this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2025
953 points (95.3% liked)

Technology

75513 readers
2492 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related news or articles.
  3. Be excellent to each other!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
  10. Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.

Approved Bots


founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.org/post/1872634

So, starting now, Google started mandating full JS for YT, effectively breaking all third-party clients and locking the site to their official client.

This reeks of DRM.

UPDATE: Installing Deno and installing yt-dlp through PyPi fixes yt-dlp but the very idea that Google is mandating JS to lock down YT in an attempt at pseudo-DRM is still crappy.

UPDATE #2: inv.nadeko.net is working again for now.

top 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] MystValkyrie@lemmy.blahaj.zone 15 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (3 children)

I am so glad I had the foresight to use yt-dlp to back up most of my favorite videos. Not all of them, but I just thought we'd get more time.

But yeah, I knew this would happen. The age verification thing was really controversial, so Google would have had to expect that people would try to find other ways to access YouTube. They won't stop here and will go after Deno and NewPipe.

I'm pretty much done with YouTube. It's just not what it used to be. All my favorite YouTubers are either gone, have changed for the worse, or are on Nebula. It's mostly just slop, and I won't miss it.

[–] criss_cross@lemmy.world 1 points 20 hours ago

I wish there was a place that had agdq and speedrunning clips. Then I could leave.

Twitch is atrocious for archived content.

[–] absentbird@lemmy.world 4 points 1 day ago

Nebula is just a better experience most cases too. It just shows you what you're subscribed to in chronological order, which is how YouTube used to work when it was less annoying.

It also shares more revenue with creators and doesn't force feed you ads. I really hope it continues to grow and never betrays its roots.

[–] iii@mander.xyz 3 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Sadly there's so much good music from the 2000s on there that I can't find elsewhere. Small bands that never really broke through.

Inaccesible because of autocratic morons.

[–] NovaSel@lemmy.world 19 points 1 day ago (1 children)

As someone who is listening to a video on NewPipe as I type this very comment, no they did not

[–] Jhex@lemmy.world 6 points 1 day ago (4 children)

Came here to say this after giving it 24 hours in case it was just lucky timing

However, now if I try to watch a YT vid in Firefox, I get the "Oops something went wrong" right when the Ad should have popped up

load more comments (4 replies)

my yt-dlp is on a daily auto-update loop, so I missed this. It's working still. My thanks go to the amazing yt-dlp devs.

[–] DonutsRMeh@lemmy.world 44 points 1 day ago (10 children)

They're going to keep enshitifying it until they kill it completely. Them blackholes, I mean shareholders, will never have enough money.

[–] 6stringringer@lemmy.zip 7 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

Overheard at the last shareholders conference. “Until everyone empties all their ecoin & change jars and the only things left to eat are those mysterious Budding’s sandwich meats with some shit ass processed excuse for a loaf of bread.” This is where we want the average American citizen to be living/existing/panicking.” I dunno his name, but it was for sure a rich, old, white dude. A real Montgomery Burns type looking MF’er. I dunno? They all look the same to me. EDIT: Apparently I fit that demographic according to the young ‘uns visiting us. Although they think I look like “The Dude” from “The Big Lebowski”.

[–] Ziro427@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago

The Dude abides.

[–] devedeset@lemmy.zip 7 points 1 day ago

They won't kill it, just like it hasn't died so far. The content, viewer demographics, and algorithm continue to shift. There's too much money with all the ads and subscription fees. Most people view some content on it by default.

Its gonna be the new cable TV in a way. Kinda sucks, some good stuff on it, but mostly slop filled with ads. And everyone will still use it. Even if they block all 3rd party access, people like me are still going to use it to some limited degree. There will be a video about how to fix a random plumbing fitting that is leaking in my house, or how to fix some random thing on my 15 year old car.

load more comments (8 replies)
[–] aeternum@lemmy.blahaj.zone 7 points 1 day ago (3 children)

The day smart tube next stops working is the day i stop using youtube. I will NEVER watch a shitty youtube ad and I'm sure as shit not paying google any money whatsoever.

[–] RamenJunkie@midwest.social 5 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

What I don't understand. Like, they know people hate shitty ads.

If they had like, literally any level of vetting on the ads, people might actually watch them. But its all fucking scams or podcasts of lies pretending to be ads etc.

I know it costs money to have people but sales people serve a purpose.

[–] rumba@lemmy.zip 1 points 1 day ago

They have a bank of companies that are paying to have their ads shown.

The companies dictate who they want to market to.

Google originally pitched scanning your things for relvant ads and delivered on it, but that's not where the money is at.

[–] jerkface@lemmy.ca 4 points 1 day ago

It's so weird hearing about YouTube ads. I can't recall ever seeing one. I know one day they're going to finally ruin it and I won't be able to consume it any more, an event I try to prepare for, but I haven't really done anything special to avoid ads except all the stuff you have to do just to be secure on the web in the first place. Like just using librewolf out of the box works fine?

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] nom_nom@lemmy.ml 70 points 2 days ago

Holy shit I did not realize how complex of a project yt-dlp has to be to do something as simple as download a video... Kudos to the devs

[–] carrylex@lemmy.world 67 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (5 children)

This post's title is just completely incorrect and it looks like 700+ people didn't even read the comments or the actual issue for one minute.

Good job guys!

load more comments (5 replies)
[–] hardcoreufo@lemmy.world 26 points 2 days ago (1 children)

New pipe and smart tube both working for me.

[–] SoleInvictus@lemmy.blahaj.zone 13 points 2 days ago (2 children)

My self hosted downloader similarly didn't skip a beat.

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] thethunderwolf@lemmy.dbzer0.com 41 points 2 days ago (3 children)

You should remember to send all YT videos that you watch to archive.org

There are browser extensions to do this conveniently

load more comments (3 replies)
[–] Korhaka@sopuli.xyz 22 points 2 days ago (11 children)

Honestly surprised YouTube hasn't just required DRM yet

load more comments (11 replies)
[–] art@lemmy.world 140 points 2 days ago (10 children)

Just ran am update for ytdlp and it's working again.

load more comments (10 replies)
[–] Eyekaytee@aussie.zone 217 points 2 days ago (40 children)

youtube has a monopoly on video content, they can (and will) do what they want

load more comments (40 replies)
[–] AndyMFK@lemmy.dbzer0.com 52 points 2 days ago (5 children)

Google doing everything they can to anger everyone.

load more comments (5 replies)
[–] tisktisk@piefed.social 100 points 2 days ago (42 children)

Someone give it to me straight, what is the endgame of this cat and mouse game? I know yt-dlp and invidious have been quite crafty at adapting to these changes, but the scales seem to be tipping.

It feels like Google will dominate the game into submission the same way it did with AOSP and Chrome. I know I'm being dramatic but it's really starting to feel like we're being cornered into a hopeless situation

[–] Truscape@lemmy.blahaj.zone 111 points 2 days ago (16 children)

Well the problem for google is that Youtube MUST be accessible to almost any internet user in the world - that's a key reason why it's so ubiquitous.

The reason this cat and mouse game has lasted as long as it has in the first place is because any method that is currently being quashed has a solution lying in another user agent that youtube can't kill.

If one day YT sets a "minimum requirements" page on their website to access their content, they've immediately ceded market share to the next upstart. Imagine if they broke viewing for all of the countless cheap (and e-waste) phones, tablets, low end IOT devices, "smart TVs", and so on because they place a requirement that the device cannot meet. Those users will not throw away their hardware - they'll migrate to the first available alternative way to watch content.

As long as YT caters to the lowest common denominator (Their business model essentially binds them to do so), there will always be a software/hardware environment that these tools can spoof. The moment that stops being the case, people look for other options.

A similar analogy would be how Microsoft handled the windows 11 requirements - the strict requirements locking out years upon years of hardware has resulted in a substantial amount of users finding workarounds for their machines (like windows 10 IOT LTSC), or to even jump to linux entirely. They abandoned the entry level users, so entry level users are abandoning them.

load more comments (16 replies)
load more comments (41 replies)

about +12 hours ago spotdl (which uses yt-dlp) was broken. But I keep go on watching videos on newpipe

[–] mrpollo@lemmy.zip 8 points 1 day ago

Yt-dlp worked for me 3 hours ago

[–] cupcakezealot@piefed.blahaj.zone 46 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (3 children)

huh well seems like i should go on a yt-dlp binge on the wcw vault just in case for archival and historical purposes of course

load more comments (3 replies)
[–] courval@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago (2 children)

The world needs a p2p alternative, what are our current options? I wouldn't mind alocating 500GB or more of my storage space just to get rid of these fuckers. These fascist gangsters are taking millions of people hostage who depend on YT for their livelihood..

[–] RichardDegenne@lemmy.zip 6 points 1 day ago

Outside of PeerTube, you mean?

[–] DFX4509B_2@lemmy.org 2 points 23 hours ago* (last edited 23 hours ago)

You got PeerTube for that, but anyone who kills their YT account and moves to PT full time will need to secure alt funding somehow either through Nebula, merch sales, getting a W-2 job, or a combination of the three, though, even if they host on a physical server they own and not on a VPS; buying the parts to build a decent PT server is going to be a pretty heavy up-front cost in itself although there wouldn't be any monthly costs and especially monthly data storage costs like on a VPS.

load more comments
view more: next ›