I’ve used LBRY, and it really sucks. You have to use a client, which was very slow at the time I used it. And they fell for the muh blockchain meme, so it takes forever to launch if you haven’t used it in more than a week. The content availability is poor, as in some videos just wont load (ever).
Bitchute I do actually use, there are people who post on it that I watch, and the videos always load. I do wish there was a mobile client, because I like to listen to videos on my phone. But as a platform it’s rock solid.
To be fair, you can use bitchute on a mobile browser. At least on android that is.
@looming-hawk YouTube has pretty much just become Jimmy Kimmel, main stream news, and pirate streams of family guy. To the normie, they probably don’t look at user generated content off the site all that much.
Yeah I know, rise from the dead my pretty, necrophilia etc etc…
Today something weird happened to me.
Youtube played 2 ads in a row one right after the other. Unskipable. The advertisers got smart and are making 6 seconds ads you don’t really have a chance to skip anyways, but I absolutely despise the fact there is the option of 2 ads back to back, because it’s not far away when there will be 3 ads back to back and that’s just the start of the youtube video. Midvideo ads are a thing and then we are talking about up to 9 ads in a video if we only have one ad break mid video. It’s getting ridiculous…
So are there really any viable alternatives to youtube? Meaning actually having content and not overdoing the add stuff so I can watch the stupid video?
Also the fucking Google know I have been looking for a washing machine so all my adds now are persil, somat, calgon, etc chemicals…
Yeah, I hate when that happens. It doesn’t happen often tho. And when those ads happened to me, they were both just 15 seconds long. So it was just a half a minute of ads, which isn’t huge but also sucks a lot.
I forgot the name of the site, but it used YouTube servers for the back end and used their own front end, the videos didn’t but have ads on them. I wish I remebered the name.
The cool thing about it is that you can play videos in the background on mobile. Jumping forward and backwards in time also works as expected and is fast, unlike on YouTube which takes a while sometimes.
And for a long time there will be no real alternative, if it ever arises. I’m talking about a real player nr2 on the market, not various marginal projects that are trying to pretend to be youtube. Or some frontend solutions that they do only nice wallpaper on youtube face.
Unfortunately, youtube is currently a giant. For a real alternative to appear, you need a very large $$$ and the conviction of a large number of creators to add an alternative as a second source next to / or instead of youtube otherwise the monopoly on the market will remain.
There are far better methods for ad problems and spyware than marginal alternatives …
I don’t watch ads. I block everything. I know I’m a bad man and I don’t let people make money on youtube.
The 2 ads thing is nothing new, they’re doing that for years already. If an ad is skippable or not depends on the advertiser of course.
Generally I don’t mind the ads, YouTube and the Creators both have costs to cover so yeah… but it gets annoying when it’s long and not skippable.
I remember back when ESO launched they had a 3 minute trailer playing as an “ad” on Twitch, and Twitch ads are not skippable no matter what. That’s fun. And those were times where Twitch streams crashed even more often then they do now.
Just since i’m playing with it:
You could go with one of the subscription downloaders based on youtube-dl. I’m running a cron job every hour that automatically downloads all my subscriptions. I’m working on a script that generates nfo files for kodi to make every channel into a “series”.
That gives you the option to have a series library in kodi, including “new episodes” and, if you incorporate the youtube rating, also a “best new episodes” thingy.
It’s not so great in terms of discoverability, but it skips the adds before the video and the whole “sharing your preferences and algorithm” thing. Not a real alternative, but a less intrusive/add riddled way of getting the videos.
I actually have a premium account for a while now and given how much I watch and the fact that google music is included (which replaced spotify for me), I think it is well worth it.