All you pirates with your archives and torrents. You are Luke Skywalker here.
SmartTube can seamlessly delete that commercial?
(Sponsorblock is also available as a browser extension for most browsers but has an open API for other developers to use)
They also keep upping the price every so often. SmartTube is free.
I had YouTube Premium via a VPN subscription then they cracked down on it, sod em! Why do I have to pay more because I'm a Brit than if I were an Indian? Don't bull me on "because I live in a Western country I've got a better salary etc.". If they can afford to provide it to Indians for a lower price then why would it cost them more to provide it to me? Same bandwidth costs. Greed.
If not, then I still need to have a custom app/browser extension... at which point why would I pay for subscription anyway?
I was pleasantly surprised YouTube came out with a first party tool to skip sponcon.
> https://dataconomy.com/2025/07/30/youtubes-ai-powered-jump-a...
Sponsorblock takes care of >95% of those.
While there is some quality content on there, the amount of terrible content getting vast amount of views is pretty high.
I guess one question is whether TV is much better.. I would say on average it probably is less bad, although there have also been / are questionable unethical tv shows. But at least with TV shows there's more likely to be a few more layers of questioning / analysing / looking at the ethics, with responsible people involved.
You prefer everybody agrees with the truth?
... come back to this comment in a year.
The funny thing is that the clear anti-democratic leanings of our technolords are based upon not trusting the vote of the masses has unfortunately been somewhat validated (case in point: the current admin). There's just one small problem: the technolords themselves have only one vision and skill: enshittification in the quest of personal enrichment.
China has a very scary model of societal control, but at least they know how to invest in the country as a whole.
And it is indeed a business layer too. The people making the channel gets paid for their trouble per views. Each channel is a little brand with their own idea of what kind of content they will give to the viewers and in what shape and what kind of quality.
I’m sure what you describe is different from this in some way, but it is weird reading that you wish youtube had channels without mentioning that it already has them.
> because I lost so much time finding great content sometimes that it’s sad.
Idk if you are pickier than me, or have even more niche tastes than I do, because in my experience youtube is full of great content.
Streaming was fun for a while, but as always these greedy execs are ruining it.
I've been doing a lot more digital purchasing. Like movies and TV shows. I know there is some risk to the services shutting down. But Disney's MoviesAnywhere mitigates that some.
I typically buy stuff when it is on sale. Generally a digital movie is (way) cheaper than a single ticket at a theater. And I've kinda built a decent sized library where I usually can find something to watch.
And, generall, my library is way better than Netflix at any given time. (Though I still have a couple(!) streaming subscriptions...)
That's an oxymoron if you can't have a local copy
I paid many movies on iTunes, and there's no way to access that content anymore, certaily not from my Linux (main) machines.
Also, people who "bought" 1984 on Amazon only to see it disappear from their Kindle will not have been amused.
Nobody likes to have things they spend money on cluttered across 20+ services with changing subscription fees and licensing terms. It's a mess.
All my devices run Linux and apparently there is no amount of money that will let me stream paid content above 480p.
Even if you subscribed to them all you'd still not have everything. Sailing the seas, you get everything for free or for a couple dollars a month for a more premium experience.
Time for change.
But the content issue is just so dumb (and I’m not blaming Netflix).
I suppose next we will have a new streaming service for each film and show.
I'd predict most of the piracy would again disappear quickly as long as it's better, faster and has virtually everything people wanna watch. Basically replicate what Spotify did, but more open, so closer to what Grooveshark tried to do I guess.
But even Spotify are putting the price up this year. I bet if something like that happened, it'd quickly soar to $0.2 an episode in the next year, then slowly creep up more and more.
Yeah probably, until they find the point where more people leave because it's too expensive than they'll earn by raising prices, then they'll oscillate or find a new direction. Isn't that how capitalism is supposed to work?
And even if you could get all the video itself, it's not guaranteed you'd get the right video+audio+subtitles combination that you want, as everything seems to be negotiated separately.
So while one service could offer the right audio and the right video but not the subtitles you want, another service could have the right video and the right subtitles but instead be dubbed without original audio.
It became a whole mess for people and eventually it was again simpler to just resort to piracy for the even the slightly technical consumers.
Do you actually need everything, everywhere, all at once?
Do one at a time and then switch after you run out of shows or if another service has a "must-watch".
Besides, those services often make it difficult to unsubscribe with dark patterns.
Its been a long time now but probably around when South Park left Netflix, I started pirating again. Now I have a massive Plex server and home lab dedicated to piracy. AND I STILL PAY ~$20/m for Usenet lol.
Unrelated, but fun example as South Park is probably the only show on TV that also let people watch the entire show (-latest seasons it seems) for free online! https://www.southparkstudios.com/seasons/south-park
Been like that (in many places) for many many years at this point too :)
Plex is a pretty light-weight system as long as transcoding is avoided or it has hardware transcoding available to use.
And wrangling Usenet is a fairly simple affair on vaguely modern PC hardware, too.
So all of that stuff runs in the background on the same desktop Linux box that I also use for everything else.
Am I doing it wrong?
Plex, meanwhile? It is much more approachable by the lays.
My elderly mother can watch my media with a cheap little Roku box while she sits on the sofa at her house many miles away with a remote control in her hand, using Plex.
But most of my multi-os stuff happens with VMs these days.
After I spent a few years successfully running Windows as my primary desktop OS, as a virtual machine (with its own dedicated CPU cores and accessories like GPU), the lines between separate computers and different operating systems permanently became very blurry to me.
Every time I see anything like that, I'm always clicking not interested, don't recommend channel, etc. But it doesn't help. I would think it's something to do with my searches, or someone in my household watching this sort of content behind my back, but if you look at the front page of YouTube before having searched anything (you can do this through third party services such as GrayJay; it was getting so bad that YouTube itself had to disable their front page when you're not logged in. Seriously, try opening YouTube in an incognito tab. I promise you they would not disable their front page without an extremely important reason to; front pages are prime space!) it's all the same kind of content. Youtube as it stands is worse than the most hyperbolic satirizations of Fox News. FAANG are the ones pushing the fascism. FAANG are the mouths of our owners.
If you can't help yourself scrolling through the recommendations, there are browser extensions that will hide them.
https://calisphere.org/clip/500x500/26157/0c7951eaf2251821c1...
I watch all kinds of great stuff on youtube that I enjoy, over a pretty broad range that starts with building drag racing cars and ends with videos of quietly walking through Japanese cities at night.
Somewhere in between those points lies more-technical presenters with a knack for cleanly delivering the best technical explanations they know how to make -- people like Geerling, Lovett, Wendell, Hillhouse, Jones, and Black.
I learn a ton from these people, and I was first introduced to their youtube channels by The Algorithm.
Meanwhile: I never, ever get weird MAGA spam or political hate on YouTube -- and I never have.
Through years of mostly very passive training, the algorithm treats me pretty well, actually.
A browse through my youtube recommendations mostly shows a bunch of engineering, machining, and car topics. Stuff that is replete with general pleasantness, and that is devoid of politics.
Even the clickbait is dialed down nearly to zero.
And maybe that makes sense, for me, since nobody but me has ever used my youtube account for anything -- and therefore, nobody has ever had an opportunity to piss in my well.
I don't understand the goal of your post. What is the solution you're proposing for those things? That they don't use anonymization techniques? They kick out the other people from their home?
The OP is saying they don't watch that kind of content and they mark the videos as "not interested" and Youtube is still pushing the content. The onus is on Youtube to stop. Presumably OP is logged in, or if they're not, then Youtube still uses browser fingerprinting techniques. It seems simple on Youtube's side to fix the problem. Blaming the OP here doesn't make sense.
What does that mean "politically uncensored within the law"?
They did not ban it outright, so you cannot complain or rigorously prove their bias, but they algorithmically suppress dissenting content.
However, the contrast between a 70% average recommendation rate and a 0.1% recommendation rate for this video shows the algorithm's bias, fitting the definition of suppression of dissemination. According to Merriam-Webster, censorship includes "suppressing" content by restraining its usual course or inhibiting its reach.
And what is the political part of this? That "illegal immigrants" are coming in to your country? To amp up anger and fear over that?
This is what I detest about "politics" -- when it is just emotional manipulation via hate and fear to cow people into voting for whoever claims title to that hate and fear.
Immigration has challenges but humanity is defined by immigration -- we're all immigrants either directly or indirectly. We have arrived at what could be a post-scarcity world and need to start acting like it.
After Game of thrones season 8, people wonder why they should invest into a show when there’s a high chance it won’t pay off. Even for a good show it can feel like work. That plus the high cost for studios and over abundance of supply, meant studios pulled back.
Instead we’re seeing a reemergence of low effort TV. And YouTube plays nicely into that.
At some point this pendulum may swing back (remember in 2000s when everything was low effort reality TV).
GoT was going downhill way before the final season. Also, I'm not sure what you mean by investing in a show. TV watching should be enjoyable, you dont have to watch things you dont like hoping for a payoff later on.
The recommendations part of YouTube just seems to give me old content or will show me things I've already watched. Despite it feeling almost user-hostile, I still use Youtube,
As a thought exercise, what would YouTube recommend as related videos next to Breaking Bad episodes?
Cable TV
Cable TV with a million add-on packages, eg: “oh you want to watch hockey? Thats extra. Oh you want this channel too? Different add-on”
A couple streaming services
Tons of streaming services with a mess of territorial ownership, eg: Thursday night football on Amazon, other games on different services.
We just took the cable + tons of packages model and instead ended up with a ton of services.
These days I just have HBO, Netflix, and pay for ESPN for Hockey, and even those 3 feel ridiculous. I can see why piracy is easier and more appealings
Most live sports events come out as torrents 2 - 3 hours after. Sometimes sooner.
I'm not sure what will happen to it once google enforces their developer registration thing [2]. I assume that f-droid and newpipe will still work on rooted phones, but in general I don't like the direction in which this is going...
[1] https://newpipe.net/ [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45409794
ambicapter•2h ago
hectdev•2h ago
mouse_•2h ago
pixel_popping•2h ago
Workaccount2•2h ago
cantor_S_drug•2h ago
magicalhippo•2h ago
At least that's how I interpreted that section.
cantor_S_drug•1h ago
magicalhippo•1h ago
I guess it would have to be another setting along with the subscription flag.
pengaru•2h ago
I have quite a bit of experience as an auto mechanic, and love using youtube to find footage of something I'm considering doing or some item I'm considering buying. Just the effort+time savings alone is a game changer. Previously I would download FSMs for something I was considering acquiring to see what it's really like to work on / maintain / something of the internals, to minimize risk of buyer's remorse.
However, most the videos I find of people DIYing things are utter trash when it comes to actual guidance. The readily available footage of internals and failure modes is super valuable, but most these videos will do more harm than good when actually listened to. It's a whole lot of the blind leading the deaf. And the youtubers generally speak authoritatively about things they're clearly doing incorrectly to anyone experienced.
We had the same problem in the web forums era, but the conveniently accessible instructional video format strikes me as far more problematic. At least in the web forums it was entirely a conversational text format, so you were already in the context of reading comments, and the discussion would usually call out idiots immediately front and center. In the youtube videos, especially viewed on mobile, the comments are something you must seek out past the ads, must mode switch from watching tv to reading something, and are usually filled with morons anyways.
hectdev•1h ago
ryandrake•1h ago
The repair steps tend to range from so-so to excellent. The diagnosis steps are almost always very lacking.
jorvi•2h ago
Expect a full-on slop tsunami, with people running bots that first generate half facts and outright hallucinations from Gemini, and then generate a visual tutorial for it to post to YouTube.
"For the DIYer, a tutorial on strengthening beams. Step 1: rub glue on them."