What a waste of resources. Imagine employing some of the most brilliant engineers on the planet and allocating man-hours towards artificially worsening the experience for your userbase in order to blackmail them into paying you, and giving them back what they had in the first place.
At least this is a loosing game for Google, since this is client side behaviour.
The best engineer I've ever known ended up working for years on optimizing ad space auction time by micro seconds.
They may have been extremely competent at this, but if they decided to spend years of their relatively short ephemeral life on such a useless project, perhaps they weren’t the best at the time. Perhaps they needed money and were focusing on family life, I don’t know. Who I am to judge? I’m judging though.
> At least this is a loosing game for Google, since this is client side behaviour.
This is where their most brilliant engineers have bested you, because they control the client too.
While I'm not pro YouTube, I think it's fine for companies to decide how to monetise their product, including things which were originally free. If you don't like free services, stop using them
If a company wants to offer its service as a loss-leader to outlast its competitors who offered their services at a cost its users were willing to pay, then that company has no room to complain if people don't want to pay the last-game-in-town's jacked-up rates!
There is no moral high-ground for YouTube to take here.
Wait what? When was there ever a competitor to YouTube?
Did you travel from a parallel universe?
Sorry man, the whole industry was created by YouTube paying creators ad revenue.
>If you don't like free services, stop using them
Problem is, there's no real alternative for YouTube. It's a monopoly.
That’s not remotely true.
Okay, so list which websites I can use to watch all kinds of content that I can find on YouTube.
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.
Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Tiktok all fulfil the 'whatever topic I am interested in this second, there are videos about it' property, though admittedly they do not have near as much meritorious long-form content as YouTube.
is use yewtu.be from time to time on web, and pipepipex on android.
Is this product or hampering the way the web works with video? Go to any other site with a <video> tag and you won't face similar issues.
Aren't they going to win in the long run with remote attestation?
Maybe ads-as-business-model is like political ideology - it is not a human universal but must adapt to the place: for instance collectivism over individualism in East Asia, theocratic conservatism over democracy in Afghanistan -- maybe ads as business model is despicable to some regions, but accepted in others? Albania it's apparently illegal for YouTube to serve ads?
> Imagine employing some of the most brilliant engineers on the planet
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 ...
Agreed. I was leaving the mall with lots of great goods I had found, but then the guard stopped me and told me I was stealing! Imagine paying that guy a salary just to blackmail me into paying them! This is an outrage.
> Imagine employing some of the most brilliant engineers on the planet
Maybe we should stop with that tired fallacious rhetoric? Just because you work at a massive company doesn’t make you “brilliant”.
Apple has entered the chat
*Allocating man-hours towards making sure that users actually pay for the service they're using, either via youtube subscription or ads
Google is the richest company literally on the entire planet, you really don't need to go to bat for monopolistic practices.
Monetizing a basic OS feature is not a good look.
the only time ive tried to use a feature like that, is when im in the car listening to a podcast or something.
juggling the phone to not only skip ads, but also forcing the phone screen to be active, is a hazard.
In my case this loophole being closed, wouldn't make me pay for premium... but it would make a younger version of me certainly more dangerous on the road.
If they wanted users to pay for the service they're using they should never have made YouTube free in the first place.
They made it free just like any other startup makes a free tier to obtain market share.
[delayed]
Drug dealers invented this business model, they would give heroin to young children for free and then once hooked hike the prices or force them to turn tricks to pay for their habit. It’s effective but not very admirable to say the least.
I've also seen this done for cheese, do you find that equally reprehensible? Or is the argument just rhetorical sleight of hand, where "drug dealers do X, so therefore X must be bad"? Drug dealers also consume food, and you know who else consumes food? You.
Maybe if the Youtube subscription wasn't 10x what they earn from a single user with ads, that would be more believable option.
No worse than what a lot of their other "brilliant" minds are working on - ads.
Whataboutism is just fascinating. How myopic must your world view be that when you see one bad thing, you immediately try to justify it by pointing out another bad thing?
Newpipe remains one of the best solutions for background playback. They do tend to move pretty quickly to patch "fixes" that YouTube throw in now and again. It's also useful for video backups if you need to preserve them for any reason.
I am using Tubular, a NewPipe fork that has built-in SponsorBlock and ReturnYouTubeDislike features.
I'm a NewPipe user as well, unfortunately the experience is getting worse there too. Might be because I also use a VPN, but after every couple of videos I have to cooldown my usage until the IP block is reset.
This started happening for me a few weeks ago.
I recommend PipePipe: https://github.com/InfinityLoop1308/PipePipe
> It's also useful for video backups if you need to preserve them for any reason.
You can download only the soundpart as mp4 or opus too.
Why install additional software? Firefox hasn't broken for me only the Chrome clones.
Because modern websites are unusable on mobile; it's a feature and not a bug.
I've been using Firefox on android for over a decade, including for YouTube, and maybe once a year I encounter a problem where I need to use Chrome for a specific website.
I released a browserbox variant many years ago that could ensure background playback on YouTube. Despite multiple posts here and on PH, it never gained any traction. It seemed people were simply not interested in overcoming no background playback for free on every platform (including mobile).
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.
The issue isn't with the payment, it's that you've burnt a ton of money to extinguish all competition (by giving away stuff for free) and then, when you're a monopoly because of network effects, you lock it in and charge whatever you want.
If YouTube allowed syndication with other websites, for example, so I could watch videos on whatever website I wanted (with an appropriate portion of the revenue going to YouTube), I would have no problems with them changing their monetization model.
It’s called “opportunity cost.”
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.
Yeah, that marriage situation can be totally tough. If you're going through that, I feel for you. I can relate, but then who of us has ever really picked the "right" person to marry the first time around? Sure, some get lucky. But often our wapred childhoood expecdtatiosn contaminate the idea of a perfect match with something that feels familiar but is actually wrong for us, or worse, just abusive.
Anyway, in this case I think the analogy is a little overblown because the stakes are so different, but is revealing. You can way more easily divest of a software product than a marriage (presumably, tho that may differ locally). But, as in marriage, there's a interesting nuance: the stories we tell ourselves about what went wrong are so often one-sided, which lacks empathy for how the other person is probably just doing their best. A similar empahty mismatch with the entitlement of consumers who don't comprehend that the value they expect a person to provide them for free, should actually be compensated. As in, a free exchange.
That someone might confuse those could tell you 'something about them.' Or it could just be an honest mistake, on their part. That we're all likely to make.
Still the trigger to ape-brained fairness-wiring seems similar, and embodies that same one way empathy. Free and fair exchange, in commerce and relationships, should be based on more of a mutual empahty.
Thanks for bringing it up!
yt-dlp is great if on desktop.
I do this, then send it to VLC on mobile.
Background playback is a feature of the browser and operating system, not YouTube.
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.
They removed the UI option to find newest videos first yesterday.
Serving requests is a feature of Youtube and if they don't want to serve your client... well you didn't pay for it anyway.
They corned the market, drove everyone out of it, and are now rent-seeking. Can't say you have much of a choice between youtube and any other video provider that has the same content on it.
>They corned the market, drove everyone out of it, and are now rent-seeking.
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
The equivalent here is if Sony owned the most watched TV network (by far) and decided that it would work fully on Sony Bravia tvs. People with LG or Samsung TV's could only watch a degraded version.
i had that happen on firefox mobile months ago and installed video background play fix which all it does is stop sending the js hooks for when tab/window focus is lost. it was something clearly targeted to mobile browsers for people like me who don't bother with official apps anymore as they're riddled with antipatterns and ads. you can just youtube to the homepage like it's an app anyway.
+N for video background play fix extension. Highly recommended on firefox.
This and ubo on android really make firefox a really great (the best imo) browser on android.
This will be a positive if browsers (extensions?) allow the ability to spoof visibility by site. Most websites have no business knowing if they're in the foreground or background.
Nice - you’ve just increased significantly power consumption of your browser!
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.
The user should be making the choice - not the website. The website could be informed about being backgrounded, if the user chooses to. But the user should have the priority in the decision chain - their choice overrides any that the website makes.
That is what it means to have control over your own computing.
That's actually quite easy. onBlur, etc
Just to be precise, onBlur is a JavaScript event for an item that loses its focus, visibilitychange is what you actually need to detect tab changing.
Revanced allows you to patch the official Android YouTube apk to enable this feature alongside many others, including a block, Sponsorblock, and dislikes.
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.
The real reason why sideloading is soon to be blocked by Google, along with NewPipe.
If this may help you, some browser allow youtube videos in PIP (e.g. Orion). That keeps the video going, you can scale it down in a corner.
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.
There must be reaching a state where there must have more code for blocking all the stuffs there are trying to block than displaying videos. No wonder its UI feels bloated.
This is so annoying.
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.
On iOS you can get free background play with Youtube App by putting the video in picture-in-picture -> locking the screen, -> going to control center and hitting the play button. Don’t let Google know!
For me just pressing the power button twice and play on the lock screen quickly does it.
It should be trivial to work around; for instance, yt-dlp or so (https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp) and I think you can as-is stream e. g. via mpv or something, probably to the browser too. Some python script for an ad-hoc localhost webserver I'd think.
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.
I'm confused. Wouldn't Brave just stop telling YouTube if it's in the background or not?
If you’re on iOS, put the video on full screen and then put Safari in the background. Next, press play in the Control Center. This should now allow the audio to play in the background.
What a shame. What's the point even? I'm not going subscribe to YouTube premium anyway, and even less install and use the YouTube app. What happens with this move is just that I will just use YouTube less. I believe that's the case for most people who chose to use YouTube in a browser precisely for background playback.
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.
Perhaps that's what they desire. Serving YouTube video has marginal cost and you provide marginal zero value. Losing you as a customer is probably desired.
That's a very narrow view. YouTube is the only reason I have a Google account. Because of it I use some of their other products. And because I'm connected to my YouTube/Google account, they can track my behavior across products and across devices. My usage profile has value if only because it can be correlated to others (who don't bock ads), and because I share link to their platform on social media and messaging app. That's still true even if I'm able from time to time to continue listening to a YouTube video while my phone is in my pocket. But I will share less link and leave them a lot less usage data if they push me away from their products.
Yeah and people have been trying to pay artists in exposure for eons now. I’m sure the artists are really feeling bad about the decision now.
The point is that youtube is an ad-funded service, and if you're not watching the ads, Google is losing money on you.
Bwaaa an evil monopolistic empire won't get our money, that's so sad really. They're racking up tens of billions of money every quarter, we don't. I carefully do my best not to give any money to Microsoft, Google and the likes. They must be dismantled anyway.
If they are an evil monopolistic empire, why are you upset you can’t use their services? It’s not like watching shorts is a matter of life/death.
Still working on IronFox (Firefox fork) on Android with the Video Background Fix extension.
Will someone _please_ make a decent linux phone already so we can stop this nonsense.
You're free to do so, probably your million dollar idea right there.
still works for me
Not for long, probably.
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.
Fuck google
I've noticed yesterday before and after update. So annoying. I so fucking hate Google and what they've become.
This is precisely why I don’t use YT anymore. On top of these scummy behaviour on Alphabets part… the content has taken a deep dive because more and more people are creating it for the “algorithm” and less for the content.
Imagine trying to take a basic browser function we’ve all taken for granted for decades and attempt to paywall it as ‘Background playback is a feature intended to be exclusive for YouTube Premium members.’
Get fucked. I vote we remove API access to any focus state information.
Fuck you google.
It upsets me to see YouTube Premium apologists despite all the hostile moves by YouTube. YouTube Premium is an extortion scheme. When there are enough paying customers, YouTube Premium will begin showing ads to them. They won't forget sugarcoating ads as being “unobtrusive” or “environment-supporting” or whatever. But guess what? If you don't want to see them, you can upgrade to YouTube Premium Plus and continue being an apologist.
But think how hard it is for them to earn money to make up for all the billions they’ve used to create de facto monopoly in video space? Won’t someone think of poor capitalists trying to squeeze the niche dry?
> YouTube Premium is an extortion scheme.
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.