For those not familiar with it, yewtu.be is an Invididous instance, where Invidious is an alternate front-end to YouTube, similar in spirit to Nitter (Twitter), Teddit (Reddit), the late Bibliogram (InstagramProxiTok, and more. Another YouTube front-end is Piped. It's possible to use public instances of many of these, or to self-host your own.
There are browser extensions such as LibRedirect which will automatically, well, redirect requests to these alternatives, with extensive configurability by the user.
Yup, for me I cancelled my YouTube Premium subscription—which I had been happy to pay—because of YouTube shorts. They were constantly pushing them in the mobile app, and sometimes I would succumb and click on one, and then often lose several hours to scrolling. Skill issue, I know, but when I went looking for a way to disable them in the UI I found there isn't one. I ended up feeling like it was a adversarial relationship—they're using dark patterns to hijack my attention to increase their engagement metrics, to my loss—so why would I pay them? I installed NewPipe and subscribed to the creators I watch regularly on Patreon and I'm very happy with this setup.
I don't use social media because I think it's a net negative in my life. However YouTube I've always justified by following lots of educational content. I've learned a lot of cool things and gained new hobbies just by watching YouTube. One day, leather-working videos popped up on my feed. Soon I was making my own stuff with leather - it was a heap of fun!
I've noticed over the past few years though, that no matter how much I try to tweak the algorithm, I'm just getting mindless junk. And shorts are the worst of it! They're deliberately designed to hook you in, so they're very hard to ignore.
And so YouTube, I have to admit, has become a net negative. Another place for mindless dopamine hits, zombifying us all. I'm so sad about it!
As a counterpoint, my YouTube feed is great these days. When I open it up, I get more of what I want to watch. The hardest part is choosing which video to watch in my limited time.
I think the key is that I subscribe to channels I want to watch and I use the like button on videos I want to see more of.
> I've noticed over the past few years though, that no matter how much I try to tweak the algorithm, I'm just getting mindless junk. And shorts are the worst of it! They're deliberately designed to hook you in, so they're very hard to ignore.
If you're actually clicking the shorts ("very hard to ignore") then you're going to get more of them, period. I get an occasional shorts line in my feed but I scroll right past it.
I curate the list of channels that I'm willing to watch. Mostly science, math, engineering, etc. Like that I'm free from the algorithm. YouTube is still the best most educational and interesting media out there.
But yes. YouTube shorts are a massive net negative. I wish I could remove them completely.
Just the thought of installing an app with permissions to patch other applications on my system makes me twitchy. I'd consider it on a dedicated media consumption device with limited shared account information, but on a daily driver I use for authentication, purchasing, etc? No thanks.
Nothing against the developers of it, but it's a tool available for use by others and I'm not going to jump on it any more than I'll install random unsigned browser extensions.
Sure yep brainwashed. Still not running third party firmwares compiled by pseudonymous folks somewhere in the world, and still not running sideloaded modified APKs or sideloaded much of anything.
Hell, I'm not even running the assorted very functional "photo scan to pdf" apps that I purchased Pro versions of over the years because while there are some very skilled developers in Moscow and St Petersburg I have no way of checking on whose behalf they use those skills.
Revanced is just an app with no special permission. It's not a firmware. It's open source. It can only patch an apk which you provide to it with standard android file-picker APIs.
I understand exactly what it's doing, and while it's better than doing it on an active system in still going to stay away.
From a security standpoint, can you tell me what's different about this vs "I ran this chunk of PowerShell that said it would patch Office to bypass activation"? After all, it's just a patch.
The patch is totally open source, and the project is rather high profile. Where exactly is the additional risk here?
From a security standpoint, What's the difference between using revanced's open source patches and downloading literally any open source software from GitHub?
I love revanced, the main thing I miss though is the ability to cast to chromecast through the patched app. So for now I keep both apps installed and switch if I need to cast.
I've pressed the "X" on those damn things like a dozen times, and even said "yes" to the modal asking me if I was sure I wanted to hide them. Yet they still appear. The default selection also uses the most transparently sexualized thumbnails with BOOBS! just begging me to click. Admittedly, I sometimes do - not for the boobs, but for the comments which inevitably make jokes about the boobs in the thumbnail.
I find that shorts pretty regularly suggest content I would like and it seems to largely depend on what I watch even outside of shorts. Ie when I watch a lot of dancing videos I get a lot of Shorts feed containing that, same with Korean or Japanese content.
That's definitely not the case for me, unfortunately. It seems like the selection of Shorts presented to me on the homepage has never evolved past its default content recommendations. Maybe I opted out of something at some point and they can't use my watch history for Shorts suggestions.
Anyone who says that and actually believes it is fooling themselves if they think they’re immune to strategies developed by an entire industry over the course of decades to the tune of billions of dollars.
I feel the same with Twitter. Recently, no matter how hard I try to train its algorithm, it always finds new crappy short videos or click-bait threads to push on my timeline. Feels like a naive "crank the engagement up" lever has been pushed. It's fine as a business strategy in itself, clearly it's been working fine for many companies, but it just doesn't align with a Premium subscription model.
People don't voluntarily pay to be treated as semi-intelligent scrolling cattle, we fall into endless scrolling unconsciously and pay with our eyeball-time, but we don't go "oh I'm gonna shell out $8 for the privilege of browsing an inferior TikTok". He's got to chose one strategy and commit to it.
When you're in the Subscriptions tab of the YouTube app, there is only one horizontal line dedicated to shorts. In the Home tab, only two horizontal lines are dedicated to Shorts. After that, as you continue scrolling, they never come up again.
I think it's a bit dramatic to jump to words like "dark pattern" just because YouTube dared to suggest some content in one place in the interface.
If anything, YouTube's Subscriptions tab is one of the most user-respecting pieces of social media out there. It only shows you your subscriptions, and it is chronological.
And you can't use any fancy extensions to hide shorts on a Roku or other tv yt app.
I'm currently still paying for premium but now it's like my cable bill. I sorta have to, but I don't feel like it's a voluntary transaction where I'm paying to get something I want. Now I'm paying to reduce about 50% of what I don't want and there is no option to get what I want at any price.
They're so desperate to push Shorts they made Vanced stop working for normal videos but shorts still play fine to this day. I'm using Revanced now which saves me from that crap.
It’s cute that Google thinks we’re all going to pay for YouTube Premium/TV instead of just not watching YouTube. That’s where I’m at. I don’t watch anything on YouTube anymore, and like when Reddit got “smart” and drove me away, I’ve noticed my mental health improve.
Damn. YouTube is my favorite consumer product in existence. It has massively changed my life for the better (like learning about health and wellness topics that have actually transformed my life). I watch about fifty hours a month in mostly pure bliss. And it costs $12 or almost nothing. I will never understand how people can be reluctant to part with a few bucks a month for an amazing product.
If you come from a third world country I get it, but many of us here do not. $12 is less than half an hour of work for even middle class Americans and Europeans.
I guess if you don’t even watch YouTube I don’t understand why you are even in this thread.
The pricing is lesser in other countries I have seen $2-3 a month, so it is not necessary to qualify Americans/Europeans it is priced similarly across the globe .
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It is not just $12/month for YouTube that is the problem most people have to budget for all their content consumption between streaming services, sports subscriptions , music subs, newspapers you can easily spend upwards of $300/month , that is not including other productivity tools Saas you could end paying for like o365 , Dropbox and so on .
YT would be the one easiest to cut because you won’t loose access just have to put up with some ads unlike everything else .
For many not seeing ads is not worth $12 a month , for some like you the value is enormous so you see it as worth paying .
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I personally stopped paying for YT premium because I get most of the content from Nebula what I used YT for, at 1/10th the cost.
Also there is no way to disable Shorts and they won’t improve the by design poorer implementation on Firefox; both these make my experience using the platform poor even if I pay for it so I don’t bother.
We subscribe to almost every reasonable content provider and we pay about $60 or so IN SWITZERLAND, where we pay a swiss tax just because we have more money I guess. If someone is truly paying $300 they should cancel their cable subscription and subscribe to a handful of streaming services and YT for $<100. All the content you could ever watch.
A typical household with say couple of newspapers and magazines, music and audio platforms, 2-3 sports and major streaming platforms in the U.S will be in the 300 range (see below)
I have only reasonably included couple of options in each category, you could mix and match preferences and use different providers or may get deals and it is part of combo with some other plan , however you will still be in this range.
- Streaming: ($121) (Prime, Apple have other uses bundled, Disney is undroppable if you have kids)
- Disney+ (ESPN, Hulu, Disney) - $20
- Netflix - $16
- Paramount+ - $12
- Max (HBO) - $20
- Peacock (NBC) - $10
- Apple Tv+ (via Apple One ) - $23
- Nebula - $5
- Amazon Prime $15
- NYTimes ( or main newspaper) : $16
- Bloomberg/FT ( or business daily): $25
- Economist/New Yorker (or other long form magazines): $20
Total: $269
On top you could be paying for
- any game network subscriptions like PlayStation Plus maybe $20-40
- one time purchases for movies/ games etc in addition to Prime, AppleTV+, Disney+ plans when they not included perhaps another $100 every month
- cable/internet/Mobile plans which are another ~ $200 easily
- Patreon/ podcasts or other creator specific subscriptions
- other personal productivity apps you may pay for (o365, Dropbox, email etc) maybe another $100
Final total: $700 / month on just subscriptions and licenses
You don't anybody who consumes from three pay walled platforms or they don't pay for it and instead use archive.ph or similar ?
I would think my family having access to read good quality journals rather than get their news and analysis just from social media or click bait content farms is worth $50 / month ?
I know only 2 top quality newspapers not behind a paywall : Aljazeera and The Guardian, both while have decent American coverage or not amercian. Perhaps you can also include NPR, BBC and few other high quality news sources that are still free but are not newspapers.
Every high quality news source even news agencies like Reuters[1] are now behind paywalls.
[1] Associated Press is still free, given their non-profit status hopefully will remain so.
I remember something about Aljazeera around ten years ago where Aljazeera America (AJAM) was remove from cable TV networks in the US. Something to do with their affiliation with middle eastern countries I think. I’m not sure that’s enough reason to dismiss them completely.
Anyway, what you say makes sense, but I just don’t think many people drop $50/month on that stuff. They don’t see the value, and continue to feed Facebook.
Al Jazeera is Qatar government funded akin to BBC.
They came to prominence when Bin Laden used to give them recorded tapes and interviews post 9/11. They have comprehensive and deeper coverage on topics and geographies [1][2] where western news orgs won't focus.
Beware though, they have biases too like everyone, particularly on covering Qatar and Middle East. The government funds them as tool of geopolitical soft power by creating an honest dependable news, no different from UK with BBC but without the colonial undertones, on average with global topics they are a solid source.
[1] In particular areas with some Muslim population, i.e lots of Africa, East Asia etc
12 bucks is enough to get you access to entire streaming catalogs full of exclusive content on other platforms. Merely not showing you ads on a site that's largely full of non exclusive user generated videos doesn't seem enticing. Wellness videos are everywhere, people will just watch them on TikTok instead of paying for a full premium subscription.
It's a strange argument anyway, nobody buys something simply because it's only an hour of work. The internet offers me a hundred subscriptions every day, if I buy them all because they're just 10 bucks I'm broke. Whatsapp cost 1$ once and they even dropped that because although it's great value, what matters is that none of it is exclusive.
I would love to buy it, if i liked it. I happily pay Spotify, Kagi, ChagGPT, etcetc - but while i do watch a fair amount of Youtube.. i'm not sure i get that much from it.
More over, i'm constantly of the defensive with it. If i click on an impulse video -- aka one i watch guiltily but would rather not make a habit out of it -- Youtube disregards other videos i'd much rather watch and now gives me repeated videos of that one thing. I open a fair bit of stuff in Incognito just to avoid Youtube polluting my feed.
I think i'd happily pay $3/m for what i get. But generally it's not close to $12/m for me, especially when i don't feel like it's working for me.
I'll never pay for YT because when it first started it was about people sharing information because they wanted to give to others. Now, people want money and fame. That's fine, but it's not my money they will get.
yeah I'm done with Linus Tech Tips videos for that reason. Knowing them, their Floatplane (YouTube/Twitch competitor) platform has the "after this segue... from our sponsor!" bits edited out. Like even they know YouTube is dying.
I'm not sure how you drew that conclusion. Of course Floatplane subscribers get the sponsorships edited out, that's the benefit of being a sponsor.
LTT was worried about their Youtube dependence, so created Floatplane. The fact of the matter is they wouldn't be in existence without Youtube and would probably die, even with Floatplane now existing.
There's no evidence anywhere that Youtube is dying.
The advent of competitors isn’t evidence? Why would they spend millions to build an entire YouTube competitor?
I’m not sure how you can say “YouTube isn’t dying” and “LTT is worried about relying on YouTube” in the same breath. Linus was always complaining about YouTube from a creator’s POV.
I don't understand paying ten cents for something that does what it wants instead of what I want.
I currently pay for premium to avoid ads myself, so you don't get to call me any freeloader names while I complain that despite paying I still have to suffer shorts and utter shit suggestions and embedded sponsor ads and having to answer a ridiculous 2fa prompt on my phone every single time just because I use firefox in medium private mode , and annoying things like hiding downvotes, and serious things like censoring and invalid dmca takedowns and algorithmic promiting/hiding, etc.
I’d definitely pay 2-3$/month for Youtube if I could unbundle it from Youtube Music. I’m paying for Spotify and have no intention to change that (and I’ve given Youtube Music many chances).
I dont know if its changed, but you can only watch 1 thing on youtube at a time with the premium account, like not even with ads. it straight up stops the other video.
Youtube certainly costs money to run. It doesn't cost as much as they're asking. Besides, Google has mercilessly injected itself in many more parts of my daily life, and they're making good money off of me. They're not paying me for that. So I'll consider it a debt paid to block all of their ads.
Now, if Youtube was an independent company, that'd be a different story. But it isn't, so µBlock it is.
man I hate to pull the "get a real job" quip but I would bet my life that most of those "creators" are going to end up getting a "real" job in the next few years. My sister makes a couple TikToks a month to review stuff and these companies pay her stupid amounts of money because of the number of followers she has. She lives in the West Village where she regularly hangs out with Malcolm Gladwell and David Blaine. She does something with art. Spain's bureau of tourism (I'm sure they have another name for it) paid to fly her and a couple of other "influencers" to Spain for a several-day tour of places Salvador Dali either lived or created something for. It's fantasy land, where company execs think things like that are a good use of money. MrBeast and Legal Eagle will be alright whether YouTube dies or not, but everyone else is screwed.
YouTube Music on its own is $10/mo, so if you were going to subscribe to that then YouTube Premium is really only $2/mo extra, which is a bargain in my eyes.
Gatekeeping a thread about YouTube/subscription services because I don't watch YouTube is asinine.
I suppose ultimately I am arguing that $12/month isn't "cheap" because it's really "$12/month and whatever time you spend on it". I used to dump so much free time into things like TikTok, YouTube and Reddit, and I am grateful their leadership answers to greedy millionaire/billionaire venture capitalists who can barely tell a mouse and keyboard apart.
You watch 50 hours a month. I watch maybe 30 minutes. So it makes a lot more sense and a better value to you, obviously. Would you still be keen to pay if it were say, charge by the hour? I'd probably sign up for something like that, as either my cost would be negligible, or yours would skyrocket.
They'd prefer you stop watching. Bandwidth costs them a lot, and they have pretty much the cheapest bandwidth of any tech player. If 1% of users are freeloading like you and I, and they can block us and save 1% on their infrastructure bill, that's still a huge amount of money saved, and could easily turn the whole effort from a loss to a profit.
I think our best bet to make a difference is to cause network effects to drive other users to take the same steps we do. In the long run that will help shrink their monopoly, and/or bring a tipping point closer to reality.
Similar to voting. Yeah, I could vote for a third party candidate, but the real power I have is in how many other people I can convince to vote for someone.
I don't understand this. What is your principled stand? Don't charge me money and also don't put in ads?
Youtube is one of the few platforms where people making content can actually survive off of it. It's not everything but it's more than ~anything else.
It would be nice for there to be more platforms but personally I'm exhausted of platforms trying to race to the bottom and ultimiately squeezing people who are actually doing the "hard work".
(My one big complaint is that youtube doesn't charge people for bandwidth, meaning that services like Vimeo are ... kind of DOA. I don't know how you do that and have viral stuff for normal people, but it does feel like something should be in place)
YouTube could play ads and let me play videos while my phone screen is locked. They could play ads like they used to: a small popup. They could play ads like they did after that: one 5 second pre-roll. Or like after that, a pre-roll with a skip call to action.
But at some point it got into the ballpark of two 10-15 second ads every 5 minutes even on the channels of people who explicitly asked not to turn on monetization because they're making educational content, often for kids and schools. The mobile app nags me with a "try premium" / "skip trial" popup 5 times per week. There are consistently small bugs in the user experience of the app.
Oh, and they're rich as God because they're also the people who own the operating system, browser, app store, and search engine I used to find all this stuff -- plus my email and my productivity software, all of which they will leverage to _squeeze_ every last bit the juice out of me as a user. They own all my data already. They own everything.
So, what is the "principled stand"? Enough is a goddamned enough! If they were just going to show some ads, it would be fine, but like every single parasitic horror show out there, they promised they'd be good and they cannot stop getting worse.
At the very least, I can choose not to pay them $12/month for the privilege.
Yeah I agree that you can totally just be like "not for me". I just think the using of language of protesting and voting for "the video experience as a free user is not fun" adds a moral valence to something that honestly has a pretty good extant solution. Pay for the sub!
Pay money, get no ads. It's not that complicated. It's totally reasonable to whine about the increased ads and not wanting to pay ofc. But at least we can pay to not have ads!
I see this ending with ads increasing ad infinitum. As more ads get added, the value of the free version will decrease and more users will be pushed to either stop using the site or pay for subscriptions. We should fast forward to that end game, where YouTube locks all the user-created content behind a paywall to monetize it for their own benefit like all internet platforms seem to be aiming to do.
I understand that YouTube costs money to run, but the monetization situation does not reflect that, and is thus totally backwards. The current model is that users pay for a “service” (YouTube) which has an expense for “content” (video creators). The content is what the users actually want; the situation should be that users pay the content creators, who pay YouTube something akin to rent. It is not fair that YouTube profits off of the value that content creators bring rather than just their infrastructure. It is akin to paying the owner of a building for access to the store.
Vimeo has exactly the business model you propose. Total data delivered to viewers is limited in all Vimeo plans, and you need to pay them extra if you want a viral video.
It's been about a while, and so far hasn't gained a large userbase of viewers - at least in part because content creators don't want to pay for random non-paying people to watch their videos.
It boggles my mind how technology has been advancing consistently through time until the last few years. Now we have feature flags in databases dictate whether we can use technology. There's no reason to block YouTube videos from playing when my screen is off, except to get more money out of people.
Video ads pay far more than audio-only ads. Brand advertisers want to get their logo in front of you.
I bet the economics don't add up for running a video hosting site, yet only getting revenue from audio ads.
Even spotify hasn't managed to survive on audio-only with ads - they have to put in other arbitrary restrictions like 'you can't play the song you want to play' to dissuade people from using the lossmaking plan.
It's colloquial knowledge at this point that companies suck as much from consumers as possible, just look at the "inflation" narrative. Company had to raise prices due to "supply chain constraints/inflation" but then goes on to report record revenue. To an extent it's just supply and demand, and I want to respect that, but most of these same companies got government handouts from PPP while the everyday consumer has to choose between one $10/month subscription service or another. Fuck. How about charge me money, don't put in ads, but charge enough that you make money, it's just not hand-over-fist because you've created a monopoly?
Thats why cloudflare won't host sites with lots of video. It's why twitter doesn't do HD video. Thats why there are no startups trying to make video hosting sites.
If you hosted a youtube clone on AWS with their cloudfront CDN, you'd be paying $0.085 per GB out to the internet. A youtube ad view earns perhaps $0.004. HD video is ~6GB/hour, so a 3 minute video costs $0.0255 to host (before compute and storage costs, profit and engineer time).
Earning $0.004 for something that costs you $0.025 is never going to work out...
I don't like this reasoning because I've seen the inside of google. Their bandwidth is very cheap.
What costs is having a CDN, a bunch of very fast servers that exist in every point-of-presence, given the load they endure CDN cache servers fail quickly when compared to others. -- along with the upkeep of their networking equipment, which is cheap but not free.
But Google itself has invested wisely in how it connects to the internet, they are dark fibre all the way with many hundreds of gigabits between sites and pops. It's a huge upfront investment (the kind SV startups seem to hate) but the long tail makes bandwidth essentially free.
The only cost they have is hardware and peering, and given their size I can't convince myself if they are or are not being shafted financially by big ISPs for peering - even if they are though, it's marginal compared to what GCP/AWS/etc; charge us, even Colo datacenters will charge significantly more than what it costs Google.
Thanks, this is exactly what I was wondering about. I would expect Google's marginal cost of bandwidth to be approximately zero. What are networks going to do, not connect to Google?
And to be clear this is literally what happened to Netflix and I think YouTube and a few other sites in the pre-Net Neutrality days. Of course we don't have Net Neutrality anymore either, so presumably Google is paying ISPs not to throttle, or ISPs are content with the 1TB/month cap they tend to have.
Also, that 1TB/month cap is just foot-in-the-door technique. It will stay 1TB or so as videos, games, websites, etc. continue to get larger and larger and then they will lean on Appeal to Tradition (logical fallacy) when people complain that 1TB/month isn't adequate.
That kind of reminds me of the Monty Python skit where two mafiosi try to shake down the army. Why in the world would Google pay up? Your average ISP needs YouTube to work well far more than Google needs one ISP.
> Thats why there are no startups trying to make video hosting sites.
No, there are no startups in video for the same reason there were no startups in office apps or operating systems in the 2000s, a subsidized 500lb gorilla in the space.
The problem with a video startup is that you have to charge for your content. And some jerk will download your video, post it to YouTube, and distribute it for free.
If YouTube were forced to stand on its own instead of being subsidized by the Google advertising maw, we'd see innovation in the space.
Until YouTube gets broken out from Google by anti-trust action, the video startup space will continue to remain dead.
The big cloud providers all charge ridiculous amounts for their bandwidth. It makes your numbers completely invalid for any bandwidth-focused operation.
Also youtube's bitrate usually far below that amount.
Because it doesn't answer the question. I was asking about YouTube, which, being part of Google, occupies a radically different position. They aren't using AWS to host their video, so the numbers are irrelevant.
> when Reddit got “smart” and drove me away, I’ve noticed my mental health improve
We had a "showdown" moment with our kids some time ago due to inability to manage device usage. Ended up with me changing the wifi password and all the kids devices permanently lost internet access at home.
The kids have been playing together - and outside! - and generally much happier ever since. Mental health definitely better. Who'd have thought it?
They aren't missing anything either. Subconciously I thought that I needed to stay on top of things like the news, how the stock market is doing, whatever the latest tech hardware releases are, etc. but now, most of the time I forget those are even things.
I watched a lot of the History Channel, TLC and Discovery Channel growing up. I've seen all manner of documentary about all manner of thing. I'd say plop your kids in front of that every now and then, but these days it's just Pawn Stars and Hoarders and Deadliest Catch.
Might be worth checking with your local library to see if they offer a Kanopy.com subscription.
The monthly show checkouts are somewhat limited (I think 10 a month) but their offerings are pretty large and generally family friendly or education based, even though they do have some more modern or topical movies or shows from time to time.
I watch a lot of YouTube and I have premium subscription. I believe it is worth it for me. Yes I can use adblockers, but the premium experience is just better. It also comes with YouTube music which is much better than Spotify and others. There are other benefits like watch queue, background play on phone.
I'm never going to be one to buy merch, and there are a lot of creators whose content I occasionally enjoy but don't want to pay directly via e.g. Patreon. Premium views pay more to them, so you're also doing a bit more to support the creators you watch as well.
Premium subscription is just an antipattern of them removing options. The experience is not better than before premium was a thing.
YouTube music is in no way better than Spotify. I actually had to leave Google play music (and YouTube music) for Spotify because the product was so subpar.
The only benefit was that some random thing on YouTube might be there but, other than that, just part of the Google poor support of their paying users.
The benefits you site are possible without their premium, using other apps and, again, they worsened the experience to push you to premium which is extremely shady.
>> Premium subscription is just an antipattern of them removing options.
> It makes sense only if you believe everything on the internet should be free.
I wish HN readers would try and stay away from strawmen and address what others say.
If a product offers something and suddenly makes it product progressively inferior as a means to make a distinction of "this is premium", then it's an anti pattern. It feels scummy since it didn't start with "first X are free" and shows a lack of upfront monetization strategy.
>> YouTube music is in no way better than Spotify.
> I don't disagree. It's highly subjective.
It's highly objective if you actually use arguments, which you don't.
>> The benefits you site are possible without their premium, using other apps
> Piracy is always an option. But if you choose not to do it, buying premium makes sense.
Using the term piracy here is playing into the game of anti competitive companies who continually lobby governments to get their way over the actual desires of citizens.
You haven't really supported your quasi marketing campaign claims about the YouTube experience.
Truth is:
They had a product that was good.
Made it shitty and told you to pay if you want what you had.
You pay and laud it.
> If a product offers something and suddenly makes it product progressively inferior...
The inferior experience in terms of YouTube is the increase in ads. I like to think of it as a price increase due to inflation.
> It feels scummy since it didn't start with "first X are free" and shows a lack of upfront monetization strategy.
That's a standard practice actually. I have seen new restaurants offer food for free on the day of opening to attract customers and then charge from next day onwards. They will also gradually keep increasing their prices to cope up with inflation and/or other reasons.
> It's highly objective if you actually use arguments, which you don't.
Treating your preference as objective just shows how much disconnected you are from the reality. In my country, YouTube is the goto choice for music. Moreover, YouTube ads are skipable, but Spotify ads aren't.
> Using the term piracy here is playing into the game of anti competitive companies who continually lobby governments to get their way over the actual desires of citizens.
Desires of citizens like you is to get everything for free. That's what I have understood.
> You haven't really supported your quasi marketing campaign claims about the YouTube experience.
Your happy customers are your best marketers.
> Truth is: They had a product that was good. Made it shitty and told you to pay if you want what you had. You pay and laud it.
I agree, they did make the product shitty for free users. But that won't make me and many others stop using it.
>> If a product offers something and suddenly makes it product progressively inferior...
> The inferior experience in terms of YouTube is the increase in ads. I like to think of it as a price increase due to inflation.
It's a coping mechanism. Just like people who think their lives need to be worsened due to inflation and "that's due to exogenous characteristics" and not to do with their gov policies.
>> It feels scummy since it didn't start with "first X are free" and shows a lack of upfront monetization strategy.
> That's a standard practice actually. I have seen new restaurants offer food for free on the day of opening to attract customers and then charge from next day onwards. They will also gradually keep increasing their prices to cope up with inflation and/or other reasons.
I knew you'd go for this one. Transparency matters. Restaurants are usually upfront about this. Have a taste before buy is fine. Destroy the competition and then abuse a captured market while still actively destroying the competition (lobbying, attacking funding, purchase with intent to stop, etc).
Also, Just because something happens, doesn't mean it's ethical. People made money squatting on URLs like savehaiti.com after the hurricane and, even though it works, it's scummy and not something to laud.
>> It's highly objective if you actually use arguments, which you don't.
>Treating your preference as objective just shows how much disconnected you are from the reality.
It's not preference. You didn't state it initially as preference. There's also objective features to analyze or no product would be better than another.
This poor attack at me is funny seeing as you want to move the ballpark to play the victim and not have to defend bad claims.
> In my country, YouTube is the goto choice for music.
Which doesn't mean it's a better product. And did you think about everyone else's Country before making your statements or does it only work to excuse your lack of solid arguments?
> Moreover, YouTube ads are skipable, but Spotify ads aren't.
Suddenly we are talking about a free tier and not the product GPM/YM vs Spotify in their premium versions? More goalpost moves.
>> Using the term piracy here is playing into the game of anti competitive companies who continually lobby governments to get their way over the actual desires of citizens.
> Desires of citizens like you is to get everything for free. That's what I have understood.
"Citizens like me". You don't know me. You made a bad sales pitch for a product that abused customers and instead of recognizing that you start attacking anyone who points out the truth with poor strawmen.
You don't know how many services I pay for but you should have inferred that I pay for Spotify and that I paid for GPM/YM so your whole dishonest line of attack is moot.
>> You haven't really supported your quasi marketing campaign claims about the YouTube experience.
> Your happy customers are your best marketers.
Actually, you've massively failed as a marketer by being unable to point out advantages or defend why YouTube had deteriorated their product and demanded payment for it. And let's not even address the behaviour towards the creators who built the bulk or their content.
>> Truth is: They had a product that was good. Made it shitty and told you to pay if you want what you had. You pay and laud it.
>I agree, they did make the product shitty for free users. But that won't make me and many others stop using it.
No. You just acquiesced and got screwed over but think championing it is a good thing. It's hilarious but at least you agree on the core.
Tbh I mostly pay because I hate the modern ad and behaviour tracking financed Internet. If your service has a paid option I'll pay for it. I think had we all gone down the freemium road decades ago the Internet would be in much better shape today :/
Lately I've been watching `MIT 8.04 Quantum Physics I, Spring 2016` [0], also at night before I fall asleep.
And during the day I occasionally leave the live stream of a stork nest running. One of them learned to fly just two days ago, and it was fun watching them getting to learn how their wings work, while they don't have much space to train [1], which makes me ask how many such livestreams exist which normally would be volatile data. I'm not sure if these live streams do get stored, but it would be a huge amount of bandwidth for almost no added value.
Then there are fun mathematics videos which show you how to solve mathematical problems [2], daring you to solve them.
Basically there's so much of value, like `the native web`, `ServeTheHome`, `Jeff Gerling`, `No Boilerplate`, `Code to the Moon`, James Briggs`, gliding, mtb-riding, windsurfing, so much quality content which is hard for a TV station to deliver.
I don't lump in YouTube with other types of social media. While undoubtedly the vast majority of content on YouTube (either by count or by number of views) is utter garbage there is still more quality content than I will ever be able to watch in a lifetime. Documentaries, talks, lectures, concerts, content creators on all kinds of interesting things, from retro computers to history or science.
I would buy YouTube premium but I don't really want to remunerate Google for their anticompetitive business practices or their mistreatment of content creators. So I just go for patreon of channels I like.
In the same boat here. But they couldn’t care less, the masses is what they’re after.
I came to and been using invidio.us to listen to lectures without any video, a feture that works on Iphones with the screen turned off. Not sure whether apple or google are the ones who don’t allow for that.
Screen off only works for premium subscriptions. I hate it, but someone has made a good point to me once that advertisers are probably not okay paying the same amount and not having video show for their ads. So Google would either have to build support for a separate category of audio-only ads, and those ads would pay out less. Instead, they just only offer the feature to ad-free subscribers.
The HN demographic is all the more likely to find, develop, and/or promote alternatives to YouTube.
I didn't mention those in my comment above as the main issue was alternative front ends to mainstream services, but another obvious option is alternative services.
The key stumbling points for that seem to be discoverability and monetisation.
Kind of surprised nobody is making a strong effort at solving monetization through P2P (lowering costs).
Historically the problem was you had to get people to install an app instead of visiting a website, but now everybody's trying to get people to do that on mobile anyway.
In theory P2P isn't great on mobile devices because they run on battery and have limited cellular data, but devices also allow apps to tell if the device is connected to a charger and unmetered WiFi. And if you only upload from devices that are, that's probably still enough bandwidth to give you a significant cost advantage. Then add in anyone you can get to install the app desktops and TVs, many of which are always on and have fast unmetered connections.
Then offer streaming on the website, but only if you subscribe. The paywall on the website links to the app installer, which is free (with ads).
It's an interesting idea, but I think it actually parallels a lot of problems of residential solar.
How much are you paying for someone hosting? If you're paying them the same as your costs (high), then why not just pay for more servers which will be more reliable? Especially because of the difference between how much bandwidth during peak demand hours, which is probably going to be when there are the most devices on battery, and when you'll need the most servers anyways. The same way peak electricity demand in some areas is after peak solar.
So even if you do 1:1 view time credits, now you're losing money if they upload at night, and watch that same amount during peak hours. Probably what most people are doing. This is what happened with California new solar NEM3 plan that changed the export rates from 1:1. You only get something like 20% credit for the power you're putting in. So can you pay hosters enough to want to host, but not enough that you're better off paying for your own servers?
This doesn't even go into storage costs yet.
There's a cryptocurrency for P2P storage and transfer, Storj. Looks like they even have an S3 compatible gateway, but they don't look that much cheaper than object storage on DigitalOcean or CloudFlare.
The idea isn't to pay them. Nobody gets paid for using BitTorrent, but it still works, because there are people who have "free" bandwidth (i.e. they weren't using it, and if they don't use it, it's lost, so they don't care).
You often hear the argument that people aren't going to "use" their bandwidth and watch ads, but that's dumb. The ads are to pay for development of the app or the content. The bandwidth is to offset what you downloaded yourself. It's two different things. And if you have unmetered bandwidth you're not using anyway, don't be a miser.
But if you really want to give people something as an incentive to upload, show them fewer ads, and give more credits during peak hours. Now, if you want to see no ads, you have to upload something like 10x what you download, and correspondingly up to 10% of users can get that deal. But if 10% of users take that deal, you eliminate your bandwidth costs and still have 90% of the ad revenue. And if more are willing to take it, it means you can give fewer credits until it balances, or vice versa.
Incidentally, residential solar isn't really a problem because you already have non-uniform demand throughout the day. The longstanding solution is to have "peaker plants" that only come online during peak hours. It's only a problem if you want to replace 100% of generation capacity with solar and have no storage solution. But that doesn't stop you from replacing e.g. 50% of generation with solar, and then running other plants less often and paying the fuel savings to the solar generators.
There are also ways to shift demand around, namely through pricing. Make electricity cheaper during sunlight hours and more expensive between sunset and 8PM and suddenly tons of people are doing laundry midday on a weekend instead of in the evening during peak hours. Which also makes it more economical for people who can't avoid peak hour usage to buy an energy storage system so they can run on stored energy when the power company is charging high rates and then charge it back up when power is cheaper.
Same here! The UX is so bad on both I just can’t use either. Not hard to quit when usability sucks and I find other things to do… like read or go outside.
If they achieve even a 1% conversion rate into subscribers it’ll be a net positive for them. I imagine they’re OK with you leaving the service since you cost more than they make from you.
I happily pay for YouTube Premium, and I get more value out of it than literally any other subscription service I'm paying for.
YouTube is an endless goldmine of quality videos made by people who actually give a shit about the topic they're talking about, rather then people who are just trying to make "content" to monetize.
I also appreciate that at least some of my monthly payment goes to the people making the videos I'm watching.
I'm honestly surprised to hear such a cynical take on it.
If you like Invidious, NewPipe but want something for desktop or browser in general - check out Piped - https://github.com/TeamPiped/Piped
So basically it is a way to use YouTube with a proxy server in between. Quoting directly from LibreTube (an Android app based on Piped) -
> With NewPipe, the extraction is done locally on your phone, and all the requests sent towards YouTube/Google are done directly from the network you're connected to, which doesn't use a middleman server in between. Therefore, Google can still access information such as the user's IP address. Aside from that, subscriptions can only be stored locally.
> LibreTube takes this one step further and proxies all requests via Piped (which uses the NewPipeExtractor). This prevents Google servers from accessing your IP address or any other personal data.
> Apart from that, Piped allows syncing your subscriptions between LibreTube and Piped, which can be used on desktop too.
I don't want to come off as an apologist for Oracle or the OCI product, but I can't help to wonder if there's more to the story than just "this provider will randomly ban accounts without any reason".
The only real "without any reason" I'm aware of is free tier infra running on an account that hasn't upgraded to paid tenancy. "Always-Free" resources belonging to an unpaid tenancy can be deallocated without notice in order to provide resources for a paid tenancy.
Nitter frontends and Mastodon bridges have repeatedly been struck with DMCA takedowns and cease and desist letters because someone Googled themselves and found a strange website replicate their account.
There are malicious people out there (on large, official platforms as well, because moderation is fiction) that will replicate someone's social feed and then adds controversial crap/crypto scams/weird stuff in the middle of it all. Taking action against imposters is sometimes necessary.
If you're a normal Youtube channel and you find someone "ripping" your videos to Yewtube, I completely understand why someone would demand a takedown. Most people barely know how to operate a browser, let alone understand the concept of privacy preserving alternative frontends that work through local implementations of Youtube's client code.
If you're some underpaid tech support person who gets a DMCA complaint about such a mirror, I wouldn't be surprised if they decide "take down first, ask questions later" would be a safe bet.
Agreed. I'm no Oracle apologist and I'm sure the author was understandably emotional when drafting this, but opening with "It is known that this provider will randomly ban accounts without any reason" - especially without linking to any references - just undermines the author's credibility and makes them seem immature.
While a lot of reasons may feel "slight" they are most likely still clearly defined in the terms of service. It would be interesting (and useful to other OCI users) to get more information about what actually happened in this case.
It's nice that alt tech is trying out all of these bottom-tier cloud providers and posting results. Now I know which ones to add to my "avoid at all costs" list (which is already quite long).
I had a customer who ran half their stuff on Azure and half on OCI. OCI was never a contender for expanding their footprint and they wanted to get off ASAP.
You may think Azure is amateur hour, but it apparently does not hold a candle to OCI.
> It is known that this provider will randomly ban accounts without any reason.
and yet this site was still using them prior to ban hammer because “it probably won’t happen to me”
I will always say this: fuck Oracle. Fuck Larry Ellison. Any person or company that uses their products despite knowing the shit the founder and company has done deserves any consequences
Multi region at least doubles your infra costs. Multi cloud will probably at least triple your costs since things like terraform don’t transfer cleanly and you can’t use even hosted services like RDS/CloudSQL, EKS/GKE because you won’t be able to replicate it across cloud providers due to all vendor specific differences.
Multi-provider setup may incur additional effort, though the payoff is in liberating yourself from lock-in to any one vendor. Note that those costs are being incurred here regardless, with both the costs of having to develop those on the fly and with downtime. Effectively, multi-provider set-up was a deferred cost for yewtu.be, now being realised.
One trick for using hosted services to to avoid the service-specific tooling of the hosts in question. Yes, that decreases the value-add of such services, but again, the trade-off is reduced lock-in.
There are also multi-platform solutions which stand as middleware between your own application and/or services and that of the host platform.
Then you incur costs around people who have specific knowledge around the technology. I can push 500k reads per sec on a RDS on instance which be a very challenging to do on on vanilla Postgres on EC2 instances. And when stuff breaks like broken file systems, I can just rely on their support. Same goes with Kubernetes at scale. EKS allows me to not to hire an ops/systems role.
If you just need durability not reliability it doesn’t need to be _nearly_ this expensive.
I run a bunch of stuff single region, single cloud, but I’ve got a regular job that takes the dumps of my databases and other user content and pushes it over into a Backblaze B2 account tied to a separate credit card.
At $0.005/gb/mo, every 100GB costs you about $0.50/mo in storage. Depending on how much data is changing, if it’s say 10GB/mo you’re looking at about $0.90/mo in AWS’s punishing egress charges.
For less than the cost of a basic McDonald’s cheeseburger every month a lot of services can add _durability_ which is more important in many cases. If your service has a lot of value people will wait for it to come back. If it’s never coming back, then you’re probably done. (I worked with one client who was entirely offline for a MONTH. People called CS every day begging them to fix it faster, but not a single one cancelled.)
Yeah, if AWS nukes my entire AWS organization it’s going to be a bad week getting everything set back up on $AnotherCloud. But it will be back up in a week, not lost forever along with my users’ trust.
I do love the ideal of multi-cloud in theory but the practicalities aren’t so simple. It’s hard enough for businesses to pull it off, let alone someone who’s providing a free service.
On a side note, I'm a CTO and I'm being seduced by Oracle's sales people due to their extremely low prices in my region. I'm on Azure and it's getting expensive. Can someone with actual experience using Oracle as a cloud provider chime in?
I tried oracle cloud for a similar reason and it was quite bad in several fronts:
-their cloud console interface in general was bad
- the technology is pretty rudimentary: after spinning up some ec2 instances and attaching some volumes, I needed to enter some strange custom commands in the terminal to make them useful (aside of the standard partitioning and mounting)
- their cost explaining docs were worse than Amazon IMO.
- for some reason they started spamming me with Portuguese mail (maybe because my last name looks like Portuguese?)
- Somehow I cancelled my admin account but not some inner account so for some time i couldn't login but still had some volumes that were being charged... I couldn't delete them.
- I tried to spin up one of their ready made wordpress instances but it wasn't working. I've since forgotten what was the issue but at the time I found it hilarious.
Overall I wouldn't touch it for stuff related to work. Had very bad experience with them .
Do you really need a cloud, or can you migrate to one or more dedicated servers which - unless your project is small enough to fit on one of those $5 servers that only exists in clouds - are probably much cheaper than you think?
Yes, but do you need it? Hetzner will sell you a server with 4x16TB of raw storage (so, 48TB after you make it RAID-5, 32TB if RAID-6) for about $100/month. On S3, that's $736/month. $368, if we assume the server is only half full. If you have good backups and don't mind some possible downtime, use it without RAID and you are getting storage for 1/14 the price of AWS (not counting the backups).
Bandwidth is under a pretty generous "fair use policy" and if they decide you are not using fairly, overage is only $1/TB. On AWS, $90/TB and the free bandwidth is not very much.
Are you worried that you'll hit a huge traffic spike and need to upload 20TB faster than you can provision a new server?
If you really are set on cloud storage, B2 is cheaper than S3.
It's interesting that they had two different accounts specifically in case one got borked, and then Oracle simultaneously closed both without warning.
As far as I can tell, the site is just a youtube frontend, so it's unclear if this was some sort of pseudo-DMCA thing, or if Oracle Cloud just sometimes intentionally scorched-earths paying customers.
Projects like this usually run off of Oracle cloud to take advantage of the free tier. Reclamation of resources on the free tier is not unheard of, especially if abuse or high resource usage is detected, and other cloud providers like AWS will do it too.
It's sort of the opposite. If you're on a free account with free tier and under utilize resources below a certain threshold it may get reclaimed after a while.
It was almost certainly over-utilization of a low revenue tier that did it.
Cloud companies all make certain claims around bandwidth/CPU/memory/etc. on low tiers, but if you actually fully utilize the tier, they'll almost invariably make your life miserable.
Normally they won't outright boot you (this seems surprising), but your instances will suddenly always be limited to what the Cloud Company considers to be "proper" for the low tier you are paying for--which magically is always much smaller than what they advertise.
It was probably easy for Oracle to identify that both accounts were being used to serve this site of questionable legality. And having multiple accounts is probably against Oracle's ToS anyway.
In the United States violating the TOS of a web site is technically a criminal offense under the CFAA, although the government is choosing currently not to prosecute most of these offenses[0]; but beware as that is simply a policy that can be ignored at any time it is useful.
What is the appeal from these YouTube frontends? I came to really dislike them because links are broken after a while because these sites don't live very long and the video data itself is still streamed by YouTube? I don't get it.
Beside the things the other user listed: these sorta give you a way to experience Youtube before it become Google's plaything.
In case of piped and freetube you can subscribe to channels without Google account (freetube does that even offline), it's also possible to import channel subscriptions from Youtube.
There were instances that shortly existed, or which tried to redirect you to some suspicious sites but these were filtered out.
The appeal is privacy, no ads, and avoiding the need for a Google account or supporting Google with any data to mine.
Some of us feel supporting Google in any way is unethical, but still want to consume some of the content they have lured people to put on their servers.
Not at all. Giving value to adtech companies only re-enforces content creators being trapped in a bad deal.
If everyone blocked ads content creators would be forced to research platforms that allow direct payment via micro-transactions, merch, or direct donations instead of ads. LBRY and liberapay exist.
If creators want me to tip them, they need to offer me an ethical to do so with money. I will not pay adtech companies with my time, or money, ever.
Also, most of what I watch on YouTube is clearly pirated (or ad free). That’s pretty much been their business model since day one, though they have diversified a little into legitimate for-profit content that is supported by ads.
I run a Piped instance on a VPS for myself. It's not linked to my Google account or my home IP (from Alphabet's perspective) in any way. I like giving Alphabet less info about my behavior.
YouTube will make recommendations based on your immediate session's viewing history, even without an account.
A tremendous advantage to viewing without authenticating is that you can quickly set a strong affinity based on your current interests, and don't have to live with consequences of viewing low-quality content for hours, days, months, years, millennia, etc.
If Invidious and Piped offer(ed) the option to permabam channels as well (to those subscribing directly to those services, or even within a single session), so much the better.
I hope you don't mind me asking for info, but how beefy is the vps? I can't find minimum specs for these frontends, and that would help me know if I have enough spare power at home. I imagine you want all the bandwidth you can get, but are there cpu limitations?
Everything put together appears to be using 368 + 94 + 16 + 37 = 515MB of RAM while watching a video. I imagine you'd want some overhead (the backend is mostly Java) and this doesn't include the reverse proxy. Seems to use fairly low amounts of CPU. (My VPS is 5 Epyc cores and 9GB of RAM, so way beyond what it needs for this.)
Doesn't that still leave YouTube with one unique IP address that all your traffic is originating from? It would in any case close off some tracking vectors if you also use other Google products from your home IP address but I guess you would also need a proxy/VPN or share the instance to get any kind of anonymity.
The lighter ui is fairly significant. I go a step further and do most of my YouTube watching in mpv, but occasionally I'll find my browser unresponsive and find the problem fixed by exiting some YouTube tab.
The settings for volume, speed, quality, whether to show/hide recommendations, disable autoplay, etc can be controlled and without requiring any login. Also less cruft. On YT proper such things were only possible with userscripts/addons which ime by the time I found Invidious (2020) had already been broken by YT changes so it was an easy switch when used with a browser addon that auto redirects.
Videos can also be optionally proxied in some instances but that wasn't a draw for me.
> the video data itself is still streamed by YouTube?
It's up to the instance admin for Invidious and the behaviour of Piped to proxy googlevideo. Not sure if it's visible at Invidious if you use an instance that doesn't proxy the traffic, but you can be sure it's proxied when you use Piped.
I happily pay for youtube premium. I find that the content available is much more enjoyable than netflix and the others. If I have a couple of hours to kill it's probably going to be spent watching youtube series rather than browsing netflix.
And I like supporting the content creators that I watch. Rather than just freeloading.
I tried signing up for Oracle Cloud and got the below message. After that I took the exact same card and signed up with 4 other providers. Fuck you Oracle.
> Error processing transaction
> We're unable to complete your sign up. Common sign up errors are due to: (a) Using prepaid cards. Oracle only accepts credit card and debit cards (b) Intentionally or unintentionally masking one's location or identity
Is it a prepaid virtual card? Cloud providers these days tend to block such cards. With so many horror story about getting unexpected huge bills, it would be sensible to use prepaid virtual card, but I guess cloud providers would never risk potential non-payment for allowing prepaid virtual card.
I recently moved to TubeSync and Jellyfin for YouTube videos. TubeSync will make a copy of the channel locally while applying Sponsorblock filters directly to the video file.
It checks nightly for any new videos on the channel and Jellyfin sends me a notification when a new video is ready to watch.
I'm not really sure what the site does, looks like a cleanly designed proxy for youtube?
If it's a service that's piggybacking on another site there's a good chance it'll get shut down at some point. I get the feeling the author of the post is a little naïve that this comes as a surprise, that their two accounts with Oracle were linked and banned in unison came as a surprise and there wasn't a backup.
However anyone who uses a site like this knows it's easy come/easy go. You get what you pay for and appreciate the time, effort and money the webmaster has put in and make your own arrangements to save anything of importance to your local machine.
But YouTube shorts are way better than traditional long form video. An alternative interface that doesn’t put YouTube shorts front and center is bad design.
it's because do you remember several years back when the popular meme was "I wish I could just pay some money every month to avoid ads" and then youtube actually did it?
Of all the streaming options out there (Netflix, MAX, insert-your-service here) I pay for Youtube Premium. Has paid for itself many times over, especially with YT Music which is really good -it pulls from YT so I can get those rare songs/mixes that some individual just decided to upload from their personal collection. Also can download pretty much any video for offline vewiewing in the app.
The "free" movie selection is also really good (no ad's in premium). It's curated (read not endless fluff) and I spend less time thumbing through the damn menus (looking at you Netflix) and just watching stuff.
As an example YT Movies>Free just released James Cameron's Doc: Deepsea Challenge right after the Titan implosion. This type of realtime, zeitgeist curation happens all the time in their "free movie section" If you are starting from 0 in the submersible space great way to break the ice and start to grasp what that type of exploration entails. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZD_nbS1_II
Been with them since the Google Play Music days, just a happy customer.
If I come up with a clever tweet and then post it, does twitter own that data?
what if i posted it to a middleware like a browser extension that then posts to twitter but also makes it accessible on an ipfs feed?
IANAL. You still own the content you create, including your tweets, but by tweeting that content Twitter can do basically whatever they want with that data too.
If I wanted to publish a website of your tweets, I believe I could contact you and get your permission, or I negotiate the rights through Twitter, like using their third party API.
Whoa, "Oracle Cloud", i have no experience with their services, but judging from their enterprise products that sounds like the grossest possible thing to run a personal project on...
The reason they are gaining traction among hobbyists is their enormously generous free tier, where you get a 4x vCPU / 24 GiB ARM Ampere VPS and get to keep it as long as there is traffic and CPU usage.
Before you think of this as a favorable option, I do recommend you keep in mind that this is Oracle trying to gain traction.
After moving to Oracle Cloud to use their Free Tier for my personal blog, I got this email from them back in April, basically requiring me to migrate to pay-as-you-go since my blog had near zero traffic. To be fair, I'm perfectly fine with this and happy to still be billed $0 per month. But it just set the perspective that Oracle wouldn't blink an eye to kill my site off if its PMs or lawyers thought they needed to revisit a subscription plan or usage terms - and I'm not saying that it's any surprise to me.
> Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) will be reclaiming idle Always Free compute resources from Always Free customers only. Reclaiming idle resources allows OCI to efficiently provide services to Always Free customers. Your account has been identified as having one or more compute instances that have been idle for the past 7 days. These idle instances will be stopped 7 days from now. If your idle Always Free compute instance is stopped, you can restart it as long as the associated compute shape is available in your region. You can keep idle compute instances from being stopped by converting your account to Pay As You Go (PAYG). With PAYG, you will not be charged as long as your usage for all OCI resources remains within the Always Free limits.
One alternative folks should consider for very basic hosting is the fly.io free tier. It's not a VPS, but a container platform. The reason it seems like a more stable option is that they interact with the community on their forums, including occasionally helping getting service restored to free users who have a legitimate use. But it goes without saying that they could change at any moment, like any free tier, and you certainly can't bet on forum-based support saving you. Definitely make daily backups and have somewhere else you can migrate to.
I've been using it for about 3 years now (the large ARM instance a bit less than that, but since about when it was introduced). There have been two outages about a minute each (seems like a no-no-downtime host migration, but I am not sure). For the cost, I am not complaining.
Have tried this out, and yes actually using it in any capacity risks an account ban with no recourse.
Easy come, easy go. (I was running an IPFS node, which at the time was CPU and bandwidth expensive)
i think they've cut this down to 8gb, but i got grandfathered in. i started paying a small amount monthly for one of their services to avoid being culled because it's still a very good deal
The limit is 8 GiB of RAM / 0.125x vCPU only for the x86-64 VPSes. The ARM VPSes are still overpowered. But you may have to wait a few weeks to get one, depending on the region. They get snatched up as soon as they become available.
Strange -- they still advertise the 24 / 4 free offer on this page: https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/
I know folks who have done it quite recently.
IIRC it's possible for the slider to have a lower maximum if you're already using some of the resources on another VM, since they allow splitting. This has caused some confusion for some people, possibly due to leftover block devices from deleted VMs acting as if they are taking up free RAM/CPU credits.
It's very likely that they just used two free-tier instances for this and Oracle discovered that and it's against their ToS (creating multiple free-tier instances).
AWS is by all means a legit cloud provider, one of the big three. You know what you are getting in to, and the skill/knowledge required is transferable to your dayjob.
Now when I read "oracle cloud", my thoughts immediately go to their horrible, gross way of doing business in DB land. Pay outrageous amounts of money for poorly specced machinery, the "you are not allowed to benchmark us" snafu, poor docs, no open source mindshare to speak of/terrible community. And I personally hate their sql dialect but that's me.
Then, you apply this feeling of grossness on the idea of them being your cloud provider. One that at the moment is not dominant, so learning how to navigate and use it is probably not that useful for your career right now. And one with, for me, a pretty shit-tier branding.
All in all I'm not surprised to learn they have a very generous free tier to lure people in.
> AWS is by all means a legit cloud provider, one of the big three. You know what you are getting in to, and the skill/knowledge required is transferable to your dayjob.
> Now when I read "oracle cloud", my thoughts immediately go to their horrible, gross way of doing business in DB land.
And you don't think about issues with Amazon the ecommerce provider? Lots of complaints there. How do you treat that separately? Every provider has their pros and cons.
Oracle cloud is currently the fastest growing cloud provider and catching on to be the top 4(?). The skills/knowledge is likely transferable too.
Oracle the database at its time was good. There were likely some shady practices, but it was actually a good database for large enterprise that needed it. Your only other choice(s) included SQL Server from Microsoft and it didn't perform as well. I can't claim I like it either but it wasn't useless.
> All in all I'm not surprised to learn they have a very generous free tier to lure people in.
All in all - let go of your bias as it clearly impacts how you view things. Most of it is sentiment and based on some opinion or hype. Lots of companies have shady practices in 1 way or another - some are well known and others are nicely hidden. In large companies not every product or department is the same either.
As an engineer and to live up to that name - I rather operate on stats and facts. Perhaps Oracle cloud is less reliable, not as well documented or have other problems - that's all fine, but not that its "gross". What does that even mean? Will it stink if I login to it?
So what does the internet on a desktop look like in the next 3, 5 and 10 years? Every site requires an account and logging in, if not an app install? Instead of phones becoming like computers, computers are becoming like phones.
There are browser extensions such as LibRedirect which will automatically, well, redirect requests to these alternatives, with extensive configurability by the user.
<https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/libredirect/>
YewTu.be went offline last week amidst news that Google were cracking down on YouTube viewers employing adblocking.
As to benefits of Invidious and Piped front-ends:
- No subscription required.
- Less data exposure to YouTube /Google itself.
- Lighter website / improved UI/UX.
- One small way of registering dissatisfaction to YouTube for dark patterns / user-hostile site practices.
Invidious: <https://invidious.io/> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invidious>
Piped: <https://github.com/TeamPiped/Piped>