This means as a creator that’s not in YPP, you may see ads on some of your videos. Since you’re not currently in YPP, you won’t receive a share of the revenue from these ads, though you’ll still have the opportunity to apply for YPP as you normally would...
Kinda makes the inevitable conclusion obvious: non-fashion&beauty channels need not apply - non-legacy media will not be permitted much aside from topics that both have:
1) No possibility of generating an objection from the most sensitive of current and potential advertisers.
2) Do not compete with legacy media presently on platform.
Makes you wonder about all those outrage mobs that targeted companies with adverts that had the bad luck of randomly appearing in videos that demonstrated wrong-think, and how they've ushered in network television 2.0 while sticking it to all the totally-real-and-definitely-a-threat-to-our-democracy-neo-nazis.
Seems odd that someone would weigh in with such an aggressive counterpoint in defence of Google on their own volition… I’m always suspect of comments like these coming from said company’s PR team.
I mean really, “Further I think products like this are actually unethical”?
Did you really just jump to the defence of a near 2 trillion dollar company whose business model overtly threatens some of our most fundamental human rights?
Yes, because I think the general content of discussion around this subject is one sided, and I want to give voice to what I consider to be a more centered point of view.
For example, in your comment you take for granted that Google "overtly threatens some of our most fundamental human rights". I could imagine reasonable arguments that Google does some harm in some cases, and it would even be defensible to claim that Google does more harm than good for some groups of people (although I disagree). But the position you take as a given seems extreme to me and conflicts strongly with my conception of "human rights" and "overt".
Please tell us how Google "overtly threatens some of our most fundamental human rights" by providing free services? Just saying Google is evil doesn't make a good argument.
There are numerous current (and past) legal cases against Google, including numerous antitrust / anticompetitive cases. Several of those hinge on influence and manipulation through that chief organ of a democratic society, media.
Google's role, and YouTube's specifically, in radicalisation, is rather well documented.
"How YouTube Built a Radicalization Machine for the Far-Right" (2018)
Trust me, I'm pretty much the furthest thing from brainwashed a Googler can be. In fact you'd probably be surprised to learn that officially and unofficially, Google agrees with you much more than with me. My personal opinion is that other companies are much better at ads personalization, and Google is much better at building powerful technology that uses a shitload of compute and TPU, so long term Google wants a world with FLOC or similar, and essentially no individual tracking.
>They are an unethical use of the data produced by Youtube creators, who miss out on ad revenue which they worked hard to earn
AdSense is typically a small portion of a channel's revenue (I've heard a few creators say it's around 30%), and all of the costs to produce a video are sunk.
When someone with an ad blocker watches a video, they're still consuming the sponsored content, clicking on the affiliate links and buying the merch. From a business standpoint, they're still 70% as valuable as a "regular" viewer.
I've never heard a YouTube creator complain about ad blocker or ask people to "like, comment, subscribe and whitelist". Linus Tech Tips even made a guide a while back on how to set up Pi Hole and only asked that people "buy a shirt".
If they're not complaining, and people with ad blockers are still making them plenty of money, I don't agree with you that it's wrong.
This product also attempts to remove the other things you listed, including sponsored content (via SponsorBlock), ability to click affiliate links, ability to like or comment on the video, etc.
> I think that Google using data to personalize ads and recommend videos is ethically ok.
Advertising does not simply make people aware about some goods and services, it often works by manipulating peoples desires and fears. And to manipulate effectively, ad companies need to collect as much information as possible about every person. Google collects and manipulates at scale when it becomes a threat to society and culture.
Truth be told, I have similar feelings about ads. Several times, I have benefitted from ads on Facebook and Google, rendering several times their investments.
For example, there was this one time when I had come across an ad on Facebook for a competition that I had found interesting. I applied, got selected, and eventually won a fully sponsored trip to NYC (worth about $4000).
Now, would I want my data to be leaked *outside* FB/Google datacenters out into the public? No. Would I want to be constantly interrupted while I am watching a video? No. But would I want ads that benefit me and help me? Yes, sign me up.
Also, regarding tracking, I believe tracking should be entirely optional (by law). Tracking certainly helps understand user preferences, and I personally always leave them on, because I want to help developers improve my experience. However, I do understand people wanting to turn them off, particularly on suspicious sites.
> They are an unethical use of the data produced by Youtube creators, who miss out on ad revenue which they worked hard to earn.
YouTubers share a percentage of the revenue with Google because it has a strangle-hold on online streaming. Platforms building frontends are chipping away at YouTube's moat within means which net neutrality and interoperability make it possible.
> I think that Google using data to personalize ads and recommend videos is ethically ok.
If viewers want nothing to do with YouTube, it is in creator's best interest then to engage with businesses building alternatives. If this niche service becomes any popular, then perhaps, the creators would do well to listen to their viewers, and a new model around revenue can be developed.
Any particular reason you think personalized ads are ethical? Why do you consider it ethical to track the videos people watch, the subjects they search, the webpages they visit, and use this to make money off them?
My default is that a thing is ok, unless there is a good argument that it causes harm or violates some principle I believe in.
But I can paint a more specific picture. I don't think any of that tracking harms the user, and on the contrary it makes ads and products better. Unlike Google and most of the world, I also don't believe the data "belongs" to the user.
If you go to a website, the website owner should be allowed to tell anyone that you went there. I believe this should be protected speech, just as it would be protected speech if I saw you walk into my physical store and I sold that information to a third party.
I believe this because I think the world would be worse without personalized ads, and because banning it violates my moral principles regarding speech.
If someone created a platform that buys every available bit of data from Google about you in real-time and visualized that on a website in real-time, would you be OK with that? Suppose you would be OK with that, do you believe that Google should pay you for collecting that data?
The idea that blocking ads is unethical because it harms content creators would have a lot more weight if YouTube didn't pay content creators such a pittance.
YouTube is a middle-man that has inserted itself between content creators and content consumers so they can collect rent, and they've happily fucked over content creators every single time it has served their bottom line to do so. Viewing YouTube ads supports YouTube more than it does content creators--you can make some argument that maybe the opaque monetization somehow benefits creators more than YouTube, but there can be no question that the power is firmly in YouTube's hands. It's bad for content creators, who have to constantly worry about frivolous copyright claims, demonetization, and the mysterious algorithm causing them to lose views and subscribers. And it's bad for consumers, who end up with a watered down and censored version of content, with the ubiquitious "like and subscribe!" and "this episode sponsored by" constantly being rammed down their throat even when using an adblocker.
If you want to support content creators, support content creators, not YouTube. I make recurring donations to a few different YouTube artists and they get more money from me than they would if I didn't use an adblocker.
> Viewing YouTube ads supports YouTube more than it does content creators
That's not correct. The YT ad revenue split is 55% to the creator, 45% to YouTube. If it's the case that creators are getting a pittance, it's only because YT is getting even less.
> I make recurring donations to a few different YouTube artists and they get more money from me than they would if I didn't use an adblocker.
And the creators whose YT content you watch, but don't donate to? Would they perhaps be making less money?
I think it should be opt in. A simple way to reduce a products privacy intrusion is to not use the product. Of course then the content creators still doesn't get paid, but at least you didn't use their data...
> They are an unethical use of the data produced by Youtube creators, who miss out on ad revenue which they worked hard to earn.
There are many creators who don't only rely on unethical privacy invasive ads and support more ethical donations based support systems.
Just because a creator refuses to support a more ethical payment system, doesn't make it unethical to bypass participating in a system (the ad network) that actively harms you (by unethically violating your privacy).
My salary doesn't depend on it. Lots of people who I work with do not agree with my views on this. In fact I'd wager that most people in my org would disagree with me.
Either way, I joined recently and I'll leave at some point. My comings and goings from Google will have nothing to do with this, because it's not very important to me and I have always thought personalized ads were ethically ok.
Have you not been on the market lately? Any software engineer has nearly infinite opportunities, and the same is true for many other roles around IT. Dependence doesn't look like that.
You think a person capable of getting into Google is not capable to get into any other FAANG company? I'd assume they're the ones persuading them to switch - why'd the FAANG companies look for candidates without that experience (e.g. on Linkedin) and reject someone with it?
>They are an unethical use of the data produced by Youtube creators, who miss out on ad revenue which they worked hard to earn.
What are you defining as "use of the data", in this case? Viewing their content? If so, that seems like a skewed way of phrasing it.
If I were a YouTuber, I would personally either be okay with or even actively encourage ad blocking/skipping. (Easy for one to say, I know, but, as light evidence, I have some popular open source projects and have run popular websites without ever displaying any sort of ads or sponsored content when I easily could have. And I've strongly considered the idea of trying to make YouTube videos regularly.)
I think I have a slightly different take on the issue compared to most people who dislike ads. I don't actually care much about the personalization or the data collection, as long as there isn't a way for an employee to easily drill down into specific people and track their individual activity by their real identity (i.e. a human manually stalking individuals personally, like a few Google and Facebook and NSA employees have occasionally been caught doing; I understand only a tiny percentage of them would ever do this).
I just inherently don't like advertisements and advertising. I don't want to see ads, anywhere, ever. I pay for YouTube Premium - I'd pay for Twitter Premium / etc., if I actually liked Twitter.
If that didn't exist: mine cryptocurrency in my browser if you want (as long as consent is requested) and give some of that to them. Or use something like Brave's attention token thing. Or anything else. Don't shove advertisements and sponsored segments in my face. Or, at least, ask if I want to see the ads, first, and let me choose "no".
I know it's difficult for content creators to make a living, and I know it's difficult to offer a service like YouTube or Twitter or Facebook for free. But I don't like this world of advertising. I want out. I hope there will be people like yourself who instead work towards building systems that let us slowly transition away from advertising models, like what Brave's trying to do.
1. To turn it on/off means they're still tracking it somehow regardless. I'm not logged into any google service on my machine right now, and yet disabling the features on the link above returned that it was turned off for this browser and device.
2. This was on by default
3. So it would seem that Google was tracking me even though I wasn't logged in as well as any other number of users; I wasn't using their services, yet I was generating data for Google without my consent at all.
4. I find your use of ethics here semantically deceptive; it's distracting the above actions of Google performing unauthorized collection of data on person(s) by discussing an action regarding the relationship of content creators and viewers.
5. Google's collection of data to personalize ads is unethical in that my data and my information, as well as the information of many others, without their explicit consent. In countries where GDPR is enforced, Google creates a full screen modal which does not allow you to advance without either blocking the element or agreeing to data collection, which is in direct violation of the letter and spirit of GDPR.
6. The discussion is not about whether ads are okay or not okay, it is about the system by which ads and data collected to sustain the ad system is generate is okay or not, which it is not for the above reasons and many more.
I cannot agree with any of your points as I see them as dismissive of the core issues and a justification of shady business practices that seek to simply gobble up information on all users regardless of whether they use Google's services or not.
These points you've raised do not address the behavior of Google nor the purposes of the application at all, and are only tangentially related to the comment on the ethics of modern advertising. The discussion about the content creators and the viewers is not Google's discussion -- Google is part of the system that hosts and pays the content creators, but the discussion about revenue streams for creators is one for the creators and their audience. Google trying to shoehorn themselves into such a discussion when alternate revenue streams exist that can be used. How creators want to handle that is their business. Arguably, Google has made this situation even worse for creators by:
- Reducing ad revenue for creators year after year
- Not providing contemporary features that other fast growing and dominant platforms have given their creators (see: Instagram, TikTok, and other contemporaries)
- By treating more substantial revenue streams for content creators aggressive until only very recently (previously it used to actively cut-off patreon links for small time channels that weren't part of the Partner system)
- By by providing the same level of tooling and control over works that other platforms do
- By aggressively demonetizing content creators that have any DCMA claim raised against them regardless of the validity of the claim
Google/Youtube and all of their partner items are aggressive towards consumers and abusive towards the content creators using its platforms. The actual good actors on these platforms suffer for minor clerical mistakes or because of aggressive automated systems that cannot be contested while bad actors continue to abuse the system and profit from it.
Users and content creators may have benefited from Google/Youtube and still have a dependency on its ad revenue, but it comes with extreme risk to rely on it now and with very sketchy behavior in order to support the system, all while Google and bad actors profit.
For the reasons above, I find your post extremely disingenuous, and your opinion on advertisements far too lackadaisical.
I disagree with your points #4-5. I don't think it's wrong for google to collect and use this data without your consent, and I would not vote for a cookie banner law if I were given the opportunity.
I also think your points about creator revenue with Google are valid and (some) are good criticisms of their business model. Where I disagree is believing any of these are "ethical" issues or that I
should feel any worse working at Google vs working at a gas station that raises the price on potato chips.
We could dig down and try to find the more fundamental thing we disagree about. Currently from these comments, it seems like the crux of it is that many people believe that it's wrong for Google to use information Google collects about them to show personalized ads, while I disagree and do not think there's anything wrong with that.
The next step for my understanding would be to figure out why it is wrong for Google to collect and use this information. It doesn't bother me at all and I don't have any moral principles that this violates. What do you think?
The actual explanation is very simple. I have more information available to me than you do, so I formed a different opinion about Google and targeted advertising. If you'd like I'd be happy to address more specific issues, my contact info is in my bio
If your identity is bound up in working for google you will need to somehow deal with the cognitive dissonance of accusations of your employer's unethical behavior.
Either your identity has to be kept separate (i.e. working there can't be something you're proud of) or you have to challenge or downplay the accusations, because they reflect upon you.
A great deal of googlers are proud of working there.
I worked for what many would call an unethical company for a while but I was never proud of it. When people talked about its behavior I would usually agree with them, but some of my coworkers were proud and they would defend it or try to downplay the accusations (e.g. we're not as bad as X).
I've barely been working there for 5 months, my identity is not bound up in Google. I'm certainly not "proud" to work there, it's just a job, but I disagree that the company is somehow evil.
Maybe consider the possibility that people disagree with you for reasons that have to do with their different evidence and experience rather than corruption?
You should also allow for people who honestly have a different viewpoint than yours, since tolerating and dealing with such people is part of living.
>vast, clearly corrupt and abusive company
You assert much, and prove little. Adding up everything Google does, it seems to me that it comes up well into the positive side, though some of the things they do are bad.
None of these links have anything to do with personalized ads. These are examples of ads that were very widely viewed, and the ad itself is what is claimed to be harmful. Why would targeting matter for ads seen by nearly every viewer, as is the case for your examples?
Your second link isn't even talking about bad ads or personalization. It's talking about bad content with good ads not wanting to be associated with the bad content.
Ah ok, yeah I was debating the ads stuff, but you're right that I did also claim to be ethically ok with video recommendations. I think the latter is less contentious so I wasn't directly defending it.
That one is easier for me to defend actually.
I've worked on video recommendation and misinformation integrity (tangentially) at Facebook. I promise as a disinterested ex employee that you are just factually wrong. Facebook and Google both spend 10s to 100s of millions per year specifically to reduce the spread of misinformation. It's a very difficult technical problem because of avoiding false positives (taking down acceptable content) and because there are state actors spending huge amounts of money trying to do the opposite.
There's no conspiracy here. You'd be right to say that Facebook has not done a perfect job, and that they didn't magically predict state actor election interference before 2016. But you'd be factually wrong to say that Facebook intentionally targets people with misinformation.
Any site as big as Facebook, Instagram, or Youtube would have the same problem.
What am I factually wrong about? I agree with your reply. Yes it’s a difficult problem and google and FB have demonstrated that they’re hopeless to solve it. That doesn’t make their behavior ethical.
In fact even though they can’t solve this problem, their entire business model is still built on the fact that anyone can target ads to a specific group to influence their behavior. And if they’re not showing ads then they are showing personalized content based on engagement and virality, which is not a measure of quality or truth, but one of shock and outrage. So no your employers’ behaviors are not ethical and I think you’d have to be delusional to think so.
You were factually wrong to say "The videos and ads are hyper targeted to misinform people".
That statement implies that "videos" are specifically shown to be with the intent to misinform people. In reality Facebook and Google do not do this intentionally, but by accident.
> their entire business model is still built on the fact that anyone can target ads to a specific group to influence their behavior
Not really, unless by "influence behavior" you mean "click on the ad". Ads just aren't that good, and neither Facebook nor Google want to make money off of misinformation.
> not a measure of quality or truth, but one of shock and outrage
No not really. Firstly Facebook shouldn't be the decider of quality and truth, so we can discard that as a goal. Content moderation is complicated, you can't just hide stuff that makes people emotional, or you'd have censored everything that happened in 2020.
Secondly, I don't think there's anything unethical about showing people the content that they want to see, even if it outrages them. There are many things going on that people should be outraged about.
Either way, I still don't consider it an ethical issue, and I don't think I'm delusional. I just know too much about how Facebook actually works to consider them evil.
> That statement implies that "videos" are specifically shown to be with the intent to misinform people. In reality Facebook and Google do not do this intentionally, but by accident.
Let me be clear, the content producers are the ones with intent to misinform. Google and FB just profit off of it.
> Either way, I still don't consider it an ethical issue
Yet you defended this behavior as “ethical” half a dozen times in this thread.
> who miss out on ad revenue which they worked hard to earn
What? Who cares? They can have multiple revenue streams and they often do with Patreon and sponsored messages inside videos. That nonsense that they rely only on youtube ad money has to stop.
EDIT; oh you work for Google! That explains everything. Nice of you to mention that explicitly, by the way.
No one said it's their only revenue. You're making up words no one said. It is unethical to consume content without accepting that ad revenue is how its covered. That's it.
> It is unethical to consume content without accepting [ads]
Well in my belief, ads are unethical. These two views don't reconcile. And since I'm in control of my computer, I get to decide if the ads play or not.
You can make the case it's also "unethical" to track everything users are doing across the whole web with Google Analytics, and then using that data to sell ads to third parties. "Being ethical" cuts both ways.
Stealing from a rich man may not harm the rich man, but I still believe it's unethical.
I'm saying that I think taking things without paying is unethical, while what Google does is not unethical (use user data to provide a service and sell ads).
Google makes billions! every year putting ads on illegally copied copyrighted videos. Sure, they will take them down if the claim is made (especially by the big players) but for sure they are not going to return any money made. Some kid doing an small tool is wont to make 0.00000000001% at best. You are the juggler defending the rich baron stealing from everybody.
I tried to set this up in docker. It fails with an exception that I think is related to the Captcha solver. There is no explanation I can see about how I can turn this feature off or why/if the Captcha solver (which is a paid service) is required.
I'm wondering if captcha is going to be a problem on any YT front end that hammers the site to fetch updates for a bunch of channels/subscriptions. It's a problem I've encountered using NewPipe on Android.
With all video being streamed through Cloudflare? I hope you're on the $200 paid plan because Cloudflare ain't gonna be happy with the bandwidth and will likely warn you very soon if they haven't already
I'm in the EU and many youtube videos show up as age restricted for me. The existing normal workarounds for this (nsfwtube, vlc, mpv, send google random id image) dont seem to work for me anymore here. I was left with 2 options.
1. Give google my real id (which I will never do in a million years)
2. Download each video in its entirety using youtube downloader site, then watch it, which is inconvenient.
I ended up building a simple desktop program that can stream youtube videos while also bypassing the age thing.
My Google account will be 18 in about six months. I have a crazy dream that they'll remove my age restriction then. Never mind that I've got things like paid GCP on that account.
It's bizzare though, that it could be required (legally) for me to send some company a copy of my idea to see e.g. acrime documentary.
What is the hosting charges for the demo instance? Says it has CDN also. Is the cdn for actual YouTube video files or just the ui of piped? How do you handle a barrage of accounts ?
What is the specs for self hosting this ? Minimum? Can this be made a private instance so that it doesn't attract attention?
The feature I miss the most is Collections where I could group my subscriptions into folders. I have too many now to easily browse them (although adding them to an RSS reader helps somewhat).
Not really cool to steal YouTube's bandwidth in my opinion. The only ethical high ground that really exists here is to stop using the service altogether.
I would add that if you hate advertisements, you can pay for YouTube Red or whatever they call it, and remove them. I think that's a good compromise: either you use it for free with ads, or you pay to remove them.