In my circle, piracy is making a comeback. We're tired of having to hunt down streaming services, and be extorted for hundreds of euro a month, just to see ads for their own programs.
Streaming was fun for a while, but as always these greedy execs are ruining it.
Too many services nowadays. Was fine when it was just Netflix, had mostly everything, no ads, full quality. Nowadays Netflix price has gone up, additional plans for 4K/no-ads, anti-account sharing and less content as content now has gone to Amazon/Disney+/Hulu/Discovery+/Paramount+/Peacock/HBO etc. etc.
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.
> Even if you subscribed to them all you'd still not have everything
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.
This is what copyright does though by design. Everyone leverages the monopoly granted by government to maximize profit because its way easier to force people to your service for maximum profit and compete (n offerings rather than everyone ha>ing the same offerings and competing on price and user experience. This is also causing the crazy market dislocation from hige show budgets because they are tryingto invest in their competitive edge when creativity doesnt work on big budgets at all. it needs a constraint to push on.
Let me pay $0.1 for each episode I watch, make everything available and route to the right entity that should be paid and then offer one cross-platform client that everyone pooled their efforts into. And since we're dreaming, make it a open collaboration with a FOSS client too.
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.
Grooveshark, that's a name I've not heard in a while...
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.
> 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?
Capitalism is supposed to have perfectly competitive goods to be efficient. IP protection - especially the obscene century-long protection of copyrights - renders capitalist competition into monopolistic competition, which no longer maximises consumer surpluses.
Hence mandatory licencing can increase benefits for society - and in the past such models worked - e.g. for radio. Today, the only reason content conglomerates get away with it is that they can pay of sufficiently many legislators.
I think it's broken, yeah. I think the whole "art for money" thing doesn't make sense in general and something else has to be figured out. Artists should be able to survive without depending on things like "perfectly competitive goods" or whatever.
Why are you simping for the shareholders? I should have the choice of anything I want to watch. The unethical option provides all and is cheaper than a subscription for a single one of those services.
Besides, those services often make it difficult to unsubscribe with dark patterns.
I pirated for many years until Netflix had everything when I was in high school. Roughly around the time I got a job I stopped pirating games and bought everything on Steam. There is still some annoyance with other launchers besides Steam but, I endure.
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.
> probably around when South Park left Netflix, I started pirating again
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 :)
People use separate computers for wide range of reasons. My desktop isn't always running Linux for example, or even from the same partition always, and to run something 24/7 I need to host it not on my for-work desktop. I also run some less trusted software on separate server and network than say Home Assistant and Frigate.
Sure, I suppose. And I do have a separate computer for HA, because I consider it part of the house.in a way that is simply deserving of (cheap!) dedicated hardware.
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.
As "lightweight" as it is, you don't even need Plex or a "media server" software. My "media server" has been "files on an NFS share" which has worked for me for the last 15-20 years.
Oh, I also use SMB for that. A local file share is more than enough for anyone who lives alone, in a cave, and who never has never physically interacted with another person -- and who never wants to.
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.
For me personally piracy made a comeback when everyone memory-holed "The Speech" episode from IT Crowd. I had even paid for it on a separate platform when Amazon removed it, only to find the platform I paid for it on removed it also. Say what you will about Graham Lineham, I still think it's one of the funniest IT crowd episodes, on par with "The Work Outing". I'd rather not have media I personally enjoy rug-pulled from me in this manner.
Yep. Piracy getting popular is the market telling you something is seriously wrong. The system is currently broken with tens of services each coming in at $10+ per month (and seemingly increasing every quarter).
> 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...)
My personal theory on this is prestige TV is in a recession.
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).
> 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.
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.
I really love newpipe[1].
No ads, continue playing with screen switched off, download option, and i appreciate the lack of recommendations (This way I only see news from the channels I'm subscribed to and don't get drawn into a recommendation-loop).
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...
There was a time when the algorithm was truly amazing and the recommendations were smart, spot-on, and mostly high quality. I don't know what happened but you have to search now for decent content.
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,
Monopolistic online platforms such as amazon, youtube, netflix arise due to quantum nature of the internet. Lack of spatial location. lack of time duration, lack of distance, instant multiplicity with identical copies are all quantum things attributable to information at speed of light. For life on Earth, locations, distances, time durations, lack exact copies are natural. So Internet directly interfers with everything that is natural. Platforms like Amazon can spawn millions of virtual workers attending to the needs of every customer. This conflicts with natural limitations of traditional businesses and thus destroys decentralization and localization that is vital to human life.
I remember when people laughted off the valuation at the time of Google acquiring YouTube.com ($1.65 billion). With the benefit of hindsight, this was a wise move that has payed enormous dividends, and more benefits no doubt still lie ahead.
YouTube has so much questionable content on it that gets millions of views... Parents who've found ways to monetize their kids. Dangerous / unpleasant pranks being pulled on members the public. Conspiracy theories. Fake game shows where the winners being given money are actually friends of the host. Or where the host pretends contestants are doing something dangerous, but actually it's CGI, (misleading young viewers into thinking the dangerous stuff is real / fun). Morons making content that's attractive to kids who don't know better. Etc.
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.
Maybe a business/layer would be needed (if that doesn’t exist yet) that pick « best quality » content and provide a curated list as a channel ? YouTube is just the whole catalog. I would definitely like that, channels and curated content from YouTube because I lost so much time finding great content sometimes that it’s sad.
The fundamental way how youtube content is organised is channels. You find a few channels you like, you watch their back catalogue and you subscribe to their new content.
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.
Usually YT channels are per creator so it’s usually the same vein of content. But TV has channels from many sources and it’s a manually curated list of content.
I was referring to the same way of aggregating content. TV is old and we don’t need a 1 month program of planned content I guess because everything is on-demand but still. Being able to make a specialty like curated channel and share it to watch it like TV might be a thing.
Conspiracy theories nowadays are about a year away from being conspiracy fact. Digital ID is being HEAVILY pushed by the Labour government in the UK. Scary times.
I think that's a fait accompli -- it's merely a matter of who has access to the data.
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.
It's a tool like anything else. I learn SO MUCH from Youtube. Watching someone DIY something where they show all the steps, makes it so accessible. I then learn from them and create some really intricate things from different domains without any formal training. I'm talking car repairs, electrical engineering, woodworking, metal work, gardening, 3d printing. The list goes on and on.
I don't understand, why isn't Youtube social yet. By that I mean why can't I subscribe to other recommendations by creator of the channel Posy or Martijn Doolaard or Sisyphus 55.
I mean these creators can create their personal recommendation streams (of other videos they liked) and some weighted combination of those items could enter my recommendations. This feature is present in Soundcloud.
That does sound like it could be interesting, however it also sounds like it could be horrible. Just because I subscribe to a creator doesn't always mean I align with their views on everything, so could fill my feed with junk.
I guess it would have to be another setting along with the subscription flag.
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."
It's true... but such an awful double edged sword.
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.
The major problem with relying on YouTube content for general automotive diagnosis and repair is that it doesn't tend to be general purpose. It's always "how this one guy fixed this one problem on this one car." A video could have a title like "Fixing a 2002 Toyota Corolla that won't start" but all it shows is the guy jumping right into replacing his fuel pump. There can be many other reasons that a 2002 Corolla won't start, but you're going to have to search through 100s of other videos to find the one that exactly matches your car's root cause, which you don't know until you diagnose it yourself.
The repair steps tend to range from so-so to excellent. The diagnosis steps are almost always very lacking.
I could see that. Some times I'll also use it to gain consensus from a few different creators. The best ones will show when they fail so its a learning experience for everyone.
Google figured out how to get all those creators to work for free, to put a nice coat of paint on their fascism Trojan horse. It's a tool of oppression, masquerading as a tool of expression.
Sponsor block is much less useful now Premium subscriptions have the "skip commonly skipped section" feature, which is always the sponsored content. With the addition of this, you can avoid ads and sponsors well enough now on Premium for me.
I was pleasantly surprised YouTube came out with a first party tool to skip sponcon.
I don't understand why you wouldn't just get yt premium. You get the same features and it pays out well. YouTube premium views are like gold nuggets for creators.
No Sponsorblock (so doesn't block ads by creators themselves, the cliches like NordVPN/SquareSpace etc. you have to manually skip)
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.
Does YT Premium have something Luke SponsorBlock? Can I press a button to remove Shorts from search results? Can I reenable seeing dislikes under videos to know which ones are not worth watching?
If not, then I still need to have a custom app/browser extension... at which point why would I pay for subscription anyway?
Yes, no ads from Google's side and ads by creators themselves (e.g. Raid Shadow Legends, SquareSpace, Manscaped, NordVPN etc. etc.) get skipped via a community-sourced database called Sponsorblock.
Yeah past few years 95% of all the content I watch is through YouTube. All the studios just need to put 50% or more their content on there! I haven't subscribed to any streaming service in a few years. YouTube is free on my Roku TV, through Firefox on my TV/Mac Mini set up (wireless mouse as remote) and on my phone.
We need a politically uncensored version (within the law) of YouTube. Things like Rumble do not work well, they are not technically polished. It's a good side project for X.
Means for example, that this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AnR4Xw74_is had only <0.1% of YouTube algorithmic views (like 7 total), all the rest were "direct" link. All other videos in the same channel had >70% of the algorithmic views (YouTube "suggestions" or "related content").
They did not ban it outright, so you cannot complain or rigorously prove their bias, but they algorithmically suppress dissenting content.
Yet you can link to it from anywhere else on the internet, including from other pages on youtube, and anyone with access to youtube can watch it. A lack of free promotion is not censorship.
Ad absurdum, if the video was banned outright upon upload, it wouldn't be considered censorship under your definition, since upload and storage are also "free."
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.
FFS, algo tweaking is not censorship. Censorship would be prohibiting the speech at all.
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.
I swear to God, I can't go three clicks on YouTube without seeing a recommended video like "BASED Trump OWNS woke moralist!"
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.
Because recommendations can be useful for discovering new things?
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 have to say this tells us more about you than it says about Google. I never see such recommendations. The theories that I would look into if this were happening to me, which I reiterate it certainly is not, would be in the following order: perhaps you've installed an extension that is inserting content into your life; you are using anonymization techniques that mix your identity with that of other people who are interested in such content; you share a household with such people; you watch content that you do not realize is associated with right-wing content.
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.
It's not at all clear that the OP is logged in, or that YouTube is doing anything at all. This is HN, where it passes for rational thought that everyone installs rootkit "privacy" extensions in their browser and uses a VPN of no reputable provenance.
The goal of my post is to communicate that this does not resemble the mainstream experience of using YouTube.
Streaming was fun for a while, but as always these greedy execs are ruining it.
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.
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.
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?
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.
All my devices run Linux and apparently there is no amount of money that will let me stream paid content above 480p.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
At least that's how I interpreted that section.
I guess it would have to be another setting along with the subscription flag.
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."
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.
The repair steps tend to range from so-so to excellent. The diagnosis steps are almost always very lacking.
All you pirates with your archives and torrents. You are Luke Skywalker here.
Sponsorblock takes care of >95% of those.
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...
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?
SmartTube can seamlessly delete that commercial?
https://sponsor.ajay.app/
(Sponsorblock is also available as a browser extension for most browsers but has an open API for other developers to use)
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.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/censoring
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.
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.
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.
https://calisphere.org/clip/500x500/26157/0c7951eaf2251821c1...
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.
The goal of my post is to communicate that this does not resemble the mainstream experience of using YouTube.