It's certainly not a popular opinion, but it's definitely an uninformed opinion. The aim of NewPipe is not to "stick it to the man" or even to advertisers, it's to create a superior viewing experience that removes much of the bloat of Youtube's official app, and also being light on system resources. Whereas the official app used to crash and warm up my Moto G5 Plus, NewPipe has been running like a dream for years.

I think that would be fine - but if that would be true, they could easily check for proof of Premium subscription to provide features that are paid.

But they're not - they're like one of those re-released Android Play Store apps which are hacked to provide paid features for free.

I'm really not sure what you mean by this comment. Are you talking about NewPipe?

NewPipe is not a re-release of any Android Play Store app, or like any hacked app (like YouTube Vanced). It provides features beyond even YouTube Premium's featureset, removes perceived anti-features like Google Play Services integration, and is much more lightweight to boot.

The title of this post leads with "ad-free". Seems like it's the main selling point.

That is really absurd logic. It doesn't take very long to click on the OP's link, visit the project homepage, and see that NewPipe offers far more than just being ad-free. The home-page mentions ads a grand total of 1 times.

Well yeah but it also removes ads... which are how content creators and the people who build and maintain the platform infrastructure make a living.

Not that it addresses paying for the infrastructure, but many of the creators I watch are now reading ad copy within their videos and are otherwise sponsored directly.

Well yeah, but the parent comment was missing the forest for the trees. The value of using such an app exceeds beyond its ad-blocking features.

It doesn't remove ads, it just doesn't play them. Why do you expect the developer spend effort on funneling money to Google while degrading the viewing experience?

Because they’re the ones hosting and serving the video?

No one forces them to do that. They're free to charge for their services.

Not my problem.

Counterpoint: the amount of advertisements needed to sustain video production ultimately hinders the value of the video.

If I'm watching an hour long video about X, and I have to watch 40 mid-roll ads, I'm way more likely to turn it off. I'd much rather directly support creators via Patreon, and Adblock everything else.

YouTube Premium will not show any Ads. You just need to pay for the service you're receiving.

Since when is that an unreasonable ask?

Well, if you want an example, the premium subscription is not available in my country. I send a small sum (small by Western standards and pretty substantial to me) once or twice a year directly to the creators of two channels I am interested in.

Yeah, I think it's fine if you can't pay because the service provider is being dumb.

It's a whole different matter when you can pay, the service provider asks you to pay and then you release an app that deliberately bypasses that ask.

Same for me, I support channels with superchat. I think best compromise would be bitcoin miners. No ads and creators and developers earn their money.

The entitlement among the general population is a little nuts. We expect things for free, without ads, and with high reliability. In this case we also want additional features like not logging in, downloads and background playback. Side note: Is it any wonder that journalism is dying when no one wants to pay for it (or be subject to advertising)?

YouTube is asking that their users either watch ads or pay money. That's how YouTube and creators can keep the lights on. I think that's a fair model. There are other models, like Vimeo, where the uploader pays for the hosting.

It certainly seems like the future is one where we expect access to everything and pay for nothing. That worries me.

/soapbox

So you're saying Google (YouTube) should share some of their lion's share of cheddar with content creators?

Definitely.

Creators do get the lion share of YouTube's gross revenue.

https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/03261...

YouTube just showed me a COVID-19 hoax ad. I forgot I paused ad blocking.

Fuck YouTube.

Ok. Color me surprised. I assumed the payout was much less. Thanks.

I doubt Google is in any danger of not making outrageously huge sums of money off youtube.

YouTube makes a profit, after all operational costs are accounted for, they aren't paying creators what they're owed. Why would I support a company who regularly short changes the creators who work hard to produce quality content?

Hmm, YouTube pays out massive amount of money every year to creators (if I remember their revenue report, it's majority of their revenue), so I'm not sure what exactly are you talking about?

I don't think it's clear that YouTube actually makes a profit.

Content creators get 55% of the ad revenue so that is simply not true.

I'd be more than happy to pay google for add free youtube if they weren't also stealing my data. Bottom line is that I should be able to set the price for my data and they wouldn't want to pay me what it is worth to me.

People on HN always dismiss ads with "Just let me pay for the service." but only when that's not an option.

in the olden days, i could walk into a newsagent/video shop, pick up a product, exchange some plesantries, put down some coins, and walk out. no-one would know my name or anything about me.

nowadays, if you want to pay for a newspaper article or a video, you have to fork over all your pii and oblige yourself to paying a certain sum in the future unless you do something to cancel it.

there is no fairness in commerce any more. they treat us like hostiles, and we have to treat them like hostiles.

the current choice isn't between paying for it or pirating it, it's between handing over your identity and future income or actively hiding.

one party to this commercial transaction doesn't need to eat and has an income the size of hundreds of thousands of the other side.

NewPipe doesn't need to be trusted where Google actively requires you to trust them - yet repeatedly acts untrustworthily.

If they want me to happily give them money, let me do it without trusting those who do not deserve my trust. I shouldn't have to trust corporations.

Thank you for your thoughtful comment. I appreciate it, ferzul.

I 100% agree that personal data has unfortunately found its way into a transaction in which it should not belong. I respect the fact that you push back on this point, though I do find "treat them like hostiles" as an extreme position. Other entities offer transactions that I find abhorrent, and I simply just refuse to interact with them.

If paying for physical media (be it movies or newspapers or anything else) with "coins" is still valuable to you, I encourage you to continue to practice that behavior, and encourage others as well. It is still mostly possible in many cases.

> ...Google actively requires you to trust them... ... I shouldn't have to trust corporations.

Regarding YouTube, you can still interact with them in a trustless environment. Browse in incognito mode in a non-Google browser. Google gets to show an ad to an anonymous user and you get to watch a video. End of transaction.

But it isn't. YouTube, the service is free. What you can pay for is not suffering from ads, but you had no obligation to do that anyway.

[Could anyone who downvoted izacus' comment explain why?]

Ha! People are downvoting your comment too. I am also interested in a civil discussion about why people believe they are entitled to the content and service without contributing back. Maybe downvotes are easier than thoughtful replies.

See my comment here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23880582

i did not but i do not pay youtube premium. Mostly because all that money will go to RIAA and other DMCA backers, not content creators. Specially not the ones everyone here watches.

Nobody uses youtube because they love it. Everyone uses youtube because google effectively killed all the competition by sliding billions of investor money to DMCA backers. And well, this one time it worked out nice for them, i guess. But it is not a business practice I will support. Fortunately, i'm technical enough to play their cat and mouse game to consume creators who are hostage to their monopoly on discovery.

Should it be your choice or the creator's choice how you support them?

While an interesting question, 99% of people are just looking for free content, not for alternate ways to support content creators. So it's not all that relevant of a question.

That's a good question, ideally the creator should provide as many options for support as they can, in order to capture as much revenue for their work. It's then on the consumer to decide which they're most comfortable with, whether it's advertisement, or direct support, etc.

As entitled as it may be, I will assert my right to limit the data I send to Google.

It is a mistake to assume that everyone blocks ads because they do not want to watch ads. In my case, it is playing a game of damage control with a major corporation that has the ability to connect my activities across much of the web. Other people legitimately point to the cost of bandwidth. I am sure that other reasons exist.

It is also to the benefit if creators if they diversify their revenue streams. At the moment, they are far too dependent upon decisions made by Google. Some have realized this by requesting donations from users, merchandising, baking in ads from sponsors, and promoting alternate distribution mechanisms. While seeking out other sources of revenues creates problems for people who are just starting out, it is pretty much a necessity for people who are seeking to earn money from their work.

> It is also to the benefit if creators if they diversify their revenue streams.

Watching content on YouTube while blocking ads does not encourage creators to go to other platforms. You've already consumed their product, thus lessening demand, so there's less reason to put it on another platform. It's not likely you'll go watch it on Vimeo after they upload it there when you've already seen it on YouTube.

Creators may be better off with a donation and merchandise revenue stream. Describing your actions as "benefitting" them by helping them see this by depriving them of revenue from you for their content is a slightly odd take though.

> Describing your actions as "benefitting" them by helping them see this by depriving them of revenue from you for their content is a slightly odd take though.

The claim was that creators would benefit from diversifying, not that my actions were benefiting them. I was quite clear that my motivations were related to Google.

Fair enough, I was focused on the first part of that sentence to the exclusion of the rest of it, which is my mistake.

If I could guarantee the ad revenue went to the creator and not a company hitting the creator with bullshit strikes, sure!

You mean the company paying for the storage, conversion, bandwidth, global availability and upkeep?

I mean, the creator should have its share, but it's not like YouTube does nothing.

No, a company such as Sony Entertainment or the like that takes all of the ad revenue from a melody that vaguely resembles a copyrighted song.

Yes, that happens.

Otherwise, there's no issue with YouTube getting add money.

That's why I'm on YouTube Premium. I definitely watch enough youtube to get $10 out of it.

I'm happy to support content creators with patreon when they offer a way to do so. _Especially_ when they offer a way to see their videos off YouTube. I'd never pay a dime for YT itself due to their policies and overall platform.

I mostly use YouTube to discover niche content, but only because I've been running an ad-blocker since forever. I cannot fathom how anyone could enjoy it in any other way currently. When I see how IT works at friend's houses I'm horrified.

If YT blocked access for browsers with ad-blockers (or make it inconvenient enough) I would essentially stop using it.

Being semi curious why creators aren't already using any of the other hosts, I poked around a bit.

OMG.

Whereas YouTube is a toxic cesspool, the others are blackhole hellmouths leading directly to eternal damnation. Meaning the wannabe's complete abrogation of their responsibilities show that YouTube's pathetic attempts at content moderation are better than nothing.

I now think there's an opportunity for white label video hosting.

I fully retract the implication that YouTube's doing a better job than the other video hosting sites.

I just saw an ad from "Epoch Times" (Scientologists?) about the COVID-19 hoax.

I'm gobsmacked. YouTube is pure unfiltered evil.

Moderation wise, I don't make any kind of distinction between content and ads.

I forgot that I turned off ad blocking. I guess I normally don't see this kind of shit.

> I'd never pay a dime for YT itself due to their policies and overall platform.

You're supporting them just by using them, whether they are showing you ads or tracking you or not. You're reducing demand on other platforms for this content because you're letting YouTube provide it for you. If you really want to stand against YouTube, don't use it. Otherwise, you're still supporting their platform, you've just decided to do so in a way that saves you time, money and convenience at the expense of YouTube and the content creators on YouTube.

If you're going to do it, you might as well own it.

You're absolutely right of course. But it's still a chicken-and-egg problem. YT is frequently the only platform where content creators publish because of network effects.

I guess it's too easy for me to continue using YT for discovery.

Yep, and it's those network effects which are strengthened through using YouTube even if they aren't making revenue from ads through you.

It's similar to disliking Walmart and Amazon but still using them because they are cheap, convenient, a known factor, etc, which many do (including me, in the case of Amazon). The first step is acknowledging the trade-off you're making and being aware of it. At least then people are making a conscious choice, so if they want to re-evaluate at some point, they can do so with better facts.

I think most people get enough benefit out of YouTube to warrant the fee. But advertisements allow the platform to be available to anyone with an internet connection. Fair trade off I’d say.

Except for all the entitled people in this very topic who demand this service to work for free, refuse to pay for subscription and still don't want ads either.

It's not simply about the consumers. Google is playing a balancing game between pushing ads on enough people to make the service sustainable, while still willingly allowing the people who want to block ads to do so.

With their resources and the nature of the service, they could easily win the cat-and-mouse game against ad-blocker devs if they wanted to.

The reason they don't, is because they actually want to keep those "entitled people" on their platform, in order to avoid giving competing platforms an opening to grow their own communities. They know there is a substantial part of their userbase who would simply not use their service if they had to either pay or endure the vanilla experience.

I agree with your statement but there are other sides too.

Regarding ads: Showing ads like "Girl Mobile Video Talk" with description "Girl Mobile Number Live Video Call" with "Install Link" in a youtube ads is unacceptable. And the worst thing is you cannot even turn off that ads without being turning on ads personalization.

Regarding Money: 10$ may be a cup of coffee for you but in other side of world people are earning 200$ of salary so they just can't afford it. So many people don't have privilege like average Americans have?

Regarding supporting creators. Sure ads pay creator but showing ads every 10minute , beginning of video and end of video is total BS. And even creator are already using their own ads like "This video is sponsored by Brilliant.org" so I don't mind blocking ads.

a good trick is to mute the sound and focus on the countdown button on the right hand side. that way you don't really see the ad at all but if anyone is collecting metrics on whether the ad was displayed they will register it

Oh we can discuss payment for google services as soon as they pay me for all the data they collect on me all over the internet and my phone - it isn't that hard.

> I imagine this will be an unpopular opinion here though.

I don't like it one bit -> down vote