They ask for login on my always-on VPN so Youtube doesn’t exist for me.
I’ve lived on the internet before youtube, I can go back. I’ve even noticed I’ve been forcing myself to check out whats on youtube more and more over the past 5 years instead of wanting to check it out. So I kinda feel like I can drop it as a website I visit on its own and only consume it when specific posts link to it (like from lemmy). Next step after that is dropping it completely as video creators naturally move to different hosts.
Every company want to be a platform… I just them to host videos I can watch embedded on lemmy or some other site.
Obligatory message from Invidious gang
Freetube and pipepipe FTW!
My account is old enough to drink in most of the world. They better not try and age verify me lol.
The article says they take the age of your account into factor. You should read it.
I just don’t believe them. They will find a way to screw it up with AI, the same way they’ve screwed up youtube moderation.
The article also states that this system of age verification is already in place. Have you been asked to provide ID yet? No? Then you’re fine.
Again, you should read the article.
YouTube uses a pretty wide variety of signals from across your Google account, including the age of your account, the types of searches you’re making, the types of videos you’re watching, and which apps you’ve downloaded, to make this estimation.
Account age is one factor that will be considered. Who’s to say their AI won’t screw up weights for the other factors and decide that someone is a child because they primarily let their kids use their account (bad practice, but not unheard of from stressed parents)? What happens when you aren’t a youtuber with an audience that can get the attention of actual human beings?
Google has already made AI-related errors with moderating youtube. I will trust what they say after it’s been proven.
Same with blue sky. They hit me up with an age check.
Never looked back.
Just curious why is this entire thing even in the Android community? This is a privacy topic or a YouTube topic etc. There’s nothing about it that ties it to Android. Can we keep stuff like this out? It’s just one more topic that devolves into politics, scare speculation etc. Just read the comment threads if you need to see.
Exactly. People needs to know Android is not Google
Hard to escape Google unless you are willing to use a custom rom which is getting harder and harder to do with devices with unlockable bootloaders becoming rarer. Google also has a pretty big influence on the direction of Android.
Even GrapheneOS that is talked of often requires purchase of a Google phone.
I myself have degoogled android device without bootloader locked. I have multiple devices with stock and custom ROM. With adb or other GUI tools you can go 95% degoogled without causing any breakage
But, it not being 100% does show how Google is not Android is hard to make a reality for locked bootloaders and the influence it also can have on unlocked phones.
A phone having an unlockable bootloader doesn’t guarantee being able to flash a custom rom from one of the more trusted groups.
Sometimes it means having to rely on the work of one unknown person trying to port it over for the device, and not knowing if they snuck anything malicious.
Its just a really poor situation compared to desktop OS options that makes it hard to degoogle and also be secure. Since being more private from data collection and being secure can be different things. Right GrapheneOS is one of the few options that tries to offer both privacy without comprising on security.
Situation on mobile devices is worse than people think. These vendors are locking devices more everyday. We seriously need more than 2 mobile OS. Linux phone’s future is still unclear
Indeed mobile is so terrible. Hardware options terrible and at the mercy of OEMs and hacked together fan projects still reliant on Google contributions to Android, and available only on limited OEM phones. Which if an OEM decides to lock things down not like we can make our own phones like desktops.
We need linux phones but that is unlikely. I wish Valve running ARM for steam frame leads to them maybe in the future deciding to put on a Steam phone that runs Linux. But that’s a long shot and probably territory they dont want to enter dealing with mobile carriers.
Maybe it’s my preference of using older mid-range devices but unlocking the bootloader has been fine, the problem is some banking apps and inferior hardware drivers (worse wireless performance, stretched camera image, no control of flashlight brightness etc.)
when over half of the bug fixes and security patches come from Google, it’s a Google product.
and I’m saying that as an android user from /e/OS
Thats a google product but google apps and android are two diffrent product or atleast should be
Should be but at this point basically aren’t.
You can’t run AOSP on most phones and if you could you wouldn’t get the user experience most people expect from a phone.
There’s really
45 spaces in the main internet:- the public corporate web (YouTube, Facebook, twitter, Reddit, etc)
- the private corporate web (requires login to view any content, Software as a Service, Cloud Apps, etc)
- the public web (Wikimedia, Wikia, Archive.org)
- the indie web / small web
- private web - inaccessible except through login or through VPN or TOR/Onion, but not corporate (media servers, email servers, darkweb, file servers)
And currently the main issue is that the corporate web is intentionally trying to strangle the other spaces on the web.
But there are some movements against it, https://indieweb.org/ and https://neocities.com/ and https://smallweb.cc/
Edit: missed one of the spaces
What about the darknet?
That’s just private web with extra steps, really
And those extra steps make it wayyyy more private and secure.
But not any different in the context I’m talking about
That s beyond our borders. You must never go there,
Simbaquick_snailAt that point, you’re almost talking about a private web.
Accessable public information seems to me to be a different beast.
I’m slowly making peace with the thought of losing the internet as it is. Maybe it’ll become something broken you wade into from time to time, some sort of blinking, blabbering wasteland to scavenge valid, valuable information from and return to your oasis. Some people will stay trapped in there forever, but it’s useless to try to communicate with them.
Clippy stage 2: revive many aspects of the old web
We can still pass flash drives around, at least until ID requirements come to file systems, ports, and peripherals.
So real
Friendly reminder that Tampermonkey has a script for this:
https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/521089-youtube-age-restriction-bypass-stealth-version
Doesn’t work
Cool, if GrayJay could integrate similar functionality that’d be great.
It’ll be super weird to pirate free youtube videos, but I’ll fuckin’ do it.
Are they actually free?
Are we maybe misunderstanding YouTube… A company?How do you even do that?
I built a little Python app that’s just a big Download button on top of yt-dlp. Copy the link, hit the button, it downloads the video to my Jellyfin folder so I can watch YouTube videos on Apple TV without having to tolerate ads every three minutes.
I guess yt-dlp everything lol
I’m assuming that mandatory ID checks would make yt-dlp not work
Unless you have access to an age-verified account(that is not yours), in that case you can just pass the cookies
Hunter2, that’s your time to shine!
They are going to start permanently banning people from YouTube by ID if that becomes popular enough
Variously better and worse than a ban from both Uber and Lyft.
Grayjay and Newpipe (and its forks) can do that, as well as just watching it like regular youtube, but also the option to select from other platforms - like peertube, as one example - to watch.
I use FreeTube, but this doesn’t seem like a “youtube piracy” solution because it is streaming the content directly from youtube, which can ultimately prevent access; I already am blocked from watching certain videos that require you to be logged in to watch.
The problem is basically, if there is a specific youtube video you want to watch, but youtube insists that you must provide ID to see it, right now I don’t think there’s actually a lot of recourse for that because there are too many such videos for anyone else to actually host them or offer torrents or anything.
Imagine YouTube telling you to submit ID to prove that your 20 year old account is 18+ lmao
Also, imagine living in a country pretending that it’s amazing while they treat their citizens like they do… United States of North Korea vibes
Reddit does if you are in the UK, and reddit marks loads of stuff suited to under 18s as NSFW. News about what Israel is doing in Palestine for example.
following the facebook method.
Between the age of my account and the fact I pay for premium, if they ever ask for ID they can go fuck themselves and I’ll go back to as blockers and fresh accounts
Lol “paying for youtube”
nothing wrong with that.
you support the people you watch without having to see ads. also, comes with YT music.
it’s a pretty good deal
Best way to support creators is the same way as with bands - buy their merch!
But then you end up giving Google even more information compared to using it logged out.
yeah, that is definitely a trade-off
It also monetarily feed into the youtube network effect of there being no other viable options. Maybe youtube becoming completely unprofitable for creators is a necessary evil so there becomes less and less incentive to put content there.
I mean yeah if everyone would coordinate. We’re such a small minority on here it doesn’t really do anything on its own. If we got the creators themselves onboard…
Look into browser Finger printing. The logged out parts does not do much nowadays.
Yeah, but having a Google account, tying payment to it, and having viewing history all tied to it is even worse. There’s a reason Microsoft wants people to use an account on their OS is tying stuff like extended support to it because a dedicated profile is still more reliable and accurate than trying to rely solely on finger printing.
One is so good you don’t even need to try to finger print because you already did all the work for them logging in.
I agree. All I am saying that in the limit where we all use services that respect privacy and stay away from big tech, we still have a major issue that we currently don’t have a solution for and is very hard to avoid or eliminate completely.
Yeah, but taking approach of its all pointless just give in isn’t good either.
Not paying and not using an account is ways to reduce how much is given to those companies.
And the paying user average revenue for creators is higher than ad users. At least it was when I last looked.
Tipping your creators 5€/month or smth is even better. No google, Amazon in between, no charges…
So I’d be paying roughly $500/m + all of the random videos I watch wouldn’t see any of that.
Edit: This reminded me that I can check how much I use it. I’ve been a YT Prem member since 2019.

yeah except if I watch a random video from somebody they wouldn’t get any money with this method.
I can’t afford to give everyone 5€ per month
You guys pay for that ? No ads here on you tube
I mean, people pay for Netflix or Amazon or whatever, why is YouTube different? It’s my primary video platform and I watch more than 50 hours a week (I’m low balling that number to hell as well).
While paying is more convenient for me than breaking their shit, I’ll pay. Also means creators actually get paid for my views as well
deleted by creator
Lol do you pay for youtube?
You know you’re gonna have to go elbow deep to hand them that flashlight. . ?
I still have the original Google Play Music All Access intro deal of $7.99/month from 2013.
They contractually can’t raise the price on me ever. 12 years so far.I couldn’t keep paying for it in good conscience when they killed the original Play Music app and along with it: their awesome selection of curated playlists, the best library organization I’ve seen before or since, and the critical one, the ability to upload your own music that wasn’t available already. I just can’t stand YouTube as a music organization platform.
Edit: Oh! And not to mention the I’m Feeling Lucky button that somehow no one else has managed to replicate.
RIP uploading private collection 😭
I really miss that “I’m feeling lucky” button. I found a lot of good music with that.
But in exchange for loosing those music features, I gained ad free YouTube Premium.
So yah, I keep the subscription.
You pay each month that amount for music ,😂
That’s how much I pay for YouTube Premium.
I also buy CDs, or Bandcamp downloads directly for those I really like, and want to donate to.
I “curate” whole discographies of stuff that I want to “archive”.
But when someone recommends music I haven’t heard of, I load up their most popular stuff on YouTube Music and listen to a bunch there, ad free. Then decide if or how I obtain more.I use newpipe or metrolist on my phone,freetube on my PC , never have I seen ads from yt.
I’ve tried those. They aren’t as good as YouTube Premium.
As a newpipe user myself, are we now pretending this doesn’t happen for 90% of videos?

Have just tested it with totally random subjects, such as grapheneos, supertramp, Hollywood undead, interstellar, trump, everything in working order. Tested with mullvad VPN on (exit zwitersland), or off (belgium)
Try reinstall newpipe
Guess I need to get off of GMail more urgently.
I have Tuta, it’s good enough. Lots of storage for the price compared with others.
Tuta
So, can’t use that with Thunderbird, I suppose?
Well, at least the open source client would be useful.True, using Thunderbird would be a useful thing to be able to do. I’m always on the lookout for more or less useful alternatives, even to Tuta.
Although the encryption is a useful feature, I don’t really expect that from mail.
And if were doing internal communications with a company with that level of security and privacy requirement, I would be using their on-premises mail server.I have been considering Proton, mostly. My main goal being, not randomly losing access to my mail account due to some AI bs.
Though I am not sure if they might end up requiring stuff like “Video ID”.And if it comes to paying for a service, I will also start comparing it to the cost of a domain name and a static IPv6 address, because I already have plans to run a server.
Fair. I’d love to hear why someone down-voted you. I don’t respect these down’n’dashers. 🫤
Maybe someone who has been de-federated from my instance, considering I don’t see a downvote.
Hmm, I changed the settings in my Lemmy client to see split votes (down and up votes), and there’s no down votes, but also no up votes, as if you perhaps removed your own up vote from your posts. 😅
Someone down voted my comment though for some reason. Gosh. I don’t mind the votes, I just want to have a discussion… That’s why we’re here, isn’t it. At least why I’m here.
Gotta support alternatives such as Peertube, Nebula… so there are nice places to find videos as YouTube becomes worse and worse.
It’s almost impossible for any of those to suceed beyond being niche because its not viable to run against the economics of scale and the practicality of the corporate solutions provided by the Big Techs companies in capitalist countries.
Believe me, I’ve tried to talk to real people about the dangers of sending data to a single company like Google (Alphabet) or Facebook (Meta) and depending on that for media comsumption, how it can and how it’s really used to manipulate public opinion on countries… The fact is that for non-tech and non-privacy minded people (which I’d sure Must be 99.9% of the population) they really don’t seem to care, they just wanna a “free” service that they turn on the TV and there are the videos of their “influencers” or YouTube channels to watch, on YouTube I really hate how it shoves ads like there’s no tomorrow nowadays every 5 minutes, but I also understand there’s a cost to run their business, I, myself, if were to pay for similar service provided without ads I’d pretty sure the YouTube Premium offering would still being a bargain since Google’s infractucture and running costs are really optimized.
So yeah, I really don’t believe any capitalist country can compete with the Big Techs companies, they are probably deeply rooted into common user behavior in all capitalist country, in the capitalist “democracies” it’s impossible to lobby against them in privacy concerns since they can easily sway public opinion in their favor with invisible chances to their content delivery, so anyone trying would have to have a lot of resources to do so (a popular movement without money funding in a capitalist society is basically doomed, theres a very pow chance to suceed imo) and any national alternative, or any actual alternative to their services is almost impossible to suceed since they already have their economy of scale set up with minimal costs and they can also run years on and on with a loss untill any competition does due to being unable to compete with their lower artificial prices.
I don’t know how or why you see ads on YouTube. I have been using firefox and before that whatever else, for a very long time. I have not seen an ad of any kind on YouTube in many MANY years. And since sponsor block came out I’ve only seen a few that managed to slip through. I just fast forward. But why would anyone suffer YouTube with ads? You’re volunteering for it at this point because it’s insanely easy to block them.
This just proves you are not the average user of YouTube…
The average user of YouTube user either their TV app or their official mobile app, not the website.
Me too, I also use adblockers when accessing it via the website in my computer, however when I’m watching things on living room I have to use the official apps.
So yeah, most users suffer with their ads because it’s easier to use the official apps.
YouTube app already comes installed in most Smart TVs, already comes installed in almost all Android phones (which is majority of the marketshare worldwide)…
Youtube/Google/Alphabet out of aaaaall the companies out there, should already have a mindblowing amount of info on 99% of its users. There’s no need at all to even ask for ID.
They want solid evidence for authorities, remember USA has gone full Nazi from the very top all the way down






















