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I see there is lot of dilemma in comments here regarding blocking ads. blocking ads is not piracy, blocking ads should be norm. I am ok with seeing ads, until they don't track my behavior, they don't try to manipulate my decisions based on age,region,sex,location, earning status. I am "ok" with ads shown in TV channels, because they show the same for all above mentioned categories.

let me make a simple analogy, how do you feel if a circus publicizes as free, has a billboard to show ads, and in background they hires a detective to follow your every move 24/7 , note down your interests/dislikes so they can show you personalised ads based on the interests. creepy right, That how i feel these companies do.

just because someone/company spent money and posted a billboard on public space, doesn't mean you have to read through it. It is the risk they assumed, just like youtube/creators made the decision to host videos for free on a public space. it is a bad decision from their part and they have to live with it and not gaslight people.

I hate to see youtube die, It is a wonderful archive for society. if you want you can buy premium/see ads so that society wont lose some thing valuable. but not because of creators/YT losing revenue.(that's the risk they assumed when they started the business).

and then there are people who say, you can turn off ad personalization, I did since last 5 years and you know what I see. Some Scam apps/NSFW ads content. and there is no way to report the ads unless I turn on ad personalization.

I would like to repeat statement from louis rossmann , don't accept the premise of the corporates when the premise itself is shaky.

One aspect you didn't mention is the ability to not look at the ad billboard.

If I see a giant ad billboard, I can not look at it, look away, close my eyes, block it with my hands, etc. In a distant future I'd buy glasses that blur ads from my sight (if that could be done without a company seeing everything I see).

For me ad-blockers are the same with some automation. It's a way for me to not give up my time and attention for something I never asked for in the first place.

Moves like this one from YouTube are one step closer to that dystopian nightmare depicted in Black Mirror where you have to watch the ad no matter what. You close your eyes, and the ad pauses and only goes away after you finish watching it. It's absolutely insane.

We somehow got gaslighted into believing there's something good with advertising and there are just a few "bad actors" (where did I hear that before?). I firmly disagree. The entire world would be a better place without ads.

Every HN thread about YouTube and ads, we see the same ads/tracking/Google apologist fallacies:

1. Equivocating adblock with stealing

2. Using adblock deprives content creators of funds

3. Users of adblock are entitled whiners who just want free stuff

4. Without ads, YouTube cannot exist

It is getting tiring.

"I am ok with seeing ads, until they don't track my behavior, they don't try to manipulate my decisions based on age,region,sex,location, earning status."

I think you have not tried to view pages without an adblocker. Nearly impossible to navigate, they blur news and ads, nasty pop-ups etc. I have no idea how someone without an adblocker is able to use the internet. And in Europe you also need the "I don't care about cockies" plug in.

Personally I think he dilemma is justified, just because I use an ad blocker doesn't mean I necessarily agree with it on principal.

However like you said, the problem is not the ads themselves it is the tracking that comes along for the ride.

There isn't any inherent reason that ads have to be so privacy invasive (I guess it is hard to not have ads at least log your requests when they go to a different server but that alone is normal I guess).

It is unfortunate that is seems the ship has sailed on actually privacy focused ads and instead of being tailored to the user they are just tailored to the content on the page/video/whatever. I would allow those ads if they existed.

It sucks since I do think ads are important, website operators need some way to make money and it is clear that most people are not going to pay for the things they have grown accustom to getting for free. But the current solution is so privacy invasive that you have to block it.

I am fine with unobtrusive ads to the side, ad banners, etc. But not with peacefully watching a quiet video about the greatest one-shots in Golf history and being interrupted by a blaring loud ad for a crap mobile game. It really is the loudness that bothers me the most. Newspapers didn't used to shout at you. If ads go back to being as unobtrusive as newspaper ads and didn't siphon your personal data, I would unblock them. Ironically, I think 4chan is the only site I visit where I have all ads allowed, because it is still only showing simple quiet banner ads.
> and then there are people who say, you can turn off ad personalization, I did since last 5 years and you know what I see. Some Scam apps/NSFW ads content.

I don't want my personal data to be in the wrong hands and that's why I disable ad-personalisation. But I don't agree that seeing ads for scam apps, NFTs, gambling or get rich quick schemes is better than personalised ads. The reason you are seeing those ads when personalisation is turned off is that they are the only kind of scheme which can scattershot their advertising while still remaining profitable. I'd much rather live in a world where the ad system knows exactly what I need or want and shows me appropriate ads. That way advertisers waste less money and there is more money available for the service provider or the content creators to provide value back to me. The only reason we don't live in that world is that Google and other companies have been shown to be untrustworthy when it comes to handling their customers' personal data.

> I hate to see youtube die, It is a wonderful archive for society

The actions of the past few weeks have proven it's a terrible archive for society. If there is anything you enjoy on there I'd suggest you archive it from there while you can because they'll be putting the same effort into blocking yt-dlp before the end of the year once people start taking advantage of that to bypass the ablock-block.

I don’t like advertising because it doesn’t even pretend to be informative firstly and secondly it’s not entertaining. Just inform me of what the product or service does and then if that is impossible just do a joke. I haven’t seen a YouTube in ads in years that doesn’t show some aspect of our society I don’t care about such as medications, crypto, how stupid a consumer who doesn’t buy their product is, etc.

That’s what I am avoiding with ad blocking. My life is better without all these things. I’m actually living a better life without ads.

I agree. There's a certain amount of personalization I'm willing to accept - like if I'm in the market for a 3d printer and I start getting targeted ads. Where it goes off the rails for me is if I search for information on a certain cancer, and then I start getting targeted ads for medicine and services. At that point the veneer of innocent advertising is blown away and I don't have to accept it.
Yes! I want to ask the people who believe this, if they would also assume it's piracy if I turn off my television when the commercials come on.
Ok cool but this is the real world and companies need money to stay in business. This open source free internet principle works great, until nobody wants to do the work for free, which is accelerating due to global recession.

Mark my words, by the end of this economic downturn you’ll just be happy that you’re not getting charged for a web browser… if you’re lucky.

To be precise, this is not "blocking" ads, this is simply not making HTTP requests for ads. It is the web user's choice whether or not to send an HTTP request.

Servers "block" HTTP requests, not clients.

The biggest issue with generic or burnt in ads is that they're not targeted ads. The value of an ad which isn't targeted is more than an order of magnitude less than one which is targeted.

Traditional free-to-air broadcasting (mostly) works financially because they pay once for the transmission, it's a largely fixed fee to cover an area, and then they get paid for the audience they potentially reach. Even still the broadcasters have to pay to have market research agencies run surveys to figure out what's being watched and by whom. When pay TV providers became able to get telemetry from set-top boxes the value of the addressable market rocketed because the audience was no longer hypothetical, it could be measured, analysed and segmented.

The reason you get crap ads when personalisation is turned off is because the advertisers who have money want their advertising dollars spent on addressable market, not on random NPCs. A non-addressable ad is cheaper, so that's the market for who's buying the ads. I hate ads, so I have YouTube Premium Family, that works great because I can see content without interruption and I support the independent content creators. I also run PiHole because some sites and services are just so loaded with advertising that it's annoying, so I might well be hypocritical here.

But the biggest issue that people don't understand, or think they understand but totally under estimate, is the technical challenge of delivering every video on YouTube everywhere in the world with fair quality. I build streaming infrastructure at scale (not for Google) and I'll tell you that it's really expensive to do what they do and yet people take it for granted. They feel entitled to watch YouTube because Google represents the evil establishment, without recognising the challenges they face.

I don't agree with the idea that it's good to write apps that mooch off YouTube just because they're a big corporation. Yup, it's not piracy, it's probably on the lighter side of the grey area of unauthorised API abuse. If you want to build a competing service to Google that comes without personalised ads and has great content, I wish you all the best but when you get the CDN bill, you'll understand. There's a cost per viewed minute that's probably unsustainable. Heck, even traditional broadcasters who have launched their own streaming services have struggled to make money, and that's with targeted advertising enabled.

> I am ok with seeing ads, until they don't track my behavior

Once again, people blaming sites for things browsers should handle. It's not YouTube that does the tracking; it's your browser allowing it to happen. YouTube is not fetching data from you. YouTube is using the data you send it. This comes from the browser, allowing it to happen. The misplaced blame is why we are in this state.

> I am ok with seeing ads, until they don't track my behavior, they don't try to manipulate my decisions based on age,region,sex,location, earning status.

How do they try to manipulate you? Appeal to you, sure. Not wanting them to have your data, absolutely. But manipulate?

Right of computer owner to access public network resources and display it in the way he wants is above profit incentives of resource provider and above any other proprietary rights for that matter.

For instance, if I receive a HTML/CSS data that displays a trademarked design (which should be kept as a whole), I am able to mangle the presentation part any way I want for personal usage. If I publish a site that's a mangled copy of a trademarked site, that's gray area. For my PC usage, no gray area. Same with disassembling, reverse engineering, etc.

Then, I have a right to publish any tools that perform any customizations over owner's items, be them hardware or software. Customizing proprietary software and reselling it is illicit. Customizing for one's own purposes isn't (the proprietor may choose to drop support for owner on his prerogative).

Most important point is that YT and alikes want to freeload in the middle area. They want to be free and public, but they want to force the way you consume them. That is a no go. YT can choose to make a closed system, but then they would lose all random people without accounts finding YT links and watching them. Really, tie the google account, and set up watching quotas, direct payment or any other system where YT directly gets "paid back". The user can use his tokens to access streams from wherever he wants, youtube-dl or whatnot.

> Right of computer owner to access public network resources

This misunderstanding is the basis of your entire argument: YouTube is not a public resource. It’s a private company providing access to mostly private content in exchange for payment under certain terms.

Currently they have the right to deny access as desired and even to pursue legal charges against people who don’t follow their terms. The only way to change the situation is to change the law, such as what some countries have done to limit the amount of tracking they’re allowed to perform. Client portability would be an interesting but challenging argument to make since they would have raise not only the past estimates of revenue lost due to unauthorized redistribution but now would almost certainly make the argument that creators need to be protected against unauthorized AI usage, too. I’d like to be proven pessimistic but it seems unlikely that we’re going to see much political will for IP reform with relatively little public demand.

Ad-impressions as payment is one of the most accessible means of service monetization in the world. You only need eyes or ears to be granted access. Cutting that off, or somehow ruling it illegitimate to require, will raise the bar and cut off less affluent and less educated communities.
The right to general purpose computing should be part of the constitution in any country that claims to value free speech.
I wonder if you'll keep your free rights opinion the first time some bot abuses your service, causes a few 100.000$ in AWS costs and then goes away without paying for it.
I haven't seen anyone else with my perspective on ads, so I thought I'd share it.

I believe ads actively make life worse. Modern ads are based on creating wants, rather than addressing needs. The more wants you have, the less satisfied you will be with your life.

If I needed to do some home improvement and went to the hardware store, and there were ads for certain brands in the store, that's not a problem. The ads are giving me information about a product that I might need.

But that's not how most advertisement works. Car companies don't advertise to people who need a car to commute, they show you an ad with a hot guy driving a car in a beautiful landscape and make you want to be that guy. You can't be the guy without the car, so you want the car. The goal of the ad is not to inform, it's to create a desire.

I don't want to want. I want to be content, and I can't be content if I'm always wanting. The only way around it is to not want in the first place.

If you're a Buddhist monk then you can do that already, but I'm not. Human nature is to want things, so the way I have to prevent myself from wanting things is by not exposing myself to superfluous ads.

Ooof, accepting Bitcoin/currency donations for a product that explicitly strips out monetization of another 3rd party service is going to be a problem for longevity of this project on GitHub.
Regarding ad-blocking: it's pretty simple – no single person in the entire world goes on the internet to view ads. People come to get information/content and just don't really care about other fluff that interferes with that.

As long as it's possible to block ads, people will just do it, because it provides a SUPERIOR browsing experience than otherwise. I sometimes turn uBlock off by accident and instantly get reminded how screwed the browsing experience is without it.

Some people also claim that ad-blocking hurts content creators. This is mostly false. Most content creators have realized by now that relying on ad revenue as a considerable source of income is unsustainable in the long term, due to aformentioned reasons. That's why most have Patreon, Ko-fi, merch shops, donations etc., which is a far more solid business model.

I block all ads everywhere I can, I don't care if they track me or not, if they are "privacy-respecting" or other crap, I simply don't care. And I encourage everyone to do the same.

"I didn't request the ad"

If it had the ability to block videos that have that stupid mouth open and shocked expression of the presenter in the preview tile then I’d be sold.
If people don’t want to pay for YouTube, then why not use peertube[0]?

I don’t understand the arguments here. If you don’t want ads, then pay for Premium. It’s fantastic that an option exists to solve the problem! If you don’t like the price, then don’t pay for it.

Somehow people have got it in their minds that YouTube owes them content for free. That’s a great mindset to make the shift to peertube and away from YouTube, but I don’t think it holds up as justification for getting mad at YouTube for forcing their preexisting paid plan to remove ads.

Either pay for YouTube Premium or shift to a different model of video sharing. Both options currently exist!

[0] https://joinpeertube.org/

I got that big warning about having 2 videos left before being locked out of youtube viewing due to running an "ad-blocker", that was last week, I've not watched a video on the site since.

I just download it with yt-dlp or throw it in to mpv. If those stop working I'll probably just stop watching youtube altogether since I only watch maybe 6-10 vids a week anyway. This "app" does look quite good, but for how long it will work if g**e keeps making it difficult I don't know.

Anyone else think YouTube Premium is pretty reasonably priced? You are getting a music streaming service on top of ad free YouTube. I've been very happy with it since subscribing.
I see a lot of comments focusing only on the ad-free part of Freetube, however there are really good reasons to use it apart from that. I was a ad-blocker Youtube website user and I switched to only using Freetube (even before the "adpocalypse") because of changes Youtube has been making/removing. Here are some things that made me switch:

- mega fast compared to youtube website (especially for firefox users)

- separates videos/shorts/live on your subscription feed into custom tabs (can also hide any)

- search results are actually usable and shown in a grid (No "People also watched|For you|Previously watched|Latest" every 1/2 results taking your whole screen)

- can customize scroll over video player action (skip, volume, playback rate)

- set custom forward/rewind and playback rate intervals

- set default video quality

- >2x playback rate (up to 10x)

- distraction free settings (you can hide almost anything you want on each page, examples: trending/recommended videos, the likes/dislikes, the live chat, live streams, premieres, profile pictures in comments and much more)

- hide videos from specific channels

- display video titles without excessive capitalisation option

- easily export/import your subscriptions to any format

- multiple local accounts each with its own subscriptions

The "still needs some work" things:

- playlist support is not in yet (you can save videos but they all go to one place and you can't order them)

- some parts of the UI, although very usable/fast, need some love (looking at you settings page)

- tab support would be great instead of having to open new windows

I personally don't mind paying for YouTube Premium. It's a tiny tiny fraction if compared to the cost my rent and my (relatively exorbitant) car insurance rate. I would think most folks making a software engineer's salary wouldn't have a hard time with its cost. It eliminates ads, you get a "premium bitrate" on 1080p videos, so I'm fairly happy with it. Of course, in terms of ROI value, the YT Premium subscription gives you very little since the content is already free (when viewed with ads), especially if you consider that YT Premium is priced similarly to major streaming services which actually offer a significant amount of amazing original content (ad-free as well, at least in the case of Disney, Netflix, and Apple).
Great so they want to freeload off the laying users and content producers. The serving and production of this content has real costs.

This does not make the Internet a better place. Paying for stuff you like does though.

Very cool. It's awesome we finally have an independent YouTube player app which, unlike existing players (we could always use MPV and others), also has searching and specific video related recommendations.

But there is a room for improvement. E.g. its history appears forgetting a video's pause position as soon as I start watching another one. A handier speed change (wheel-scrollable perhaps, e.g. the YouTube Enhancer browser extension has it) is a necessity - I increase and decrease speed very often depending on how well and easy do I understand a particular part so using a pop-up menu annoys. The same about sharing - I want a single-click to copy the URL to the clipboard, not a multi-share pop-up menu. An option to pre-download full videos (in a per-video preferred format, together with the subtitles) then play from the file, then let me purge/prune this cache manually would be great (I usually prefer the "18" 360p MP4 format, 240p if that's a podcast with no interesting visual content, 720-1024p if its a coding lecture where I need to read what's on the screen, higher in some rare cases when there's something beautiful, all available subtitles and chapters should better be embedded in the file).

Blocking ads should indeed be configurable. To be honest, I personally can hardly imagine myself enabling ads (I rather donate when I really like someone, and that's much more than YouTube itself would pay them for my view), nevertheless just killing all ads for everyone without even an option to change this manually somehow feels wrong. And probably begging for trouble of Google and/or other corporations attacking the project. If I were the developer I would rather enable ads by default and let the users configure blocking the way they see fit.

I would consider adding these features myself as this fortunately is a free project on GitHub but Electron means that would require me to learn web frontend which is so complicated[1] it's not really my thing.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37895164

Let me putit out there, I don't like seeing ads and I like watching videos.

I know a lot of creators are creating for fun. They do not care about ad revenues. Youtube promise them of a safe place only to show some creepy ads to viewers like me.

Youtube needs to die.

I was a premium subscriber for 1 month and quickly cancelled my subscription, the reason is simple: I was still bombarded by ads, just not YouTube ads.

If YouTube want my business back they should simply find a way to force YouTube creators to provide two video streams, one with sponsored content for non premium users and one with their sponsored content shenanigans stripped out for premium users. This would make me subscribe asap even if I couldn't care less for YouTube Music as a happy spotify user.

I know I can use sponsorblock to get rid of this, but I just felt silly having to use an adblocker while still paying for youtube premium.

All these 3rd party clients and sites to watch videos should coordinate and define a protocol for creators with a youtube channel to cross-reference a google-free (maybe self-hosted) platform to get to their content as a safeguard to not fully loose their viewership if either the creator or the subscribers get booted off the platform for whatever reason google deems a violation of their policies. Then creators can promote these 3rd party apps. Of course any other platforms will not easily be able to replace youtube's monetization, but at least keeping the contact could buy them some time.
Surely google won't let this stand for long, right? As soon as it gets any kind of popularity google will intentionally break it.
I think there is an additional issue here - which is if you want to pay to remove ads from youtube you have to have an account and that by definition provides your analytics and browsing history to youtube no? There is no way to remove ads without turning over your behavioral analytics to youtube.
It's worth pointing out that this hurts the creators who make those videos that you are watching.
bug report:

when you are playing a playlist and go to the "pop out" window, clicking on "Next video" button on the pop out player messes up the payback (moves to next video only in the main parent window to new video which starts playing simultaneously)

also, clicking "back to tab" on the floating player window ... does not return the user focus to the main plyaer window. you have to hunt for it in task bar and ppen the main window manually yourself.

related feature request:

it would be great if the floating popup player also had a time seek control

main playback controls on video should include next/previous buttons when playing from a playlist

Its ironic they accept monero; if youtube did (or something equivalent) I'd be able to pay for premium without them tracking my watch history.

At the end of the day that's all I want. No ads, no tracking.

Let’s be clear - just because you block cookies and javascript doesn’t mean google, who owns and runs the servers for YouTube, can’t track you.

Great thought but completely useless.

Impressive.

Is there a Andoid app with similar features?

Also, is there a equivalent for Coursera Videos? (Jut unhappy with Coursera UX) :)

Oh boy I can't wait to use the application that surely won't be nonfunctional in like 3 days
There are:

+ Invidious, FreeTube, yt-dlp for music and videos

+ Internet Archive for loads more films, shows, music, University courses in their entirety, etc

+ Metager/Qwant/Ecosia for search, Duckduckgo for image search

+ Anna's Archive, Libgen, etc, for books

+ External hard drives for storage

People apparently so concerned about ethics, I suggest considering setting up a monthly donation that goes out directly to people actually working on behalf of the public.

Depending what you're into, that could be the Free Software Foundation, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Internet Archive, or any of I don't know how many other projects working on specific cool free software projects, operating systems, and the like. Tor, Blender, Guix, Debian, Arch, Freenet, MediaGoblin, Peertube, Mastodon. Whatever, there are tons of things.

If you give money to Google and Amazon (buying books on the Kindle) and tell yourself you're helping "creators", well, you might be falling victim to a vicious false dichotomy. Try this book, or a talk from Cory Doctorow about the book first to whet your appetite https://chokepointcapitalism.com/

i am not sure about how does it separate itself from piped or invidious in practice.

in fact it can use invidious api as a feature. plus you need to install an extension.

but if it is more reliable than piped then i am all for it.

Normie-friendly projects like this are going to get yt-dlp ruined.
Why do they like windows over tabs so much? :-(
What are some good iOS options?