Seriously this was very surprising. I’ve been experimenting with GrayJay since it was announced and I largely think it’s a pretty sweet app. I know there are concerns over how it isn’t “true open source” but it’s a hell of a lot more open than ReVanced. Plus, I like the general design and philosophy of the app.
I updated the YouTube backend recently and to my surprise and delight they had added support for SponsorBlock. However, when I went to enable it, it warned me “turning this on harms creators” and made me click a box before I could continue.
Bruh, you’re literally an ad-blocking YouTube frontend. What kind of mental gymnastics does it take to be facilitating ad-blocking and then at the same time shame the end-user for using an extension which simply automates seeking ahead in videos. Are you seriously gonna tell me that even without Sponsorblock, if I skip ahead past the sponsored ad read in a video, that I’m “harming the creator”?
He’s still bitter someone Sponsorblocked his cat segment :-)
That’s unironically the reason I don’t use Sponsorblock, I don’t have any control over what people choose to mark as sponsored, what if they make me skip important content like cat segments?
You also don’t have to set it up to skip automatically, it will play through with a popup option to skip.
Sponsorblock has categories and you can choose which to skip.
Also it’s important to report incorrect submissions since if enough people report them they get removed and the users who do this reprimanded.
But which category is the cat in??
I think they said that they they technically don’t block ads. They just don’t implement them. If youtube were to somehow pack ads into the video stream, they wouldn’t go around it. Though I’m sure that in such case an adblock extension would pop up very fast.
How do you turn it on? I’m on Grayjay v 195 but I’m not seeing the option in settings.
You have to go first to “sources” and then it’s in the YouTube options
Since the app has ties to creators, I get why they disapprove of sponsorblock, but… Why did they implement it if they don’t like it?
Certainly there was big demand for it. I was hoping they’d eventually implement it as I’d been testing the app out
I get why they disapprove of sponsorblock
The app strips analytics and watch data preventing views from being counted. So the argument doesn’t logically make sense. They’re trying to make a moral argument out of something that doesn’t and can’t have any impact because the data used to justify watch-time and engagement isn’t provided.
I know there are concerns over how it isn’t “true open source” but it’s a hell of a lot more open than ReVanced.
For me, terms and definitions are very important. Just like right to repair is often misrepresented to the detriment of consumers, it’s important to only talk about open source if the license actually respects your freedom [1].
Open source has a lot of positive connotations and calling some project open source while only being source available feels like taking advantage of it.
It’s similar to how large corporations talking about being eco friendly with their packaging whilst making the actual devices as hard to repair as possible.
You’re right, the ReVanced project is open source, but the resulting app is not, since it’s modifying the official YouTube app.
I was kind of dissapointed when I read the new pipe team was having an issue with sponsor block, but tbh their reasoning makes a lot of sense:
https://newpipe.net/blog/pinned/newpipe-and-online-advertising/
And even thought I am using the sponsor block fork now I only skip the non-music part in music videos, because I do agree that creators have to make money somehow. And while I don’t love ads most of the time (sometimes they are really well made) my main issue with ads on Youtube/the wider Internet is how intrusive they are and them not respecting my privacy.
Well they won’t make any money off you watching them on NewPipe because the way it parses videos doesn’t register views or watched timestamps watched, the things that sponsors take into account when paying creators.
It’s why their argument is garbage, because they designed NewPipe the way they did for the purpose of privacy, which also defeats any method of making money through analytics yet they think Sponsorblock in this case stops them from making money, as if they could make money off NewPipe users at all in the first place.
If you really want to support someone on YouTube something like patreon is the way to go. Sponsored videos are life draining and a lot of extra work for paultry pay. But a legion of patreon subscribers can set someone up for a comfortable income from actually making things you want to see.
Depends on a sponsor. Some sponsors can pay crap loads of money to a big creator.
How sure are you that your view through NewPipe is getting counted on YouTube statistics so that the channel is getting a proper measure of reach?
Because I am not so sure the view is being counted, and much less the (not)viewing of the sponsorblock segment.
Views don’t get counted on Newpipe and if they do somehow it’s not accurate, as in it won’t count watch-time or parts of the video watched, the way it parses the video these analytics don’t get sent.
I know my klick on the link is counted if I am interested in the product they are selling.
There’s no reason in watching the sponsors through NewPipe, because the view doesn’t count, especially segment-based view.
The YouTube channel (and their sponsor) will never detect that you actually watched the sponsor. So, why bother watching it in the first place?
Real sponsors pay up front, or only add an additional bonus for affiliate link sales, if a creator accepts a deal on affiliate link money only, it’s their own fault. So if you always fast forward through sponsors and don’t care, you might as well enable it to save the bandwidth and power.
Skipping sponsors automatically means you definitely won’t be influenced by the marketing, so it hurts the creator because the sponsor might not work with them again because of low sales impact.
Anyway, I’ll continue to use NewPipe x SponsorBlock and the Firefox addon.
Do these particular advertisers asks the influencers to show their statistics?
I mean, wouldn’t the creator have to take a screenshot and send that info in? How do the advertisers even know people are skipping through sponsored segments?
Also I’ve never understood. I’m not going to buy a subscription service because someone I watch is offering it. If I want it I’m going to buy it regardless whether I’ve seen its ad or not, and the creators are just offering a discount code that can help them as well.
Lost views is not lost sales. That’s just stupid.
Lost views is not lost sales. That’s just stupid.
That’s why the ad-funded internet is referred to as a bubble and people are saying that the bubble will burst. It’s money-making based on the promise it’ll make the company paying the advertiser money, without any guarantee. You can’t make money out of nothing, people have tried and failed for years if not decades, it always comes crashing down, either through crypto scams, pyramid/ponzi scemes or though worthless investments like the Dot-com crash, it’ll always blow up in your face sooner or later. Which is what is slowly happening with the ad-funded internet, it is becoming overvalued similar to the dot-com investments.
Are they even able to see when their baked in ads get skipped over?
Probably, I’m fairly certain they get told which parts of the video get skipped and which get rewatched.
Kinda. YouTube has stats about which times of a video are watched more proportionally for a single view. You can ironically usually use this data to see when a sponsor spot ends (to skip to it) since there will be a peak in the watch time curve.
Shame is an artificial construct that I am choosing not to opt into. Thanks for letting us know that sponsorblock is in, I’m turning it on now.
Yeah I agree, I just thought it was funny… Not “haha funny” but a bit jarring
Shame is a mismatch between ego and ego-ideal, whereas guilt is a mismatch between ego and super-ego. The ego-ideal in shame does depend on social norms. But that is by no means “artificial”.
Blocking YouTube’s advertising is necessary for privacy, and it punishes YouTube for their bad business practices.
But sponsors aren’t underhanded like that and I feel like they’re the type of thing we should really be promoting as an alternative to privacy invading ads, and hopefully a way for creators to move off of YouTube eventually.
A lot of sponsors are very exploitative companies in their own right, and I don’t owe them my time or attention.
The point is that YouTubers pay for that with their own reputation, if I followed a YouTuber that promoted exploitative companies I would stop following that YouTuber - why would you want to watch their content anyway?
Just use the NewPipe + Sponsorblock fork.
I do too and I’ve been wondering why we would need anything else 👍
I don’t think newpipe works with recommendations or leaving comments does it?
correct, newpipe has no account integration be design for privacy
I wonder if one could design an extension that would do a rough recommendation algorithm locally. I use recommendations a ton, so I can’t really switch to newpipe.
Commenting on YouTube? Gross.
Eh, at least they added support for it. Good for them. Still looking at this app with some skepticism but so far seems to be doing what it sets out to do.
Seems to me an overreaction to complain about a single checkbox suggesting that people who make YouTube videos make actual money from sponsorships where ads get them jack shit. They added Sponsorblock but just have a one-time warning, is that really big of a deal? It’s informational, and if you don’t like it, ignore it and move on with your day.
If they were more insistent like a popup every time you used it I could see getting upset about it.
It’s not a big deal, just something I thought was odd. I’m not gonna claim checking a box is ruining my life or anything.
Yeah. I use NewPipe myself just to be able to enjoy videos with my screen off, that Youtube has locked behind a subscription for no good reason.
That said Rossman is someone who sticks to his principles and the FUTO group is an extension of those principles. At heart he’s a New York businessman so he knows that people need money to live, but he also isn’t trying to stop people to do what they like with tech that they supposedly have purchased.
i keep sponsorblock on but i pretty much have it set on manual skip by default. i mostly use it for critical role (whom i also subscribe to on twitch) shows to skip the intermission or for twitch vods on youtube to skip the beginning and after parts where it’s just the streamer talking to chat.
but i also don’t understand how skipping in video sponsored segments loses them money like it’s not a youtube thing it’s a creator thing like television adverts. how would they know if it’s been skipped wouldn’t they already get the money to do the sponsorship before the video is posted?
I’m confused about your stance on ReVanced. It’s about as open-source as you can get https://github.com/revanced/revanced-patches
no it’s not. the modifications are open source, but the base client is the same old closed source Youtube app.
With ReVanced there is a core underlying app being patched which is not OSS. With GrayJay, the source of the whole thing is source-available
I understand that and wouldn’t have commented if you said that. Instead you said that, quote, ReVanced, end quote, is not open source.
My understanding is that it literally can’t be used in an open fashion since it critically requires a proprietary closed base.
Some source code is available but the entire thing is not open source.
I think you guys are just discussing semantics. Revanced as a project is the patches themselves, so Revanced is open source. But a YouTube app patched with the Revanced patches is not.
Exactly. Could have just said YouTube is closed source from the start when ReVanced is 100% open-source.
That’s a better way to frame it.
The patch is ‘about as open source as you can get’ but the actual application is far from it.
Well the app it creates on your device is not open source. The patch is, but the actual software being run isn’t.
Also you can just use actual quotation marks my dude, no need to say “quote end quote” like some kind of Dan Carlin impersonator
