7 ms·

In ten years time YouTube will be entirely inaccessible from the browser as the iPad kids generation are used to doomscrolling the tablet app and Google feels c

by xeonmc 11mo ago

In ten years time YouTube will be entirely inaccessible from the browser as the iPad kids generation are used to doomscrolling the tablet app and Google feels confident enough to cut off the aging demographic.

andy_ppp 11mo ago
The YouTube web app is so full of bugs it's almost unusable on a phone. Comments also disappear regularly on all platforms...
- neuroelectron 11mo ago
  Google is having a hard time conforming to their own javascript standards.
- RGamma 11mo ago
  Do you also get looping search results? I've also had it happen to the simple "videos" tab of a channel.
- ACCount37 11mo ago
  And the YouTube web interface is full of issues too. For example, livestreams had transient memory leaks for months already, thought to be related to their chat implementation. In the meanwhile, YouTube spends its effort on measures against yt-dlp, which don't actually stop yt-dlp. What the fuck is wrong with Google corporate as of late.
  - mring33621 11mo ago
    dumb middle management driven by dumb metrics a very old story...
  - hbbio 11mo ago
    > livestreams had transient memory leaks for months already maybe it's vibe coded nowadays
- sussmannbaka 11mo ago
  I can only navigate to a video by long-pressing, copying the URL and pasting it into the URL bar, otherwise I get a meaningless "something went wrong" type error message. Mobile Safari, no content blockers, not logged into a Google account. After almost two decades of making the website worse they finally succeeded in breaking "clicking a video". I wonder what the hotshots at Alphabet manage to break next :o)
  - Barbing 11mo ago
    Works dandily here. Suspicion: they’ve fingerprinted me hard and know I have premium but like to watch occasionally from Safari private (with content blockers) and don’t hassle me. Mainly suspect this given lack of anti-adblocking symptoms.
  - dylan604 11mo ago
    This was happening to me browsing in FF with uBO. It would work as soon as I disabled uBO. I realized uBO needed an update, and it went back to working with uBO active after the update. For a couple of hours I was ready to never use YT again if it meant suffering their obnoxious interruptions with ads.
- goku12 11mo ago
  > Comments also disappear regularly on all platforms... I don't believe that that's a bug. The disappearance depends a lot on the topic of those comments. It's very much deliberate censorship.
  - kllrnohj 11mo ago
    > It's very much deliberate censorship. Also known as "moderation"
    - goku12 11mo ago
      That 'moderation' is in the same spirit as 'Enhanced Interrogation Techniques' at Guantanamo Bay, 'Administrative Segregation' in US prisons or Russia's 'Special military operations' in Ukraine. Tomayto, tomahto. Disclaimer: To anybody getting ready to be offended by these references, don't be selectively blind to the word 'spirit' above. If you still can't make it out, I'm obviously referring to euphemisms here and no additional equivalences are implied. Anything else you attribute to my statement reflects your own views and is your own responsibility. It's such a shame that I have to explain such basic facts with a disclaimer that's longer than the comment itself. But the reality is that some people are so sensitive that they insist on imposing their version political correctness to not just implied speech, but also to unimplied speech, language and even thought, while totally disregarding others' cultural perspectives. I leave this here just in case I have to explain my intentions to someone again.
- Synaesthesia 11mo ago
  I only use the web app on my phone (via Firefox). It works well enough and I can play videos in the background and block ads.
wiseowise 11mo ago
Pffft, and good riddance, comrade! Just think about native application and native performance, great native animations and native experience (and native ads, of course)! We won't have this god-awful Web (that propelled modern tech world in the first place) anymore, we can finally have personal vendetta against awful JS and DOM. No more interoperability, no more leverage against corpos, just glorious proprietary enclaves where local tyrant can do anything they want!
- oblio 11mo ago
  Think of iOS. You can basically use just 1 programming stack on iOS devices: Swift/Objective-C. You can't have JIT except for the JIT approved by the Apple Gods. The biggest hack to this is React Native, which barged just in due to sheer Javascript and web dominance elsewhere, and even that has a ton of problems. Plus I'm fairly sure that the React Native JS only runs in the JIT approved by the Apple Gods, anyway. Otherwise, we're stuck in the old days of compiled languages: C/C++ (they can't really get rid of these due to games, and they have tried... Apple generally hates/tolerates games but money is money). Rust works decently from what I hear. Microsoft bought Mono/Xamarin and that also sort of works. But basically nothing else is at the level of quality and polish - especially in terms of deployment - as desktops, if you want to build an app in say, Python. Or Java. Or Ruby. Or whatever other language in which people write desktop apps. And we're at a point where mobile computing power is probably 20x that of desktops available in 2007. The only factor that is holding us back is battery life, and that's only because phone manufacturers manufacture demand by pushing for ever slimmer phones. Plus we have tons of very promising battery techs very close to increasing battery capacities by 20-50%.
  - goku12 11mo ago
    > Plus we have tons of very promising battery techs very close to increasing battery capacities by 20-50%. Could you elaborate a bit, please? Any links are appreciated.
    - oblio 11mo ago
      https://www.androidauthority.com/silicon-carbon-batteries-explained-3534045/ https://www.androidauthority.com/silicon-carbon-batteries-ex... Silicon Carbon batteries. And others, but this tech is already in production.
BinaryIgor 11mo ago
It's not YouTube though, but downloader :) "yt-dlp is a feature-rich command-line audio/video downloader with support for thousands of sites. The project is a fork of youtube-dl based on the now inactive youtube-dlc."
- nicce 11mo ago
  I guess the point was that yt-dlp is only possible, because of the mandatory protocols you need in the browser. Moving to native app makes it much easier to prevent downloading and denying access to the unencrypted content.
  - easton 11mo ago
    I think these days yt-dlp is possible because they're relying on the infra YouTube has for their TV apps, which are html5 (ish) browser apps. so they'd also have to dedicate time to building native apps for every TV in existence, even if youtube.com went away.
    - freefaler 11mo ago
      I think that too. When the people refresh their TVs with the newer, more DRM friendly/updated version this channel will meet its end :(
  - somat 11mo ago
    My understanding is that the original yt-dl used the browser interface. yt-dlp uses the android app interface.
    - Thorrez 11mo ago
      >This impacts yt-dlp as we currently request video data from YouTube as if we were YouTube on TV. https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/issues/12563 https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/issues/12563
  - goku12 11mo ago
crazygringo 11mo ago
This is obviously not plausible. They're never going to shut off browser access on people's laptops. Watching YT at work is a major thing. I have to assume you're joking, but I honestly can't figure out what point you're even trying to make. Do it think it's surprising that an ad-supported site has anti-scraping/anti-downloading mechanisms? YouTube isn't a charity, it's not Wikipedia.
- reddalo 11mo ago
  They can't shut off browser access, but they surely can kill all non-Chromium browsers.
  - crazygringo 11mo ago
    No, they can't. Way too many devices, including televisions, access YT via all sorts of browsers. Not to mention antitrust would be all over that. With their dominant browser share, getting people to switch to Chrome by removing access to YT for Firefox would get multiple governments filing lawsuits ASAP.
    - mapmeld 11mo ago
      What OS are televisions using to run all of their streaming media apps? It's not iOS.
      - HeinzStuckeIt 11mo ago
        Samsung Smart TVs run Tizen.
- Forgeties79 11mo ago
  I don’t think it’s such a wild possibility that more and more jobs will be able to be done with locked down tablets and smart phone while fewer will be done on laptops and desktops. We are already seeing it at the personal level - people are entirely forgoing personal computers and using mobile devices exclusively. The amount isn’t huge (like 10 or 15% in the US IIRC?) but 10 years ago that was unthinkable IMO. I was reading a study recently that claimed Gen Z is the first generation where tech literacy has actually dropped. And I don’t blame them! When you don’t have to troubleshoot things and most of your technology “just works“ out the box compared to 20 or even 10 years ago, then you just don’t need to know how to work under the hood as much and you don’t need a fully fledged PC. You can simply download an app and generally it will just take care of whatever it is you need with a few more taps. Similar to how I am pretty worthless when it comes to working on a car vs my parents generation could all change their own oil and work on a carburetor (part of this is also technology has gotten more complicated and locked down, including cars, but you get my point). The point of all this is I could definitely see a world where using a desktop/laptop computer starts becoming a more fringe choice or specific to certain industries. Or perhaps they become strictly “work” tools for heavy lifting while mobile devices are for everything else. In that world many companies will simply go “well over 90% of our users are only using the app and the desktop has become a pain in the ass to support as it continues to trend downwards so…why bother?” Who knows the future? Some new piece of hardware could come out in 10 years and all of this becomes irrelevant. But I could see a world where devices in our hands are the norm and the large device on the desk becomes more of a thing of the past for a larger percentage of the population.
vachina 11mo ago
They’d need dedicated hardware to enforce any kind of effective DRM. Encrypted bitstream generated on the fly watchable only on L2 attested device.
- fsflover 11mo ago
  Which is why Windows 11 requires TPM.
  - goku12 11mo ago
    TPM isn't the only misfeature that makes Windows 11 an abomination. People who don't switch to a respectful platform is in for a lot of pain.
  - icpmoles 11mo ago
    DRM protection schemes usually don't rely on TPM, the real magic happens inside your GPU and the monitor.
    - fsflover 11mo ago
      They can use all available tools at the same time.
      - gruez 11mo ago
        TPMs existed for at least a decade though.
        fsflover 11mo ago
        They can even be based on free software like in my Librem laptop. This is however not what Microsoft wants.
- lloeki 11mo ago
  Netflix is already there for 4k streams
Fokamul 11mo ago
I hope they will do that, yes really. Because this will mean major shift to open-source and community solution, where creators will be paid directly by their viewers. I have NO problem, what so ever, to pay content creators directly. But I have HUGE problem to pay big corpos. It's ridiculous that we pay for Netflix same price as US people and for you it's cheaper than coffee and for us, if you compare median-salary, it's 5-10x MORE expensive. (cancelled every streaming platform year before as all of my friends, cloud seedbox here we go) And I don't even wanna mention Netflix's agenda they want to push (eg.: Witcher) That's why piracy is so frequent here in small country in EU :) Also it's legal or in grey-area, because nobody enforce it or copyright companies are unable to enforce it if you don't make money from sharing. (yes, you don't even need to use VPN with torrents)
- latexr 11mo ago
  > Because this will mean major shift to open-source and community solution, where creators will be paid directly by their viewers. That’s an unrealistic nerd dream. People haven’t moved off of closed social networks such as Facebook and Instagram, and haven’t flocked to creator-owned platforms such as Nebula. The general public, i.e. the majority of people, will eat whatever Google, Meta, et al feed them. No matter how bad things get, too few people abandon those platforms in favour of something more open.
- mbac32768 11mo ago
  I'm sorry but this sounds hollow. Creators are specifically choosing to upload their content to YouTube. They have elected "big corpos" to handle payment for them. You are not standing up for them by pirating their stuff from YouTube. If you have a problem with it, it is on you to stop using YouTube to view their content. You did not gain a moral right to pirate their stuff just because you don't like the deal.
notepad0x90 11mo ago
i think a lot of millenials and older gen-z use youtube on browsers. It has more and more alternative competitors too, like bilibili in China.
- fragmede 11mo ago
  Ooh thanks. If the 21st century is going to belong to China, then BiliBili, along with v2ex.com, is gonna need to get added to my doomscrolling itinerary.
butlike 11mo ago
They'll never leave money on the table like that. The older demographic are the only ones that can buy things.
BenGosub 11mo ago
One constant about Google, they always bet on the web.
- xandrius 11mo ago
  Until the profits tells them not to.

by xeonmc 11mo ago

andy_ppp 11mo ago

The YouTube web app is so full of bugs it's almost unusable on a phone. Comments also disappear regularly on all platforms...

neuroelectron 11mo ago
Google is having a hard time conforming to their own javascript standards.
RGamma 11mo ago
Do you also get looping search results? I've also had it happen to the simple "videos" tab of a channel.
ACCount37 11mo ago
And the YouTube web interface is full of issues too. For example, livestreams had transient memory leaks for months already, thought to be related to their chat implementation. In the meanwhile, YouTube spends its effort on measures against yt-dlp, which don't actually stop yt-dlp. What the fuck is wrong with Google corporate as of late.
- mring33621 11mo ago
  dumb middle management driven by dumb metrics a very old story...
- hbbio 11mo ago
  > livestreams had transient memory leaks for months already maybe it's vibe coded nowadays
sussmannbaka 11mo ago
I can only navigate to a video by long-pressing, copying the URL and pasting it into the URL bar, otherwise I get a meaningless "something went wrong" type error message. Mobile Safari, no content blockers, not logged into a Google account. After almost two decades of making the website worse they finally succeeded in breaking "clicking a video". I wonder what the hotshots at Alphabet manage to break next :o)
- Barbing 11mo ago
  Works dandily here. Suspicion: they’ve fingerprinted me hard and know I have premium but like to watch occasionally from Safari private (with content blockers) and don’t hassle me. Mainly suspect this given lack of anti-adblocking symptoms.
- dylan604 11mo ago
  This was happening to me browsing in FF with uBO. It would work as soon as I disabled uBO. I realized uBO needed an update, and it went back to working with uBO active after the update. For a couple of hours I was ready to never use YT again if it meant suffering their obnoxious interruptions with ads.
goku12 11mo ago
> Comments also disappear regularly on all platforms... I don't believe that that's a bug. The disappearance depends a lot on the topic of those comments. It's very much deliberate censorship.
- kllrnohj 11mo ago
  > It's very much deliberate censorship. Also known as "moderation"
  - goku12 11mo ago
    That 'moderation' is in the same spirit as 'Enhanced Interrogation Techniques' at Guantanamo Bay, 'Administrative Segregation' in US prisons or Russia's 'Special military operations' in Ukraine. Tomayto, tomahto. Disclaimer: To anybody getting ready to be offended by these references, don't be selectively blind to the word 'spirit' above. If you still can't make it out, I'm obviously referring to euphemisms here and no additional equivalences are implied. Anything else you attribute to my statement reflects your own views and is your own responsibility. It's such a shame that I have to explain such basic facts with a disclaimer that's longer than the comment itself. But the reality is that some people are so sensitive that they insist on imposing their version political correctness to not just implied speech, but also to unimplied speech, language and even thought, while totally disregarding others' cultural perspectives. I leave this here just in case I have to explain my intentions to someone again.
Synaesthesia 11mo ago
I only use the web app on my phone (via Firefox). It works well enough and I can play videos in the background and block ads.

wiseowise 11mo ago

Pffft, and good riddance, comrade! Just think about native application and native performance, great native animations and native experience (and native ads, of course)! We won't have this god-awful Web (that propelled modern tech world in the first place) anymore, we can finally have personal vendetta against awful JS and DOM. No more interoperability, no more leverage against corpos, just glorious proprietary enclaves where local tyrant can do anything they want!

oblio 11mo ago
Think of iOS. You can basically use just 1 programming stack on iOS devices: Swift/Objective-C. You can't have JIT except for the JIT approved by the Apple Gods. The biggest hack to this is React Native, which barged just in due to sheer Javascript and web dominance elsewhere, and even that has a ton of problems. Plus I'm fairly sure that the React Native JS only runs in the JIT approved by the Apple Gods, anyway. Otherwise, we're stuck in the old days of compiled languages: C/C++ (they can't really get rid of these due to games, and they have tried... Apple generally hates/tolerates games but money is money). Rust works decently from what I hear. Microsoft bought Mono/Xamarin and that also sort of works. But basically nothing else is at the level of quality and polish - especially in terms of deployment - as desktops, if you want to build an app in say, Python. Or Java. Or Ruby. Or whatever other language in which people write desktop apps. And we're at a point where mobile computing power is probably 20x that of desktops available in 2007. The only factor that is holding us back is battery life, and that's only because phone manufacturers manufacture demand by pushing for ever slimmer phones. Plus we have tons of very promising battery techs very close to increasing battery capacities by 20-50%.
- goku12 11mo ago
  > Plus we have tons of very promising battery techs very close to increasing battery capacities by 20-50%. Could you elaborate a bit, please? Any links are appreciated.
  - oblio 11mo ago
    https://www.androidauthority.com/silicon-carbon-batteries-explained-3534045/ https://www.androidauthority.com/silicon-carbon-batteries-ex... Silicon Carbon batteries. And others, but this tech is already in production.

BinaryIgor 11mo ago

It's not YouTube though, but downloader :) "yt-dlp is a feature-rich command-line audio/video downloader with support for thousands of sites. The project is a fork of youtube-dl based on the now inactive youtube-dlc."

nicce 11mo ago
I guess the point was that yt-dlp is only possible, because of the mandatory protocols you need in the browser. Moving to native app makes it much easier to prevent downloading and denying access to the unencrypted content.
- easton 11mo ago
  I think these days yt-dlp is possible because they're relying on the infra YouTube has for their TV apps, which are html5 (ish) browser apps. so they'd also have to dedicate time to building native apps for every TV in existence, even if youtube.com went away.
  - freefaler 11mo ago
    I think that too. When the people refresh their TVs with the newer, more DRM friendly/updated version this channel will meet its end :(
- somat 11mo ago
  My understanding is that the original yt-dl used the browser interface. yt-dlp uses the android app interface.
  - Thorrez 11mo ago
    >This impacts yt-dlp as we currently request video data from YouTube as if we were YouTube on TV. https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/issues/12563 https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/issues/12563
- goku12 11mo ago

crazygringo 11mo ago

This is obviously not plausible. They're never going to shut off browser access on people's laptops. Watching YT at work is a major thing. I have to assume you're joking, but I honestly can't figure out what point you're even trying to make. Do it think it's surprising that an ad-supported site has anti-scraping/anti-downloading mechanisms? YouTube isn't a charity, it's not Wikipedia.

reddalo 11mo ago
They can't shut off browser access, but they surely can kill all non-Chromium browsers.
- crazygringo 11mo ago
  No, they can't. Way too many devices, including televisions, access YT via all sorts of browsers. Not to mention antitrust would be all over that. With their dominant browser share, getting people to switch to Chrome by removing access to YT for Firefox would get multiple governments filing lawsuits ASAP.
  - mapmeld 11mo ago
    What OS are televisions using to run all of their streaming media apps? It's not iOS.
    - HeinzStuckeIt 11mo ago
      Samsung Smart TVs run Tizen.
Forgeties79 11mo ago
I don’t think it’s such a wild possibility that more and more jobs will be able to be done with locked down tablets and smart phone while fewer will be done on laptops and desktops. We are already seeing it at the personal level - people are entirely forgoing personal computers and using mobile devices exclusively. The amount isn’t huge (like 10 or 15% in the US IIRC?) but 10 years ago that was unthinkable IMO. I was reading a study recently that claimed Gen Z is the first generation where tech literacy has actually dropped. And I don’t blame them! When you don’t have to troubleshoot things and most of your technology “just works“ out the box compared to 20 or even 10 years ago, then you just don’t need to know how to work under the hood as much and you don’t need a fully fledged PC. You can simply download an app and generally it will just take care of whatever it is you need with a few more taps. Similar to how I am pretty worthless when it comes to working on a car vs my parents generation could all change their own oil and work on a carburetor (part of this is also technology has gotten more complicated and locked down, including cars, but you get my point). The point of all this is I could definitely see a world where using a desktop/laptop computer starts becoming a more fringe choice or specific to certain industries. Or perhaps they become strictly “work” tools for heavy lifting while mobile devices are for everything else. In that world many companies will simply go “well over 90% of our users are only using the app and the desktop has become a pain in the ass to support as it continues to trend downwards so…why bother?” Who knows the future? Some new piece of hardware could come out in 10 years and all of this becomes irrelevant. But I could see a world where devices in our hands are the norm and the large device on the desk becomes more of a thing of the past for a larger percentage of the population.

vachina 11mo ago

They’d need dedicated hardware to enforce any kind of effective DRM. Encrypted bitstream generated on the fly watchable only on L2 attested device.

fsflover 11mo ago
Which is why Windows 11 requires TPM.
- goku12 11mo ago
  TPM isn't the only misfeature that makes Windows 11 an abomination. People who don't switch to a respectful platform is in for a lot of pain.
- icpmoles 11mo ago
  DRM protection schemes usually don't rely on TPM, the real magic happens inside your GPU and the monitor.
  - fsflover 11mo ago
    They can use all available tools at the same time.
    - gruez 11mo ago
      TPMs existed for at least a decade though.
      - fsflover 11mo ago
        They can even be based on free software like in my Librem laptop. This is however not what Microsoft wants.
lloeki 11mo ago
Netflix is already there for 4k streams

Fokamul 11mo ago

I hope they will do that, yes really. Because this will mean major shift to open-source and community solution, where creators will be paid directly by their viewers. I have NO problem, what so ever, to pay content creators directly. But I have HUGE problem to pay big corpos. It's ridiculous that we pay for Netflix same price as US people and for you it's cheaper than coffee and for us, if you compare median-salary, it's 5-10x MORE expensive. (cancelled every streaming platform year before as all of my friends, cloud seedbox here we go) And I don't even wanna mention Netflix's agenda they want to push (eg.: Witcher) That's why piracy is so frequent here in small country in EU :) Also it's legal or in grey-area, because nobody enforce it or copyright companies are unable to enforce it if you don't make money from sharing. (yes, you don't even need to use VPN with torrents)

latexr 11mo ago
> Because this will mean major shift to open-source and community solution, where creators will be paid directly by their viewers. That’s an unrealistic nerd dream. People haven’t moved off of closed social networks such as Facebook and Instagram, and haven’t flocked to creator-owned platforms such as Nebula. The general public, i.e. the majority of people, will eat whatever Google, Meta, et al feed them. No matter how bad things get, too few people abandon those platforms in favour of something more open.
mbac32768 11mo ago
I'm sorry but this sounds hollow. Creators are specifically choosing to upload their content to YouTube. They have elected "big corpos" to handle payment for them. You are not standing up for them by pirating their stuff from YouTube. If you have a problem with it, it is on you to stop using YouTube to view their content. You did not gain a moral right to pirate their stuff just because you don't like the deal.

notepad0x90 11mo ago

i think a lot of millenials and older gen-z use youtube on browsers. It has more and more alternative competitors too, like bilibili in China.

fragmede 11mo ago
Ooh thanks. If the 21st century is going to belong to China, then BiliBili, along with v2ex.com, is gonna need to get added to my doomscrolling itinerary.

butlike 11mo ago

They'll never leave money on the table like that. The older demographic are the only ones that can buy things.

BenGosub 11mo ago

One constant about Google, they always bet on the web.

xandrius 11mo ago
Until the profits tells them not to.