At least this is a loosing game for Google, since this is client side behaviour.
There is no moral high-ground for YouTube to take here.
Problem is, there's no real alternative for YouTube. It's a monopoly.
Vimeo? It's basically dead. DailyMotion? It could've been an alternative, but they've recently deleted most old videos. Peertube? Nice idea in theory, but lack of content.
I am not sure those who work at Google are all brilliant - but it should also not matter, because they support Evil here. They should be ashamed for working for Evil. Guess if the money is right ...
Maybe we should stop with that tired fallacious rhetoric? Just because you work at a massive company doesn’t make you “brilliant”.
This started happening for me a few weeks ago.
You can download only the soundpart as mp4 or opus too.
Same time, one can appreciate the YouTube business: once you give something away for free, people absolutely loose their fucking minds if you make it paid. Once you set the bar to zero for payment, people will murder in the streets and despise you if you reasonably charge for what could have been a paid product all along. So there's a psychological blocker to switching on payment that people are ready to go to war for. It's the same blocker that cripples "open source" sustainability. People quickly develop an entitlement-callous, and feel cheated if you require payment instead of just continuing to surrender value to them.
It reminds of how a group of primates will kill a handler who gives cake to one, but not the group. This "free / paid" tension triggers some kind of deep-rooted human fairness wiring that is really tricky to extinguish once activated. That's why you should never open source your code and never give stuff away for free, if you plan to posslby make money from it somehow or make it paid in future. Because if you ever withhold the siphon of value related to ads or other 'you as a product' models, they will launch a jihad against you.
I think it's interesting how the human fairness reflex, often correct, breaks down in the context of "provider / consumer" dynamics. Even if the provider is not some "evil mega corp" but simply a solo software creator, people will still feel you are attempting to rob them of all dignity and debase their honor if you require payment for what was previously gratis.
Oh well. Live and learn, YouTube.
If you marry somebody and they suddenly become a totally different person and try to extort you a common reaction is to feel deceived and unhappy. They have cheated you in a sense of the opportunity cost of being able to marry someone else.
That people might not understand that tells you something about them.
https://github.com/revanced/revanced-manager
Rossmann's Grayjay app offers the same functionality in a separate standalone client. It has a paid pro mode, but is free software. I use this on devices that I haven't signed in with Google.
Consumer laws should prevent Google doing this. We need an anti-DMCA to make circumvention, bypassing, or disabling of user’s device or OS features illegal.
It's almost dumping [1]: they gave a service away for free (even if they were losing a lot of money) just to make it unfeasible for any other company to start a competing service.
Vimeo could have been a competitor, but then they pivoted to a professional market and now that Bending Spoons bought them [2], I'm not sure they will even have a future.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy) [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45197302
This and ubo on android really make firefox a really great (the best imo) browser on android.
Browsers will “slow down” various aspects of pages when they’re not visible, like animations or timers, to save on battery usage on laptops or phones.
Even if your remove explicit APIs for backgrounding, pages can still use heuristics to detect anyway.
That is what it means to have control over your own computing.
Otherwise the other option is to drag the tab out to a window of its own, they can't know it's not visible, at least that works for Twitch ads.
Along the same line is that you can watch any hour long video without interruptions unless it is music where you will get interrupted every couple of minutes with "are you there?" dialogues.
What is much more worrying is how aggressively Google tries to abuse its de-facto monopoly. I have said it before, I will say it again: Google abusing everyone else is a bad situation. We need to make Google smaller again.
As an example: knowing that I won't be able to keep the sound playing for the 5 minutes in between two buses when I need to walk and pay attention, I'll probably just launch a podcast from the beginning of my hour of transportation so that I'm not interrupted. For these five minutes, they loose me for almost an hour.
I've noticed YouTube likes to A/B test a lot. If you use it signed out you pretty much get a new set of minor changes each time.
Get fucked. I vote we remove API access to any focus state information.
Fuck you google.
One might also say it was unsustainable from the start, video is incredibly expensive to host and especially moderate.
All we're seeing right now is the beginning of the end of the ad-financed world. Someone has to pay the bills in the end and advertisement spending is on the way down, more and more of it is going to influencers/TTL instead of traditional ATL/BTL marketing.