Considering they said almost all, that’s not the gotcha you think it is.

but apparently nobody wanted SD cards so they dropped them from all the devices.

I think you have that the wrong way around. It is not that nobody wanted SD cards, but that phone manufacturers realised limiting storage capacity while making continually thinner devices (up to a point) would increasingly drive cyclical demand. “Is your phone getting full after a year or two? Well this one has MORE storage and look how slim and sexy it is by comparison!” It is not as though there was an organic consumer demand for phones without memory cards; the profit-motive drives these changes.

It is an interesting project, not sure where it goes. The title is deeply misleading though. The features of ReVanced make YouTube so much better, whereas this project doesn’t seem to be about making YouTube better so much as circumnavigating YouTube for the comment boxes and as your hub to creators. They seem to be doing different things.

When you say premium features, which exactly? I imagine you’re referring to the xManager patched Spotify, which I also use, but it’s not really premium. Ads cut out and can play an album without shuffle. But can’t choose audio quality, download, etc

Interesting write-up. But I wonder e.g. what the benefit of this would be over using Wireguard? It’s easy enough to set up on a UK router and then with a tap of the button you’re sending requests via your personal VPN to UK to the internet.

I’m being completely serious and I’m interested to understand more about what you mean.

It doesn’t strike me that way when you also write things like this:

you’re equating it to something like healthcare and education.

“equating” sets up a straw man. Such a tactic gives me the impression you think of this as some sort of battle that you want to win rather than a good-faith discussion.

What I had written was not an equating – and I think you should have or indeed did see that – only a comparison to show that something’s being describable as a product or service “in some sense” does not mean it is the sort of thing we pay for in a traditional way. This contradicts the central inference of your argument.

The answer to how I would actually characterise the “service” of YouTube is already in the first comment, so I’ll just quote it again:

For one thing, the “service” here has risen to a point of ubiquity that it’s a de facto public space. Everything is on YouTube – legacy media channels, individual enthusiasts, alternative media outlets, the worlds of tech, fashion, politics, sports – you name it. If you were deprived of all access to it, you would have a qualitatively poorer access [to] what is going on in society. So it’s not equivalent to a traditional service like a trade.

I stand by that; YouTube has a near monopoly over that media form, and if you require access to information and essentially a key plank of the online public square, then you need to go through it. I regard it as a (positive rather than negative) right that we do all have – not to use YouTube specifically but for information, opinion, discourse, politics and more to be available to us all. As it happens, YouTube is a key platform for the arrangement of all these things. Twitter also is/was, which is why Musk’s buyout was in principle concerning, and then in practice very shit once he created a two tier system of access to and impact on that public space.

So mediums with advertising should not be allowed to seek monetary payment? Only mediums without advertising should do so?

Not quite sure how you got to the point you did there. There are different ways to advertise – billboards and TV/radio adverts, e.g., while often odious, are something you can more easily divert your attention from and which are not tracking devices or the product of turning you personally into an item for sale. I dislike them and would prefer a world without them but I don’t think their being attached to organisations in and of itself ought to deprive those organisations of income.

I’m not understanding your logic here.

That is apparent.

For me it’s pretty simple. There is a product - would you like to pay for it?

This is called “begging the question” as a response to me – I’ve called into question exactly both your premise and conclusion, for reasons you’ve not actually engaged with, and then you’ve re-asserted them. You have assumed what you’ve set out to prove.

(1) it is not simply a product (or service – you’ve changed tune there), for the reasons I’ve already outlined. Its use and availability is not analogous to something you can pick off the shelf or pay a tradesperson to do for you. (2) therefore, the question of paying for it (and how) demands different kinds of answer. In the country I’m from, e.g., healthcare is a right and not paid for, neither is early-years education up to 18, and so on. Both are “products” or “services” in some sense of the term, but to speak of payment here is complex and the answer doesn’t simply carry over from thinking about normal products/services.

I feel that all the scary words you can add to a paragraph about advertising based revenue for digital mediums is just your tool to justify your behavior of sticking it to the man.

This can only be a disingenuous response, surely? Rather than engage with the criticism of the nature of modern internet advertising and how corporations use it to affect people, you’ll just summarise it as “scary words”.

in the end, you’re leeching off a service you enjoy.

I don’t think that’s a fair or true statement.

For one thing, the “service” here has risen to a point of ubiquity that it’s a de facto public space. Everything is on YouTube – legacy media channels, individual enthusiasts, alternative media outlets, the worlds of tech, fashion, politics, sports – you name it. If you were deprived of all access to it, you would have a qualitatively poorer access of what is going on in society. So it’s not equivalent to a traditional service like a trade.

For another, blocking ads is not merely refusal to pay a fee of some kind. Advertisements are cognitively intrusive, designed to affect your willpower and decision-making, used to track and control your behaviour, compromise your digital safety, and turn you into a product for companies to whom you do not give your consent for the opportunity to be exploited. Blocking that system of “payment” is not simply prudent but right, and the choice between paying a monetary fee or being so exploited is not a fair choice at all.

For me, what works perfectly is this setup:

Desktop – Adguard

Android – YouTube ReVanced

Never get adverts ever. The day I’m forced is the day I stop using it altogether.

That said, it might be worth looking into Stremio and Debride. I’ve been seeing that pop up lately and it’s mostly torrent based.

Just a correction on this point. With a debrid service, it’s not actually torrent-based – not in the sense that at any point you’d be utilising any p2p traffic/mechanisms. It relies on torrenting activity in a different sense, in that what you download is encrypted DDL files from the debrid provider’s central cache, whose origin is in torrents. And if there’s no files meeting your search query stored already in the cache, but which are available through public trackers, then you’d request the service downloads the torrent to its cache. So at no point are you accessing peers. Worth noting that afaik, this is all for public trackers, not private.

I’m a bit astonished how often I see this kind of thread, even here. It’s like when people complain about FOSS apps charging subscriptions or standalone fees. How many times does it have to be pointed out that piracy as an activity does not define piracy as a movement or a collective?

I’m certain this simplistic “piracy = not paying for stuff” take can only come from a kind of ignorant individualism, one that lacks any structural analysis of why, when, and for what content people turn to piracy (and why, when, etc, they stop).

He would have been better off not talking about harm directly but the ability to cause harm; he actually used that wording in an earlier comment in this chain. (Basically strawmanned himself lol.)

Because as a standalone argument for encryption, it’s fairly sound – hey, the ability of somebody to cause harm via encrypted messaging channels is the selfsame ability to do good [/prevent spying/protect privacy, whistleblowers/etc], and since the good outweighs the bad, we have to protect the ability to cause harm (sadly).

The problem is it’s still disanalogous – the ability to cause harm via LLM use is not the selfsame ability to do good (or to do otherwise what you want). My LLM’s refusing to tell me how to make a bomb has no impact on its ability to tell me how to make a pasta bake.

They’re allowed to give it to people who ask.

I think that very much depends on what sort of article/chapter, what publisher, and what the nature of the copy the author has is (e.g. preprint, journal published version download, unpublished Word manuscript, etc.) It’s hard to make any true generalisations here.

Let’s just turn everything into TikTok, hey.

Well the sync across devices would be the main thing that people would deem worth having, just not at that price.

Yup that’s my one issue, otherwise I’d swap in a heartbeat. You can do it through nextcloud servers but not any free one so far as I can see. Wouldn’t know where to start with a paid alternative.

Edit: Podverse, also FOSS, has a sync feature as part of their subscription. It’s $18/year. Haven’t used it to know how well it works, but much cheaper than Pocket Casts anyway (and a 3 month free trial it seems). It’s on F-Droid.

Potentially, I suppose. But then most people who want a pirated copy of an article are probably looking for something with at least the right pagination – makes citation easier. So it depends on how much effort you’re willing to give to that endeavour haha. Anything is better than nothing in a pinch though.

Considering the version you were given by the author could be watermarked in some way, and they could get into shit from a publisher if you uploaded it for mass retrieval, you ought not to do this without their express permission. It’s different if you had downloaded the article from a journal/database yourself, or if it was some other version (like an unformatted manuscript).

I’ve been learning French on there for awhile now and it’s been extremely effective por moi.

I wouldn’t normally comment on a spelling issue, however, in this case…

+1 for LT. The guy that runs it certainly has an open source ethos. The German one despite being a “Complete” series is frustratingly very incomplete, but that aside it was a useful way into the language. The word order explanations were particularly good. Everything is always free and the project as a whole is expanding with the help of volunteers and donations. It’s a good thing to be a part of.