> 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 ...

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

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

Maybe we should stop with that tired fallacious rhetoric? Just because you work at a massive company doesn’t make you “brilliant”.

*Allocating man-hours towards making sure that users actually pay for the service they're using, either via youtube subscription or ads

No worse than what a lot of their other "brilliant" minds are working on - ads.

I recommend PipePipe: https://github.com/InfinityLoop1308/PipePipe

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 am using Tubular, a NewPipe fork that has built-in SponsorBlock and ReturnYouTubeDislike features.

Why install additional software? Firefox hasn't broken for me only the Chrome clones.

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.

> 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.

yt-dlp is great if on desktop.

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.

+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.

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.

That's actually quite easy. onBlur, etc

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.

The point is that youtube is an ad-funded service, and if you're not watching the ads, Google is losing money on you.

You're free to do so, probably your million dollar idea right there.

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.

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.