I watch YouTube sometimes, it is becoming too addictive, can'd simply not use it because it has all the stuff, got to search alternatives, but since there is none that are both good and have relevant content - at least there is an alternative to its horrible website's UI - a cross-platform software piece called FreeTube.
My gripes with youtube
Essentially youtube is just a video-hosting, that allows people to upload videos and other people to watch them, right?
Wrong. It is much more nowadays.
Youtube is a social network. At least this is how it is seen and promoted by google that owns it. It has these engagement algorithms that are designed so you spend more and more time watching youtube. It is targeted at revenue (of course, running things costs money, duh) - and youtube tries to squeeze money out of whatever possible. Therefore, over years youtube has gotten worse and worse. You can't "just" watch the videos - you have to do it by the rules.
Fun fact: Apparently YouTube was initially meant as a video-dating website called "Tune In, Hook Up"
And boy I've become sorta addicted to it, not even noticing. Mindlessly clicking the home button to see if there's something interesting for me.
Here is a list of things that bother me:
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The interface. It is getting worse and worse with each year. Google once boasted that youtube's UI is being "designed" by some smart automated system that assesses where users click most and decides where to place elements.
Whether it is true or not, it bothers me. The UI is a clusterf*ck nowadays. The interface is all over the place: the comments, the "social" buttons (that work like crap, too), the metrics I do not care about. Some videos get titles force-translated into your selected language - and there seems to be no way to let youtube know you prefer the titles to be in their original language. -
Unclear watch history. Some videos are simply missing from it for some reason (maybe same as they are missing from subscriptions? I don't know, I don't care: as long as it does not work reliably - it does not work reliably.)
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YouTube being artificially slowed down in non-chromuim browsers. It is silently slowing video buffering when it detects an ad blocker. Basically artificially impeding the experience. Not to mention the mobile phone experience being artificially limited unless you have a premium (only for sake of forcing you to pay for it), and even if you pay - you don't get much better experience.
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YouTube hates it when you are not using Chrome to view it! Especially does it hate firefox-based browsers. That is - the website works better, faster and more stable if you simply spoof user-agent string to trick it into thinking you are using chrome.
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Google peddling their crap. I want to just watch a video. Nothing more. I don't want announcements and premieres (that appear on my subscriptions page), I do not watch lives (that appear on top of my subscriptions), I do not want shorts (which are super-inconvenient and not really informative, you can't even skip them, they are tik-tok tier crap), I do not want to involve with anything.
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Politics! Apparently, some videos that might seem "controversial" to the algorithm - they do not even appear in your subscriptions immediately (only after a day passes or something). What the hell, I just don't want to manually go to each channel I am subscribed to and check whether there are new videos.
There is also this sense of "community" on youtube I do not like - it is not a social network after all. There are gossips of various kinds, scandals, its own celebrities and stuff. And of course, for some reason youtube's users care too much about subscription count (a friend of mine said "I won't bother watching the video you've linked, because its author is below 1000 subscribers, he's a nobody", wtf).
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Content makers themselves adhere to the implicit rules at play on youtube - to increase "engagement" they use clickbait-y titles and thumbnails and add some nonsense to the videos. At fist glance it's their fault, but in fact it is a consequence of youtube's "algorithm"
Also, of course, as creating vids can be quite profitable, as if you play by its rules youtube shares some of its revenue with "content makers". So there is this motivation to "create content" that is as engaging as possible, to earn some buck . And to create as much "content" as possible.
I've been thinking a lot about the above, and realized youtube is not really healthy and "ethical". So I needed a way to make it healthier (I admit, I can not get rid of habit to watch youtube entirely, yet).
At first, I tried to get rid of youtube's annoyances using scripts: ublock to block ads and hide premieres, yt-dlp to download videos, unhook to hide parts of the interface. And on top, I wrote a userstyle to hide stuff the hide premieres fails to hide. On top of that, used the userscript to fix buttons. And changed my user agent to fool it that I'm using Chrome - it works better that way.
That did not feel complete, tho. The site is still slow, annoying and gives me the feeling it tries to squeeze pennies out of me (even tho I don't pay for anything). Let alone the horrible performance in non-firefox browsers.
I realize now, that it would be a great thing for me to either move to some third-party solution (as long as it is possible, I have a feeling that google will do things to prevent that, because it hurts their business model) - or stop using YouTube at all, which is beyond me at this point.
The reason I've been using youtube website is mainly the convenience: you just log in, and thee it is. Now, over last years I developed a habit that when something that you do not control at all becomes too convenient - it starts to control you somehow, getting you addicted)
So I decided to try something even less convenient - the FreeTube.
FreeTube app
FreeTube is a cross-platform electron software (about 220 mb when installed) that uses invidious API for youtube (not youtube's official api, so no need to get a token and be authorized or anything - but a small chance it will just stop working at some point, once youtube decides to change/force limit something again, and you will have to wait for update, which are usually quick)
I could use Invidious itself - say, yewtu.be instance seems to be popular, but I am not a big fan of logging into anything (to save settings/subscriptions).
24-10-07: Yesterday (July 8 2024) YouTube changed its api, which broke many tools - yt-dlp, NewPipe, Invidious and FreeTube. But next day it got fixed. Google does not change their APIs too often, anyway. At least not yet. Had to use the website for a day - and after two months of using FreeTube it felt horrible. Third-party youtube clients help a lot with uncluttering youtube experience. Compared to most of them, the website is slow (at least on FireFox), buggy and full of bs.
Features important to me:
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FreeTube's interface resembles one of youtube, but I can simply disable parts of the interface I do not need. Option to not show shorts, lives, premieres, announcements, blog posts, comments, view and like counters and other distracting nonsense
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It is an electron app. Yea, electron apps suck. But electron uses chromium under the hood, and youtube is designed with chromium in mind, like it or not. Way better than having chrome-based browser and switching to it, and having to log into google account.
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Data is stored locally, on my computer, in JSON. I can save my data on a USB drive or something. In future I can automate or tweak it somehow. It is mine to keep, forever.
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There was no easy way to export my subscriptions from YouTube. One has to request a data takeout from google, but it takes some time. It gave me a nice motivation to clean up and categorize my subscriptions, manually transferring them to the software.
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The concept of "profiles" - you can categorize your subscriptions. A feature the youtube would never implement, I believe: the business wants you to consume everything, constantly, without any sorting.
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Installing a non-portable version (via
deborexeinstaller ) registers afreetube://protocol. There are extensions (Privacy Redirect in my case) that can redirect all browser youtube links to the FreeTube app. -
Hotkeys work! In youtube website there is an issue that the seek and volume bars have
tabindex. So if you, say, click the volume with your mouse, your stylus, your touchpad, your trackpoint or your touchscreen - it gains focus. And pressing left-right on a keyboard now changes volume (instead of rewinding the video as you expect)Apparently this will never be fixed on the youtube, because it is an "a11y feature".
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Did I mention you don't have to login into your google account? No personal recommendations too, which is good for me: less distractions.
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Nice bonus: it has DeArrow and SponsorBlock built-in (have to turn them on in settings). These two allow to avoid some nonsense added by content creators - so less clickbait and less in-video promotions.
Make it portable!
Zipped versions of FreeTube are "portable" - there's no need to "install" them somewhere, no registry littering et cetera. However they store the data in the AppData folder.
You can alter that by passing --user-data-dir argument to the executable, but that won't
preserve for shortcut and won't work with freetube:// protocol handler.
There is a PortableApps-packed version (FreeTubePortable), but the problems are the same and it makes even
less sense than simply writing start FreeTube.exe --user-data-dir=data in a bat file.
I ended up resorting to a symlink. On Windows (or was it NTFS?) hard-link to a dir is called "directory
junction". I simply created a directory named data in my FreeTube directory and did
mklink /J c:\Users\wp0\AppData\Roaming\FreeTube f:\Soft\FreeTube\data
So now FreeTube's data is stored in its directory, and system thinks it is also in AppData. Also, on a
system I don't have control over I just resort to using the --user-data-dir.
Symlinking works perfectly on linux as well.
Back it up!
Something nasty happened - my Windows BSODed (it rarely does, this time it did when I connected a bluetooth audio card) and apparently FreeTube was saving the subscriptions file at that very moment. So subscriptions got borked.
When starting YouTube on Windows (at least, but probably other systems too) it was only showing white
screen. No errors, nothing - had to dig to find out my profiles.db file (which is essentially a
plaintext JSON file) was corrupt - luckily, was able to restore the main part of that file and did not have
to re-add the channels again.
There's a simple backup.bat file since then, I run it every now and then:
rmdir backup /s /q
mkdir backup
copy data\profiles.db backup\profiles.db
copy data\history.db backup\history.db
copy data\playlists.db backup\playlists.db
copy data\settings.db backup\settings.db
(These 4 files are all that's important, apparently. Running that batfile is easier for me than using the software's built-in backup/export capabilities)