That said, it's embarrassing how many iOS extensions I have installed just to work around today's shitty websites. AdGuard to make the web usable, AMPlosion to avoid AMP nonsense, Open in Apollo to avoid mobile Reddit dark pattens, now this (which I installed because YouTube's new embed widget starts playing on touch-start instead of touch-release, so it triggers while scrolling...)
> it's embarrassing how many iOS extensions I have installed just to work around today's shitty websites
The user-hostile design of web sites in 2021 is appalling. Even simple text articles or blog posts have become horrible. I was just reading a blog post linked from HN which featured 3 different popups: two modals and a modeless sidebar popup that follows you as you scroll.
No, I don't want to subscribe to your email newsletter.
No, I don't want to sign up for a course or webinar or some service or whatever.
No, I don't want to know more about something other than what I'm trying to read on this page while you keep interrupting me and telling me I should be doing something else.
(And that was a site that lacked the typical annoying cookie popup – maybe it actually respected the "do not track" feature? That would be a first.)
Popups were despised by users to such an extent that web browsers built in an option to block them. The sensible response to such a clear user preference would have been to abandon popups, but instead web designers came up with a way to work around the popup blocking feature by using modal javascript panes and sliding overlays to obscure the page content.
Autoplaying video was similarly viewed as obnoxious and battery draining, so web browsers built in a feature to block it; web designers responded by doing their best to defeat that feature as well, and it seems to be an ongoing arms race.
Back in the day, when someone asked how to build a website and attract visitors, the universal answer was 'Content is King', to the extent it was basically a meme.
Obviously that was before 'Engagement is King', where content became second-class and Google Tag Manager empowered marketing teams to load up each page with whatever new widget or analytics or advertising system they could get their hands on.
I've been maintaining my own site and I actually enjoy building it in the most barebones way possible. It's just HTML and CSS. Any time I feel tempted to add any JS I spend the time on making a noscript equivalent as best as I can. I'd love to see a swing back to that style of web dev again (keeping it separate from web app dev).
Ah, and then the 'allow push notifications', 'allow this website to access your location' and so on. Utterly ridiculous for just a visitor to go after them in such an aggressive way, and a surefire way to get me to never visit that particular website again.
In the current state of things, having a straightforward website is a competitive advantage. There's a reason I prefer StackOverflow links and completely avoid Pinterest.
The website I live from counters all of these patterns. Nothing appears above or in the content, only below it. There are no popups, no calls to actions and no GDPR notices. It's just one page of uninterrupted text. Everything else appears under the article. This has worked really well for me.
The way I see it, if your business model involves adding friction, you're doing something wrong.
> Autoplaying video was similarly viewed as obnoxious and battery draining, so web browsers built in a feature to block it; web designers responded by doing their best to defeat that feature as well, and it seems to be an ongoing arms race.
Browser vendors have just given up and let mute videos autoplay because otherwise the websites would show even less efficient gif/apng/canvas animation/manual slideshows instead.
It's sad but it works: "Whether you personally love it or hate it, the truth is, sticking a big ole pop-up in their face can be one of the most effective ways to jolt their attention & grab their email for a return visit."
I run it with recommend options + Show video controls and Stop autoplay and I have no issues other than occasional glitches because those two advanced options. What problems do you have?
I was struggling to remember when I posted because it's been a while since I turned it off, but one big one that I do remember was how often it would break 2FA forms that split the inputs into number pairs or similar. To be fair, those forms are stupid, but I have to use enough of them that getting a popup telling me it had truncated the paste to just the first two characters, making me close that popup, paste the number somewhere else and then copy them two at a time (or remember it) was enough to drive me insane on its own.
I started using Apple’s built in 2FA and I have no issues. It’s get filled in automatically. Didn’t had issues before either when I just copied and paste code manually.
Exactly. My biggest deterrent to trying Vinegar is time spent farting around with all the extensions, not price. eg Figuring out if Vinegar plays nicely with 1Blocker.
At some point, browsers will switch strategies from mitigations to scraping.
I'd LOVE for an RSS Reader (like NetNewsWire) to prefetch the "reader view" of linked web pages. Instead of malware blockers curating zillions of filters and patches, just create scripts to scrape the top 100 websites. And then allow sharing of user supplied scrapers.
Also bought it and works great. Minor caveat is that it seems to be unable to get a 4K stream, so it’s capped to 1080p. Likely this is a YouTube limitation though.
This is worth it even just for removing the so annoying play on scroll behaviour! I have YouTube Premium and still feel the need for it.
Also, $2 feels just right for these medium effort apps. Unfortunately people still complain about it not being free. When I asked $2 for a macOS app [0] where I worked for a bit more than a month, people got offended by it.
Coding the app logic is just a small part of launching an app, there's also presentation websites, privacy policies, icons, graphics, instructing the user how to use your app if it's something more unique, and the most time consuming of all: handling edge cases.
I’m really enjoying this. It’s so much faster and basic stuff like rotation that was janky under the YouTube player now works smoothly. But I have to wonder how long it lasts before YouTube takes steps to break it.
People have different views about ethics. Fortunately, there is no truth of the matter, so anything goes as long as we're internally consistent.
I think ad revenue models are unethical. Promotion of extremist content is unethical. Privacy-invading data collection is unethical. Honestly, I think shitty content, in general, is unethical too.
On the other hand, I think it is ethical for an entrepreneuring developer to charge users $5 to bypass bad faith actors, at the (questionable) expense of "content creators". And I'd feel pretty good about paying the $5 too.
> Fortunately, there is no truth of the matter, so anything goes as long as we're internally consistent.
I don't think that what you said is internally consistent. Now, we may disagree about exactly what you mean, but it sounds like you are putting forth some form of moral relativism, which has appeared in various forms over the millennia. Many ways of phrasing moral relativism have logical inconsistencies in them.
I think the "anything goes as long as we're internally consistent" is a statement that any ethical system, E, is correct if and only if E is internally consistent.
And "there is no truth of the matter" is saying that "no ethical statement is true in all systems of ethics".
Now, is the "anything goes" statement an ethical statement? Is it true in all systems of ethics? If both, then this is a contradiction. If it is not an ethical statement, then what does "anything goes" even mean? If it is not true in all systems of ethics, then how can you defend it without begging the question? I'm not trying to enumerate all the possibilities, but just illustrate my skepticism... I don't see an easy way out here. It's not impossible, just really quite tricky, and if you value being internally consistent, maybe you should dig deeper.
To quote Stephen Fry, moral relativism is just another way of saying "thinking".
Morals can come from culture, they can come from religion, or they can come from individual contemplation. Morals are axioms.
The one thing we can say for sure about them is that nobody agrees on what they should be.
Saying that advertising is a pest that should be actively removed is not even an uncommon viewpoint. The city of Sao Paolo famously banned all advertising.
Please provide clarification: is something "relative" if people disagree on it? If there are two different interpretations of a single data set, for example, does it mean that the reality of what that data means is "relative" or just that one or both interpretation don't have enough information (or appropriate understanding of it)?
Basically, I want to know what "relativism" actually means to you since your quote seems to imply that anything you think about is "relative". Thank you, I'm excited to hear your response.
Moral relativism is the opposite of moral absolutism.
Moral absolutism is the belief that certain actions are intrinsically moral
or immoral.
For example, cannibalism. Say there is some tribe that eats their dead.
A moral absolutist would say that "cannibalism is immoral", and therefore
conclude that the tribe is immoral[1].
Whereas a moral relativist would say that, if you had grown up in a tribe
of cannibals, then eating people would be a perfectly normal thing to do,
it would be moral from the tribe's reference frame, and immoral from our
reference frame.
Yes, different moral systems can be compared along certain objective
dimensions. Objectively, cannibalism causes certain diseases such as kuru.
However, choosing which dimensions to optimise for is itself a
subjective process. Objectively, cannibalism prevents food waste :)
Relativism is precisely what allows for meaningful disagreements to occur.
Otherwise a disagreement would simply degenerate into a loud exchange of
axioms (this often happens).
My problem with moral absolutism is that it requires a healthy dose of
chronocentrism to buy into it without reference to some codified set of
morals such as a religion. What is considered moral or immoral has changed
dramatically in the last century alone. At some point in the future, our
morality will be as unrecognisable to future generations as Ancient Greek
morality is to us.
[1] Historically, this sort of moral absolutism was the impetus for certain
missionary activity. No not that kind.
Moral relativism is a form of realism, so there would be a truth of the matter.
What I mean by "anything goes" is that ethical discourse is not concerned with truth per se, since its "propositions" do not map to the world. But if we want to talk about ethics sensibly, we could hold any ethical views really, so long as they are internally consistent.
I don’t necessarily think ad funded content is bad. But YouTube seems to do it the worst. 2 ads at the start, sometimes they can’t be skipped. Ads in between at weird places. Now there are 2 ads at the end too.
Spotify is ok. Ads. Bunch of uninterrupted songs. Ads. Like radio. Many Anime streaming services are similar. Ads bookend the content.
YouTube could have spent time curating good content and building a platform worth a damn. Instead the vast vast majority is trash. There are really only a handful of content creators that make anything good. And it seems like more and more of them have patreons or their own sponsorships. I again don’t mind these. But I have direct ways of paying the creators. And if they moved somewhere else I’d follow them.
I can easily afford that but I never want to pay a single penny to Google/Alphabet Inc. More of an ideological thing than economical, probably many have different reasons here instead of not being able to afford it.
Also, "then don't use" is not an option either as almost all the content out there is uploaded to YouTube, so it isn't like same content is available on Vimeo/Facebook etc.
Nope, seriously. If there were a way to directly pay the good content creators (not talking about $5, Patreon etc, but having a microtransaction everytime I watch a nice video like 0.05 each which does sum up to something similar aggregated) I'd love to.
If you pay a company built around ad revenue to remove ads in one particular product, you now have a big flag “has money and willing to pay” on your profile.
No ads on that product, sure, but very much not coincidentally you cannot opt out of all ads across Alphabet, and the flag is a very strong signal for elsewhere you will be shown ads (even if it’s not made directly available to advertisers in targeting settings).
You know the content creators themselves can decide where they want to have ads? Also Youtube has even skippable ads, Spotify doesn't, but somehow Spotify does it better?
I didn’t know the creators themselves are setting the ads.
Yes, I would take quality content with unskippable ads that bookend what I want to watch or listen to, vs what appears to be random sometimes. Or just companies sponsoring the creators. I suppose I’m used to the old TV and radio model.
YouTube as it stands just recommends garbage. And everything has garbage click bait titles. The fact that the quality is so poor doesn’t make me want to pay for anything.
Remember the times before Spotify? Piracy was the only way to get a lot of music ; there simply weren’t any paid options.
Nowadays the market for buying or streaming digital music has made paying for digital music viable.
With a lot of YouTube content, the situation is very similar today; there isn’t a way to pay for content without simultaneously being exposed to ads and the associated tracking/profiling/stalking. Maybe as adblocking becomes more common, creators and platforms will be forced to accommodate for the change in demand.
I remember buying cassettes and then CDs, either from a known distributor or litte hole-in-the-wall shops.
When digital music was getting big, it was mostly experienced through DJs at parties. They got their records from distributors and there were ways of pressing small amounts of vinyl cheaply.
Artists who didn't have a record deal had to hustle, selling their tunes directly from the trunk of their car or any means necessary.
Lots of musicians didn't make their money from these routes, instead they gave their music out for free as promotional material for live shows where they charged tickets.
Even if we jump forward to now, there's a few listener-supported models like soma.fm which may not last forever but have survived without resorting to ads or piracy.
Piracy is fun for the consumer, while it lasts, but it suffocates the artists and was never a viable solution.
For anyone willing to pay, there is always a way to get your wares if you know what you're looking for.
Electronic music wouldn't exist if it wasn't for ignoring copyright laws. The entire scene is built off the back of sampling and mix tapes.
Likewise MP3 players and similar portable music devices (like the iPod) were technically advocating breaking copyright laws in some countries. Like here in the UK where it was illegal to rip a CD you owned. That law was clearly idiotic but the only reason it changed was because everyone was already doing it.
I'm not trying to argue that piracy is good. However it's not as black and white as some make out.
Small nitpick- I'd say one of the hallmarks of electronic music was that it wasn't built from copyrightable samples. It was trackers and analog-then-digital synths and all sorts of microtonal weirdness which had never been heard before.
It's a nitpick because I agree large swaths of the dance and hip-hop music we have today wouldn't exist if not for copyright violation, no denying that.
However, if we can put aside the legal angle, there's an understood difference between copyright violation for the purpose of sampling and remixing vs. outright "gonna steal your stuff because I don't want to pay for it."
Tiny anecdote fwiw, I once worked a summer gig for a wedding/bar-mitzvah DJ who had a legal license to rip and play mp3s. Iirc part of the deal was they had to be a certain quality, e.g. 320kbps straight from the source.
Or at least that's what he told me (this was AJ the DJ in Houston, Tx circa 2000 if anyone wants to do the fact-check legwork)
> Small nitpick- I'd say one of the hallmarks of electronic music was that it wasn't built from copyrightable samples. It was trackers and analog-then-digital synths and all sorts of microtonal weirdness which had never been heard before.
Depends on the genre to some extent but it's worth noting that Amiga trackers could double as samplers and even the Atari ST could trigger hardware samplers. A lot of electronic producers would swap samples even for percussion (eg the Amen break which is used massively in jungle and early DnB and was ripped from a B-side on a Winstons record). Even some riffs that sound like synths are actually samples layered over a piano roll. But you're absolutely right that synths and drum machines were also pivotal too. I wasn't trying to suggest that the entire scene existed only for sampling but instead stating that sampling was one of the cornerstones that lead to the creation of many of the genres we still listen to now.
> However, if we can put aside the legal angle, there's an understood difference between copyright violation for the purpose of sampling and remixing vs. outright "gonna steal your stuff because I don't want to pay for it."
If we're putting aside the legal angle, then it really depends on who you ask. Electronic (house, techno, trance, hardcore, etc) producers had no issue with their records being copied and shared on DJ mix tapes because that was a way for smaller artists and DJs in the scene to breakthrough. But as a DJ you'd sometimes avoid including tracks from big commercial labels -- particularly if you were a headliner DJ and thus your mix tape would been heard by more people -- because mainstream artists wouldn't turn the same kind of blind eye to their tracks being on mix tapes (source: I'm an ex-DJ)
So it really depends on the scene and sometimes even the individual.
Right, yeah, that's why I said _copyrightable_ samples.. e.g. sampling a sound from just about anywhere and slotting it into a tracker or drum machine is probably fine.
I do agree the waters get muddy once it's multiple seconds long.. IANAL but there's the famous vanilla ice lawsuit, and I think there was some fair use wiggle room if it's under some amount of time (forgot the exact limit), it is fine to use.
Good point about the DJ mixtape thing. I am guessing a lot of composers/producers got the raw end of that deal, but you are right, it helped a lot for promotion and growing the scene
> Right, yeah, that's why I said _copyrightable_ samples.. e.g. sampling a sound from just about anywhere and slotting it into a tracker or drum machine is probably fine.
...and these are just 3 headline artists. Sampling was common place in the underground scene too. eg The Amen break is a percussion loop that basically invented Jungle and early Drum and Bass, and that was a copyrighted loop too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FFKMtv8tU0U
> I do agree the waters get muddy once it's multiple seconds long.. IANAL but there's the famous vanilla ice lawsuit, and I think there was some fair use wiggle room if it's under some amount of time (forgot the exact limit), it is fine to use.
Fair use doesn't cover sampling. Artists need to clear any samples used. If a sample is used creatively enough then there is a chance it might sound different enough that it goes unnoticed with anyone accosiated with the original artists estate. But that's a calculated risk the sampling artist chooses to take rather than their automatic right under copyright law.
> Good point about the DJ mixtape thing. I am guessing a lot of composers/producers got the raw end of that deal, but you are right, it helped a lot for promotion and growing the scene
Producers (nobody calls those kinds of artists "composers") didn't get the raw end because it wouldn't have affected their sales; if anything, it helped promote them). Bare in mind that mixed records on a cassette mix tape cannot be used for anything other than home listening (DJs didn't work of cassette players) and dance tracks didn't typically make for good home listening because they'd have long intro and outro sequences purposely designed for beat mixing. So mix tapes served an important role.
The only caveat some artists would have placed was any unreleased promos stayed off mix tapes (unless specified otherwise) because those promos were often secret weapons for headliner DJs.
Erm... you've told me twice about the amen break.. I saw Aphrodite, dieselboy, and a bunch of other jungle artists live, sometimes in small hole in the wall places before they got big.. hung around the goa/psytrance scene a bunch too, and was idealistic about temporary autonomous zones and stuff for a while.
Not unfamiliar with how the sausage was made. Long time ago though.
Not a musician myself.. I dabbled a bit in Max/MSP, Acid (the program), Fruity Loops, and used to go wild with Rebirth or whatever it was called, but it was all just messing around.
Did have had plenty of conversations with musicians who called themselves composers, esp. as they would make their living composing tunes for video games and film etc. Sure "producers" is the more common term, but it's a bit reductive for you to say "nobody". How about Squarepusher, Simon Posford, and folks like that? Guarantee you they have been called all kinds of things, hehe.
Anyway, when it comes to actually creating original tunes, my experience and recollection tells me it's by far mostly about synthetic instruments and laying out tracks, e.g. actual original compositions. Significantly large samples of copyrighted material play a very small part, in the big picture. Of course there's some notable exceptions, but it's a drop in the ocean compared to original material.
Not talking about DJing. By definition that is literally just sampling/remixing. And of course you have famous DJ's who put out mixes and nobody knows how hard the original music synthesis freak worked to get that fat bass line sounding just right. (Not dismissing the skill of a DJ, I liken it more to a conductor than a composer or the orchestra. Hard and important skill, just different)
Re: fair use, I believe you're wrong. It isn't a hard law but in general the length of the sample is one of the major factors taken into account to determine whether a judge will lean one way or another.
> Erm... you've told me twice about the amen break
Because you believed I wasn't talking about copyrighted samples and yet that break is copyrighted. Hence why I reminded you of that break.
> Did have had plenty of conversations with musicians who called themselves composers, esp. as they would make their living composing tunes for video games and film etc. Sure "producers" is the more common term, but it's a bit reductive for you to say "nobody".
That's because they're a different scene entirely from what we were originally discussing. I didn't say "nobody in music calls themselves composers". I believe the term "producer" originates from "record producer", which film and game composers are not.
> How about Squarepusher, Simon Posford, and folks like that? Guarantee you they have been called all kinds of things, hehe.
From wikipedia:
Squarepusher: Musician record producer DJ
Hallucinogen: DJ, record producer, sound engineer
Yeah I'm sure they have been called other things too but that doesn't mean it is the common vocabulary nor even what they identify themselves as.
As an aside, Squarepusher is one of my all time favourite artists. Seen both live but I have a special love for IDM
> Anyway, when it comes to actually creating original tunes, my experience and recollection tells me it's by far mostly about synthetic instruments and laying out tracks, e.g. actual original compositions.
You keep saying that and I keep saying that it depends on the genre and artist. However that doesn't mean that sampling wasn't a massive part of the scene. I've cited examples to that end too.
> Significantly large samples of copyrighted material play a very small part, in the big picture.
Shall we just overlook the examples I've cited then....
> Of course there's some notable exceptions, but it's a drop in the ocean compared to original material.
That really wasn't the case when I was active in the scene as a DJ and producer. However lets avoid the anecdotes:
"Sampling has influenced all genres of music.[5] It is a particularly important part of pop, hip hop, and electronic music,[14] equivalent to the importance of the guitar in rock.[5] It is a fundamental element of remix culture."
If one compares the sampler to dance music as the guitar of rock, then it's hard to argue that sampling isn't a significant influence on dance music.
"A popular element of Goa trance is the use of vocal samples, often from science fiction movies."
However I'm not disputing that synths are also used heavily too.
> Not talking about DJing. By definition that is literally just sampling/remixing.
DJing is not remixing. Some techno DJs will argue otherwise but as one of those multi-turntable techno jocks I found the arguments about DJing being "live remixing" to be overstated. That doesn't mean it isn't still a creative process though.
> And of course you have famous DJ's who put out mixes and nobody knows how hard the original music synthesis freak worked to get that fat bass line sounding just right.
I really don't understand your point here. DJs can't "fatten" up a bassline of an existing track live. They can layer other basslines over an existing track (a trick I'd do regularly) but that's very different to remixing and sampling.
"To legally use a sample, an artist must acquire legal permission from the copyright holder, a potentially lengthy and complex process known as clearance"
Responding to all your points would require repeating things I have already said above, and I feel like you are deliberately trying to pick an argument at this point, which is clouding your judgement.
I guess that's not a super nice thing, so I'll share my reasoning, but I'm not really interested in taking this further unless you have something new to add:
1. your quote on fair use literally stops a few lines before citing the opposite of your point. any basic search on fair use will tell you that the length of the sample is one of the fundamental factors.
2. it's trivially easy to find music industry sites that call Posford and others "composer", such as discogs
3. Your distinction of exactly which types of music we are talking about appeared out of nowhere and doesn't seem to have any rules, feels like changing the goalposts to me.
4. I literally said that the original music synthesis person makes the bass line fatter. This is the work that goes into producing electronic music. It's original and not an issue of sampling.
5. You're ignoring the most fundamental fact: if we take the sum total of modern music, the amount of it which is composed of definitely copyrightable samples is extremely small relative to the amount of synthesis and traditional composition. I don't want to guess an exact number, but I would be shocked if it came anywhere even close to as high as 1%. You seem to think it's somewhere like 50% or more. My takeaway is you are only accounting for very specific sub-genres (e.g. if you think Goa trance is mostly composed of vocal samples, waaaayyy off, but vocal trance, certain kinds of hip hop.. yeah, of course).
Whatever, man, to be honest I am just not enjoying this convo anymore. Forgive me but I'm gonna bow out.
I think the issue here is you're conflating a whole bunch of other genres as "electronic dance music" but which are not. Film and computer game music, early goa, etc. None of that is part of the underground clubbing scene. So yeah, the points you're making are correct but you're arguing a different point to the one I was.
Take Posford for example. Discords says he is a composer and record producer. This suggests that Simon has released other creative works outside of dance music; and given Goa's roots I'd say that was more likely than your argument that they're both listed as synonyms. The fact that Discogs also describes him as a sound engineer further illustrates that it's a list of his achievements rather than a thesaurus of related terms.
> 5. You're ignoring the most fundamental fact: if we take the sum total of modern music, the amount of it which is composed of definitely copyrightable samples is extremely small relative to the amount of synthesis and traditional composition.
I agree but I also never once said "the sum total of modern music". I was talking specifically about the evolution of electronic dance music. I said:
"Electronic music wouldn't exist if it wasn't for ignoring copyright laws. The entire scene is built off the back of sampling and mix tapes."
Quite why you decided to bring film scores into the equation and then blame me for moving the goal posts I don't know.
Lastly I'm not denying fair use exists. I'm saying selling records doesn't fall under fair use. There are a thousand other ways to use samples outside of that and some of those will constitute as fair use.
> I'd say one of the hallmarks of electronic music was that it wasn't built from copyrightable samples
Yup, exactly. See, for instance, the 1937 ondes Martenot composition Oraison as an example.[0] Other electronic progenitor genres, e.g musique concrete, did use samples but they were widely not copyrighted sounds.[1][2]
Hip-hop, however, would not exist without illegal sampling.
Quoting artists from the 30s is a little disingenuous but maybe I should have been more explicit and said "electronic dance music" (which is also the significantly larger body of creative content). And in those genres copyrighted samples were used heavily.
After having been through the progressive worsening of YouTube and its player over the years, my position is now the same as that about pirating movies around 2005: enough bullshit, I’ll behave when they do. Same as for targeted ads on the web. At some point, appeal to emotion is not enough considering the hostility and dishonesty of some actors.
In the meantime, I support people I watch regularly on Patreon, imperfect as that is.
If I watched YouTube on my phone or my iPad at all, I would definitely install this. Realistically I almost always use my TV to watch YouTube. So it doesn’t matter.
Purposefully breaking built in functionality (full screen, PIP, etc) to force people to use your app or to remove the functionality altogether is a dick move. Something that’s getting real common with Google.
I don't understand. I can load YouTube.com in my mobile browser, go full screen, and then enter my home screen and I get picture in picture just fine. It works whether I'm Premium or not. I don't need a mobile app for it. What has YouTube broken here?
I will say that I cannot use picture in picture while browsing another site in Chrome. That sucks, but I don't think that is YouTube's choice, that's just how the browser works (sadly)
Yeah that's on YouTube. I get why it's hard for them, as unlike in Casting, you can only deploy media types that can be natively played back in order to support Airplay, because you are passing a media reference, not a web page. But HLS is ubiquitous and Airplay supports it, so just serve the HLS and be done with it. I've been very happy with how easy it is to support this as someone who has built a number of web media apps.
The vast majority of people posting to YouTube make nothing from it.
It might be unethical if they were marketing it solely as a way to avoid ads but there are a wealth of benefits to using it. YouTube in a browser on iOS is a nightmare to use and I suspect that they don't fix the many issues because they want you to use their app. This extension removes those issues.
I'd happily allow ads (to an extent) if the content creator were in control and would actually receive 100% of the revenue. But this is not what's happening: YouTube controls when to play ads and how many and only a small percentage of the revenue - if anything - goes to the creator.
This can have consequences bordering on the absurd, e.g. if someone uses a YouTube video in their presentation and is forced to interrupt the presentation to wait for the ad.
100% of the revenue can't go to the content creator - hosting and serving mind boggling amounts of video is extremely expensive, especially if you consider the vast majority of it won't make any revenue (people's wedding or vacation videos for instance).
The ethical issue that I have with it is not the money, it's that you cannot get anything from the App Store (even free apps!) without giving Apple your rough location (client IP), a phone number (required to get an Apple ID), and your unchangeable device hardware serial number.
Fuck that noise.
Don't give money to App-Store-only software vendors.
I really love this idea, but it seems like on macOS, you can't use the left/right arrows to skip forward/backward. I did some testing and this appears to be a limitation of the HTML5 video player implemented in Safari, but it would be amazing if this functionality was added (along with other keyboard shortcuts).
J for rewinding 10 seconds, K for pausing, and L for fast-forwarding 10 seconds is what i've gotten used to, along with , and . for frame-by-frame scrubbing.
Unrelated, but has anyone else had issues with embedded YouTube videos playing just by swiping your finger over them while scrolling the page on iOS? I’m sorely tempted to block YouTube at the network level, it’s so annoying.
This is great just to get standard video controls. I mostly don't mind YouTube ads, except for two things:
1) they allow ads significantly longer than the ad break, forcing you to interact to skip the ad (i.e. all those stupid music videos as ads), and;
2) Text ad pop over the video content. Their entire business is showing us videos we want to watch, and they cover it with a text ad overlay. Its like they want to go out of business.
I also don't like that ads are spliced in at inopportune times, breaking the flow of many videos.
I really get the sense YouTube’s business model isn’t getting users to watch videos, it is to get users to watch something else at all times. I created several custom filters to disable the litany of suggestions that pop up at every opportunity.
There’s this constant onslaught of suggestions. An icon in the top right of the player during playback, a modal that appears when you hit pause showing other videos, the sidebar full of clickbait, and other incessant recommendations. I don’t know how the average user puts up with it.
Loving it, would love it even more if it worked for other video embeds too...there are exactly no scenarios where "your awesome embedded video player" is better than "standard HTML5 video player".
You can pay YouTube for ad-free viewing... not doing so and stripping out the ads is dangerously close to "I just want this for free, so I'll steal it"
> Prevent YouTube from tracking your play/pause/seek activities.
A little bit of a tinfoil hat issue here, but it's fair if this sort of analytics bother you (it doesn't bother me).
> Restore picture-in-picture functionality.
Picture in picture works just fine on Windows and Android without a YouTube Premium account. Is this something specific to iPhone?
> The videos don’t stop playing if you switch to another browser tab.
On mobile, web videos are paused when you switch tabs or apps regardless of the website. Not something YouTube can control, and certainly not something YouTube is intentionally doing (unless you count Google and the decisions Chrome makes, and there is definitely something to that). What YouTube is doing, as I'll elaborate on in the next point, is stopping you from resuming the content after you have switched away from that tab. On all other websites, as long as they do nothing to prevent it, you can resume your video in the background by going to your media controls and hitting the Play button.
On desktop, this is not an issue, whether you have YouTube Premium or not. YouTube does not pause or stop videos when you switch tabs.
> You can choose the audio-only stream to keep the music playing when Safari is in the background.
As I hinted above, the crux of this one is that YouTube has deemed that background playback is a paid feature of YouTube Premium. I think this is silly, but it is their policy. Feel free to work around YouTube's technical restrictions on this topic if you want, but I return to exhibit A, that you can skip the ads and the restrictions if you sign up for YouTube Premium.
In the Flash days, making it use HTML 5 was (afaict) a quality of life change. This extension seems a bit sketchy at best. On the other hand the fact that the entire thing seems to be Apple ecosystem only probably says more about the Apple ecosystem than anything else (as I've said, this is mostly unnecessary on other platforms).
EDIT: PS: I would love if Chrome and the other browsers reversed their decision to auto-pause HTML5 video when you switch tabs or apps on mobile. It just feels like a way to push native mobile apps over web apps for no reason. I understand the risk potential of allowing this on the open web, but I think a permissioning model can work here to reduce the risks.
>> The removal of in-video ads.
> You can pay YouTube for ad-free viewing... not doing so and stripping out the ads is dangerously close to "I just want this for free, so I'll steal it"
I don’t understand this sentiment AT ALL. Google has built an entire business out of scraping and selling other peoples content. YouTube has become the defacto host of virtually ALL VIDEO. So yeah, I would watch a video without ads.
This is the internet. If they send the ad and the video and I use a program to hide the ad but watch the video thats my choice. Its MY computer. If they want to take steps to stop this thats up to them.
Advertising is disgusting honestly and your statement in my opinion is an ice cold take
Some people work their ass to make a living and even if ads are annoying, for a lot it is what's keep them moving forward.
Maybe Google makes money by selling other people content but they provide all the infrastructure to allow content creators to have their business first.
Bypassing the ads is hurting mainly content creators, not Google...
It hurts both. If people support the YT creators they watch on Patreon or in some other way, that's fantastic. But you should support them in some way if you watch and appreciate their content.
Again, they give you the options: subscription model or ad-based model.
This covers the cost of infrastructure, paying creators, and paying developers.
It doesn’t make sense that they or any other company will host and send you video for free at a financial loss to themselves because you’re watching it on “your computer.”
Then again, we live in a world where drugstore makeup needs to be kept behind lock and key, so this shouldn’t be surprising.
> Again, they give you the options: subscription model or ad-based model.
They offer those options, but the fact remains that there is a third option: ad-free no-subscription model.
As a user of the ad-free no-subscription model, I give them two options: internalise the costs of people taking the third option, or spend time and resources trying to make the third option technically impossible.
As a user of the ad-free no-subscription model you can’t become their customer. There is no requirement for any business to offer to sell you exactly what you want.
You can’t buy a word processor without non-English dictionaries, buy a fivepack of beer, buy half an apple, etc.
That’s no reason to then find it reasonable to take that, let alone take that for free.
Completely your choice to bypass it, I just don't agree it's ethical when there is a choice to pay a bit of money instead to not have the ads. I will agree that this does not stop them from gathering your data and that is fair. But just stripping the ads without paying when they give you that choice doesn't seem like an ethical choice.
I close my eyes during the ads. Want to lecture me about how unethical that is? I’m “stealing” from the advertiser now because google will charge them for that view.
In a way, yes, but both Google and Advertisers know that not every view is going to have a fully captive viewer. It's a spectrum, and where you think the line should be drawn between unethical and ethical behavior is a personal viewpoint.
> Picture in picture works just fine on Windows and Android without a YouTube Premium account. Is this something specific to iPhone?
Google decided that in YouTube for iOS the feature would be premium only, at least for now. Maybe they feel iOS users are more easily monetized. Who knows. It most certainly isn't a limitation of the platform.
> stripping out the ads is dangerously close to "I just want this for free, so I'll steal it"
I never use YouTube intentionally. The service is a bit of the perfect example of boiling a frog, with one short skippable ad becoming multiple skippable ads becoming multiple unskippable ads becoming multiple unskippable ads plus interstitial ads, on top of the content itself almost always having sleezy "sponsored by" advertising content. It's simply remarkable how what was supposedly the new world that would break us free from the classic television model has somehow gotten so much worse.
That doesn't really address your point, but it is kind of tough to feel too sympathetic. The morality becomes...clouded.
> On the other hand the fact that the entire thing seems to be Apple ecosystem
Google decided to be extra greedy towards iOS users, so users helped solve it. Sounds like you're giving it a thumbs up.
Yeah I just want to suss out that picture in picture is indeed working just fine for iOS users as it is documented as working by Apple. Do other sites activate PiP reliably? Note that PiP on mobile has always required (stupidly so) that you be in full screen mode prior to activating it. In my own experience, making picture in picture trigger on iOS on my own video apps seems to be fleeting. Can someone on iOS check in on alternative video sites to see if PiP is triggering reliably?
I don't use iOS, if you say YouTube is treating it differently than Android and blocking said feature, that sucks and they should change that for sure. Just seems like there may be problems on Safari/iOS (and the underlying WebKit framework that all or most third party iOS browsers use) more than on other platforms/browsers
> Yeah I just want to suss out that picture in picture is indeed working just fine for iOS users as it is documented as working by Apple.
It does not. I just re-tried (iPhone XR on the latest version of iOS). If I jump out of Safari I get the PiP video for about half a second and it disappears. It works great with Vinegar, as advertised. Websites that use the standard video tag work as they should as well, from what I have seen.
> I don't use iOS, if you say YouTube is treating it differently than Android and blocking said feature, that sucks and they should change that for sure.
Indeed. And in the meantime I will work around them. And if they block it, I’ll just YouTube-dl stuff ahead of time. And keep laughing when Google devs whine about Safari not supporting Chrome’s HTML extension du jour.
PiP works perfectly everywhere else so I assumed this is like when Google breaks Firefox and slacks on fixing it, where it might not have started as a deliberate attempt but someone intentionally keeps fixing it off of the development schedule.
Yeah and I see how this is kind of a modern analog to that, but at least in that case the consumer of the media is making a tradeoff.
Perhaps a better analogy is DVRs and their fast forwarding (or completely automatic) removal of ads. This kind of tech will always be possible and I kind of doubt YouTube will make a loud fuss about it.
Bought it and it looks greater. However, I am wary due to the permissions where the extension "can read sensitive information."
I understand that there's probably no way around this, but still.
Yeah, that’s unfortunate that we have to trust developers to that extent. OTOH, it is true that they could get a lot of information once we give them the right to inject some JavaScript in every webpage we load. Personally, I have enabled it only on YouTube so they should not be able to touch the rest.
Cool. Thanks! I guess this feature is not available on macOS pre-Monterey (i.e. Big Sur)? I could not find it neither in macOS / System Preferences nor Safari / Preferences / Extensions.
When you activate it the first time, it asks whether it should be active for all websites or only the current one. You can also change that later in the settings. At least on iOS; I’ll need to check but I think it’s the same on recent macOSes.
I didn't verify this but my guess is that with the lack of the MSE API on Safari iOS, YT has no other option but to serve the HLS manifest directly to the video element thus it's a whole lot easier to grab the HLS URL (after YT's player JS generated the signature). Would be a bit more tricky to do this on Chrome (or Firefox) where the video buffer is built in code (MSE).
On second thought, muxing mpeg2ts to mp4 containers would make it possible to play the same HLS stream on Chrome.
Installed and running great. An OTP of 1.99$ for what is esstially YouTube Music is a steal. Will it enjoy it as long as it continues to work (ie. until YT breaks it).
Extremely useful on iPhones, iPads. Still going to use the default YT player on macOS though. Live streaming quality on macOS is very low quality with the html5 player.
You can (and I very much recommend) use SponsorBlock to get rid of those too, unless you are very interested in hearing about the same snake-oil VPN, shitty earphones or pay-to-win mobile game every time.
Just wanted to pop into this thread again. I was watching some videos last night on my iPad using this extension and the quality of the videos was much better. Not sure what YouTube is doing but overall my viewing experience was much better with this extension
how? looking at YT code all it returns is 2 combined audio/video formats in ytplayer.config.args.raw_player_response.streamingData.formats and the rest is separate ytplayer.config.args.raw_player_response.streamingData.adaptiveFormats
HLS/DASH is no longer being send, ytplayer.config.args.raw_player_response.streamingData.hlsManifestUrl is missing
https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp has reverse-engineered YouTube, and can take a video ID and figure out the direct video link. The --get-url, or -g option will return that URL.
That said, it's embarrassing how many iOS extensions I have installed just to work around today's shitty websites. AdGuard to make the web usable, AMPlosion to avoid AMP nonsense, Open in Apollo to avoid mobile Reddit dark pattens, now this (which I installed because YouTube's new embed widget starts playing on touch-start instead of touch-release, so it triggers while scrolling...)