> Are YouTube employees raiding HN or something?

From the HN Guidelines[0]:

> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.

(Disclaimer: I'm not a YouTube/Google employee, just someone who cares a lot about preserving the quality of discussion HN is known for.)

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Is there a meta area to discuss "astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like", or do we just pretend they don't exist?

It seems like there should be a monthly thread where people are allowed to openly discuss criticism (constructively).

It may be mistaken on HN, but all social media companies are gamed by corporations, political parties, foreign governments, native governments, intelligence agencies, powerful churches, lobby groups, media companies, advertisers.

Noted. Apologies!

I'd consider it a lower quality content if this possibilities aren't discussed.

Downvoted this for complaining about downvotes, breaking site guidelines (oh, not only that, it combines snark and insinuation about astroturfing too). Votes swing a lot, so when more votes come in and previously downvoted comments turn positive, complaints like this just end up as pure noise. Happens all the time.

There is snark in your own comment, so I find this criticism ironic. My comment was intended to be light-hearted, although I admit it missed the mark.

not to mention the "play in background" functionality that google anti-featured away.

You need Youtube Premium for that. I have a legacy Google Play Music subscription and sometimes I feel like my experience vastly different than people without Youtube Premium. I use Youtube enough I'm ok paying to not see ads and play videos with my phone screen off.

Oh they have been very clear about needing youtube premium for that. I do get it to an extent. If people want to use it as a jukebox. I have spotify and mp3s for that. I want to play videos in the background that don't have actual visual content ("people talking to the camera" style) and google doesn't want that. Luckily I can use alternatives for nearly all content like this, first and foremost actual RSS podcasts.

As for the experience being very different on premium: I recently had to use YT on a browser without uBlock/uMatrix and I believe I got a taste of that difference. Scary stuff, not sure how people cope with all the shit being thrown at them.

I dont mind paying for the feature but I do mind having google aplication on my phone (which I dont - none).

The trust in google not taking away my contacts, spying on my position, requiring to have their gms on my phone (which will further grab as much of my data they can have) is virtually zero.

And with a very good and well known couse.

If you open YouTube in desktop mode (in the browser) and switch tabs, you can still play the video via the notification manager popup (not sure how it's called, basically when you drag down the top bar, there is still this sticky YouTube notification). This is how you can get free background play without 3rd party apps.

s/anti-featured away/decided to charge for

On Firefox for Android for example, the vast majority of video playing sites automatically continue to play in the background. YouTube should, but it has code specifically to check for Firefox tabs being backgrounded and pause the player. So it's going out of its way to disable a feature of the browser. Happily this can be reversed with an extension, but yes, it is an intentional anti-feature. Whether you agree with that business practice is your own judgement.

Personally I think the real value add of Youtube Premium is the ability to offline videos in the official app; that's not something the browser can normally do. Well, and the secondary effect of contributing somewhat to creators, even if the payout isn't significant through that channel. It's nice for it to be automatic and not require an explicit subscription.

Fwiw, the relatively few creators who are talking about it publicly tend to agree that cpm is (much) higher for premium users than users monetized through ads. So if you want creators to get more money, paying for premium is better than watching ads.

This right here is why I maintain my subscription even though I do not run the official app. :) Well, that and I mostly watch YouTube on my desktop with an ad blocker, so creators weren't getting ad impressions from me anyway. I figure that's a fair trade.

> I really wonder why so many innocuous, on-topic comments about NewPipe are being downvoted in this thread. Are YouTube employees raiding HN or something? /s

At this point pretty much all comments saying that this is bypassing paid features are downvoted into oblivion and grayed out, so what exactly are you talking about?

You know, usually when people use "/s" to denote sarcasm I scoff. Because "who would need such obvious sarcasm denoted?

Yet, here we are...

And yet you are the one who misinterpreted the sarcasm here. Look at your sibling comment.

Maybe you should read that sibling comment again?

The part they marked "/s" was sarcasm, the sibling comment isn't saying otherwise.

A: all good comments about NewPipe are being downvoted

B: no, all bad comments about NewPipe are being downvoted

A: the votes have changed since I posted it so my comment is no longer relevant

Tell me again how they missed the obvious sarcasm.

It really is great! Been using it for years. Tends to break sometimes, but lately not. Especially great for audio as background sound

I agree. I wish it could cast to my TV but otherwise it's great.

Can't you just cast the entire screen?

I figured it out. I can download the vids and cast with the VLC app or use the "external player" option in NewPipe to play with VLC which can cast it.

Yes but then you can't use your phone.

Oh, I see, thanks for explaining.

> Are YouTube employees raiding HN or something?

Anything that can be interpreted even the slightest in favor of Google/YouTube is automatically downvoted by the HN mob. If anything, this thread is a prime example of that.

The DRM will get broken if there's enough effort dedicated to it just like every latest movie or TV show somehow ends up on torrent sites despite pretty advanced DRM.

Netflix shows end up on torrent sites in short order, yet youtube-dl doesn't support netflix (contrary to what the name suggests, it supports hundreds of sites besides youtube: https://ytdl-org.github.io/youtube-dl/supportedsites.html)