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
Friendly reminder that Tampermonkey has a script for this:
https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/521089-youtube-age-restriction-bypass-stealth-version
Cool, if GrayJay could integrate similar functionality that’d be great.
Doesn’t work
If you use Android you can just export your subscriptions and import them into a third party app like Grayjay or NewPipe. There is no reason to use the YouTube app or even remain logged into an account, unless you absolutely need to watch age-gated material.
You can’t watch age-restricted content on any Youtube client without a verified account because the server itsself looks for authentication.
Yes, that’s what I just said.
I thought age-gated meant the contrary
I don’t think so. Here’s an example of it being used to mean “restricted to a certain age”. I apologise for the confusion if I’m wrong, I am talking about the same thing as you.
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)…
Yeah I wasn’t thinking about these things, you’re right. I mean, even with “Smart” TV (don’t get me started) I have a media dedicated computer with a small footprint attached and I do everything via that.
I don’t use any tech that I’m not fully in control of, unless I have no other choice. The tv thing I completely realize is the minority case. I know only tech geeks who have the knowhow are doing anything like that.
The whole smart tv thing is irrelevant to me because it’s such a scam. They stop updating apps after a certain amount of time, forcing the users to just chuck a perfectly good tv and buy something new because apps are no longer being maintained on that one. Such a fucking scam. But P. T. Barnum called it long ago, “There’s a sucker born every minute.”
Quitting Reddit was hard in several ways.
Quitting D&D (because of WotC being assholes) sucked because I was an Eberron/Keith Baker fan and have a lot of money sunk into D&D.
But I don’t know if I could quit YouTube. If that happened, I’d try to find ways to hack my way around it. I might ask my favorite creators to migrate to other platforms. But if I had no options to get their content but to give YouTube my ID, I might honestly have to do it.
youtube may be the last american tech that i unhook from, there is simply no where else that has so much video content in one place
i don’t understand how france for example stopped 2 big media companies joining for fear of a monopoly while youtube easily gets far more viewers and watch hours than the two of them combined
Same for me. I’ve been using YouTube for long enough that my over decades curated subscription feed is my primary source of both entertainment and learning, and while I’m successfully degoogling all other aspects of my life, this one will be hard.
Who on youtube are you that attached to, out of curiosity? I definitely follow a few creators that would hurt to lose as well, really just looking for recs haha
Well, I guess just to list off who I watch frequently, kinda sorted into categories:
TTRPG:
- Critical Role - Really famous. Live-play of TTRPGs. It’s really a huge investment of time to keep up with it, though.
Just people I have parasocial relarionships with:
- Any Austin - Kinda “philosophy of gaming” is how I’d describe his latest content. I’ve been a huge fan of his for many many years and am way more invested in him than the content he currently makes. But he’s really fascinating. His alternate channel “The Excellent Man From Minneapolis” is music he writes/records. Good stuff as well IMO.
- Memoria - Gaming entertainment content. Found her when she was featured on Austin’s channel.
- gl;hf - A podcast that Austin and Memoria do together. It’s about everything and nothing.
Long form deep dive investigative and social commentary stuff:
- OKI’s Weird Stories - Cool expos on things like conspiracy theories and cults.
- Fredrik Knudson - Similar cool expos on things like gaming communities, fandoms, niche infamous figures, scientific experiments, etc.
- Folding Ideas - Somewhere between expos and social commentary. Does stuff about flat earthers, gold, cryptocurrency, etc.
- Contrapoints - Insightful and really well-edited/highly-prodiced left-wing social commentary stuff.
- Philosophy Tube - Quite similar to Contrapoints but different. I’d imagine if you like one, you’d like both.
- Munecat - Also similar to Contrapoints and Philosophy tube.
- Innuendo Studios - Maybe discontinued, but really really good source for info on how the alt-right “works” and how to fix (particularly American) fascism.
Tech/hacking:
- Ben Jordan - Stuff about privacy, police tech, fighting scraping for gen-ai training, etc. Informative.
- Marcin Plaza - Hobbyist mobile computing device prototyping. Quite entertaining as well.
- James Channel - Fucking hillarious. Mostly game system modding content, but way funnier than that makes him sound.
Satanism:
- The Satanic Grotto - A small satanist group based in Kansas that made the national news big time not too long ago holding a “black mass” at the state capitol. I’m just fascinated by all the legal fallout of the whole thing. And… I think the Satanic Grotto is the good guys. “Part of the solution” if you will.
- Behemoth X - Just really dark and atmospheric content about rituals to commune with demons. Dude 100% believes demons are real and powerful and he does blood sacrifices to them and talks about what wisdom he claims they’ve shared with him. Also life advice. Lol. Really interesting. Only major downside to the guy: he’s really leaned into using AI art in his videos lately. It’s pretty cringe.
Other creepy stuff:
- Tales From The Trip! - Substance use trip reports. Only bad trip reports.
- Night Mind - Essays on horror media. Mostly video games and ARGs.
- Nexpo - Similar to Night Mind, but occasionally does stories about grisly murders or creepy cults.
- blameitonjorge - Similar to the above, but with a lot of focus on lost media.
- Nick Crowley - Mostly creepy internet and TV history rabbit holes.
Vidja gaming content:
- Summoning Salt: History of speedrun world records. Way more interesting than it sounds.
- Pointcrow - Bit of a guilty pleasure. Popular Twitch streamer who does speedruns and challenge runs and stuff. Quite entertaining, but a bit sophmoric.
I’m sure I could think of more if I thought for a bit. I should mention that I don’t usually log in to YouTube. I keep my subscribed-to list in NewPipe on my phone. But I also do a fair amount of just searching by topic or happening across YouTube content on Lemmy or Hackaday.
Any Austin is great
Oh awesome breakdown thank you! We have quite a few in common actually, looking forward to checking the others out! It’s funny, Any Austin was actually the first person that came to my mind. I feel like anything he talks about he just breathes so much life into the subject
It’s wild to meet Any Austin fans in the wild. I was watching his stuff and supporting him on Patreon when he was really obscure. Now that he’s really popular, it’s a whole different thing.
Well hey thanks for helping him get off the ground! I forget which, but one of his “unremarkable places” videos went viral and that’s how I first got on board
Subscribing to Nebula will be a good start. Quite a few of the channels you mentioned are there already and more keep getting added.
Was that speed runner historian the guy who had a massive falling out recently? I only heard about it in passing.
Point Crow or Summoning Salt? Either way, I hadn’t heard anything.
I do know Point Crow used to do a lot of content of games like Breath of the Wild with mods that would do things like multiplayer mode or “the floor is lava”. And Nintendo recently got YouTube to mass delete lots of modded Nintendo game content. (I don’t think mods of Nintendo games are even illegal, but Nintendo is known for calling the perfectly legal illegal.) And Point Crow’s channel was pretty hard hit because that made up a lot of his content.
Man. Maybe I should consider boycotting YouTube. Heh.
Edit: Oh. Speedrunner historian guy. You’re asking about Summoning Salt. I can’t read. Yeah, I don’t know anything, but I’ll look into it. You’re not thinking of Karl Jobst, are you? He was sued by Billy Mitchell, but Mitchell is 100% provably in the wrong. And a liar. And a scammer. And a cheating cheater who cheats. (If you aren’t familiar with Mitchell, I recommend starting with the documentary “King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters”.) Also, unless you’ve heard something I haven’t, I would recommend Jobst’s channel. It’s mostly about cheaters in e-sports and speedrunning.
I wish Nebula were an alternative, but there’s no way for new creators to start out there the way they can on TikTok or YouTube. And being paywalled, they’d be taking a lot of really important educational information away from public access, essentially restricting themselves to preaching to the choir.
Would Twitch work?? I don’t love these options.
Another thing is youtube’s value isn’t even career creators. Its random people uploading stuff because they thought it’d help someone despite no expectations of any career or monetary compensation.
Im sure lot of us have searched some fix on youtube then been helped by the video posted by a channel where that’s the only video there. So not everyone is looking for a netflix alternative from youtube, but its the encyclopedia of knowledge it offers. I’ve had professor who uploaded their lessons on youtube so people could refer to it.
Why quit D&D? Whether WotC is stinky or not, it’s just books and resources you can get anywhere… So acquire the books in ways that don’t support WotC and have the best of both worlds, no?
Search “dnd 2024 phb anyflip” or replace “phb 2024” with any other book
Look for urls that look like https://online.anyflip.com/mldog/ynbn/mobile/ (this example is the 2024 phb), the “online.” and “/mobile” is what you should look for
arr free stuff *soyjaks pointing*
- I wouldn’t want to encourage others to patronize WotC. (And, if I’m running a 5e campaign - which I did for a short time - players who want to play are going to want books even if only the PHB.) So I wouldn’t want to run 5e. I might play 5e as a player if invited. But I’m kindof a “forever GM.”
- Yeah, I’m good with acquiring stuff in ways that doesn’t support WotC. I don’t consider buying used to be permissable, however. If I buy used, that’s one used copy that won’t be available to someone else who may instead resort to buying new from WotC. And WotC profits directly from DM’s Guild. Piracy is the only way I’d be ok with it. (And if I don’t want to run 5e, and given that I already have all the core books, the only WotC content I’d be interested in pirating would be Eberron stuff. If I wanted to support Keith Baker without supporting WotC/DM’s Guild, I could just pirate and join Baker’s Patreon. Assuming I can find a good place to pirate that stuff from, of course.)
- I specifically do want to participate in TTRPG ecosystems that are more explicitly dedicated to more sane licensing schemes and have very explicitly Ulysses Pact’ed themselves in no-takebacksies ways. Like maybe Paizo/Pathfinder 2e for instance. (I’m currently between groups… and have yet to acquire the PF2e books… and honestly am enjoying a bit of a hiatus from GMing… but when I get back to it, I’d love to do either PF2e or… I dunno. Something not 5e. Even though the 5e system is pretty decent, I think.)
- There was a short period of time during which I thought WotC was backing down after the OGL 2.0 debacle, and if they hadn’t immediately proved themselves 100% evil with the Pinkerton fiasco, I would have ended my boycott. But they did, so my boycott remains.
- I haven’t seen the D&D movie, nor do I intend to. And I’m not just boycotting WotC. I’m boycotting Hasbro. So, no Transformers movies either.
I’d give YouTube an ID, but never my ID. They probably just have AI checking them to see if they look real enough. As long as it’s a convincing enough photoshop, it’d probably pass the litmus test.
I thought the days of needing a fake ID were decades behind me
Just like mom pants, fake IDs are back on the menu, boys!
Finally a legitimate use for generative ai: fabricating ID
Gonna be fun if they ask me to verify my age. My account is old enough to drink.
Yeah. I’ve never been asked but now I wonder if that’s why. Haven’t heard of anyone with a drinking aged account having to do this.
They ask for login on my always-on VPN so Youtube doesn’t exist for me.
That’s what I said about my IP. Now I can’t watch YouTube. I mostly just use PeerTube
What do you even do there? I can almost never find anything to watch on PeerTube.
For me there are actually some people making videos I like. For example thelinuxexperiment, Veronica explain, privacy guides yeah not much though
Gravitytube is starting to mirror a good handful of youtubers
Oh, me? I do more posting than viewing, honestly. If we all do the same, it solves this concern
I don’t understand what you do on YouTube.
I don’t enjoy it. I’ve never enjoyed it. I truly don’t understand how people can spend time watching it
You dont understand how people dont like infinite video content? I guess you also dont understand why people enjoy libraries too.
Yeah it doesn’t have much content atm.
So how about we populate it?
Record videos about your interests. Install kdenlive and edit your videos. Post them to PeerTube.
Same with blue sky. They hit me up with an age check.
Never looked back.
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.
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.
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 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
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.
Sucks to live in a Draconian country lol.
Guess we’ll need to make a series of discord servers with channels to hold YouTube content for people who live in shithole countries where people are guilty until proven innocent.
I meant that google will be banning people
Hunter2, that’s your time to shine!
Need a yt-dlp that uploads to another service that isn’t stupid lol
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.
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.
While it may be hard to cold turkey YouTube, at least I could make a start on that reading list…
Wouldn’t you only need to give ID for adult stuff though? Which is a small part of YouTube to quit using.
Depends on what they decide to determine is adult stuff.
I’ve seen videos about politics and history be deemed adult stuff because it discusses violence, despite it being in an entirely academic style.
deleted by creator
and then some youtube content creators are POS themselves(the main ones of course). alot of them turned that way. i only mainly follow the pet based ones now, and some smaller pet ones called pushed about youtubes algorithim a while aback, they had to quit youtube because they could not earn revenue.
and asian ytubers i used to followed drank the koolaid of maga during the pandemic, consistent attacks women for causing thier decline of thier channels(it was a whole drama by the way if you were a long time fan now its the new parasocial fans vs the old fans who know thier insidious behaviour), and hosting pos like TULSI gabbard on the channel right before the election.
Most youtubers I ended up still following have been ones who aren’t even trying to make a living off of it and just sharing stuff because it seems cool. Sometimes posting something maybe once a year or going silent for years then popping in with a video.
So kind of like how there isn’t really money to be made on lemmy and filled with people shilling stuff or going viral to start gets money off interactions.
There’s just a very desperate car sales person vibe to the career youtubers.
Well, duh. I don’t spend much time on youtube, what is there worth watching? Not much.
So can I do without looking up some nostalgic crap from the past? Yeah I could live without it.
I am finding out now, as youtube keeps demanding that I sign in. Fuck off, aint nothing worth that.
This is a strange opinion, YouTube has an insane amount of content for just about everyone. There’s so many fantastic creators and it has just about the best edutainment content anywhere. Terribly managed and the platform itself sucks, but there’s an incredible amount of amazing content on there for free.
I am not sure I need “content” in my life. I can waste time in a lots of ways. I always found myself thinking what am I getting out of this really?
Also, there is just so much on it, where would one even begin? I miss youtube when it started out, now that people make things for money, the idea is to just stretch things out and waste time. Like and Subscribe!
I made it a point to never subscribe to anything unless it was anonymous through a third party tool.
So, what do you think is actually “fantastic” on youtube?
Hey I don’t think anyone really needs content - it’s just something we like. As for what I like on there: Joe Scott, Andrew Huang, Ahoy, Philosophy Tube, Drew Gooden, Comicstorian, Drawfee, Hagerty, Engineering Explained, Throttle House, Tier Zoo, Foureyes Furniture, FUNKe, HiTop Films, In The Mix, Noodle, Internet Shaquille, LEMMiNO, Michael Reeves, MrMobile, Nakey Jakey, ReDriven, Not Just Bikes, Sarah-n-Tuned and I’m kinda tired of more names. But each of these is one of my great top tiers, and it’s so awesome that there’s this many (and more) people on there making great content. It’s okay to not want to engage in that though, I do get that.
Wow, I gotta say I asked and you delivered some ideas! Thanks for that I actually will check them out.
Its like youtube is so vast it is daunting to discover.
I wonder if, for me, the fact that you tube never transitioned from computer to TV. If I am on my computer I am already doing something, so I am less likely to watch anything. It just never occurs to me, and when I am at a TV are already have a million things vying for my attention that it never occurs to me to go to youtube.
Ah I see, that makes a lot of sense. I don’t really watch tv, I pull out my phone when I eat food. Or I’m studying on my laptop and youtube is easy when I take a break. I guess computers are so portable now it’s really easy for me to hop on youtube rather than pay subscriptions or find torrents and go through a show.
A lot of my work also involves just sight and some mental power so having youtube running on a second monitor where I can glance occasionally keeps me going much longer than I would otherwise.
I go for the science communicators. Not only are the good ones super educational and entertaining, but you also don’t even need to watch to gain from it. Just listen. I weld 45+ hours a week. Being able to throw on a 3 hour video on whatever I’m interested in that day is great :) but to each their own of course ^^. For my part I’ll enjoy it until it’s unbearable.
i got for those to, other SOME syndicated/professional science videos, or independant channels usually the people are young british people that are working to becoming a researcher in thier field(paleontology, biology,etc). occasionally you get some cringe comments from right wingers(its either wokeness, or something political)
I hear you about listening to stuff. I have a collection of podcasts to listen to and thinking about all the things I have learned over the years, its amazing.
There is so much to choose from.
there are alot of good ones, but theres alot fo bad ones that overshadow the others. PROPAGANDA, AI, and other forms of slop.
That’s true of everything on the internet these days though. I don’t think they overshadow the good, I think it’s more important than ever to seek out and appreciate the good.
the original good content, science, stems, PETS and then Movies and show clips. not certain kinds of Influencers content like beast, sniperwolf, pewpewdie
Haven’t heard a pewdiepie mention in years, but yeah, I agree. Add comedy and cars to the mix too though.
wierdly hes doing vlogs now, that he fled to japan, guess hes missing all that money and privilege.
