I'll quit watching YouTube before I give it my ID

Between the age of my account and the fact I pay for premium, if they ever ask for ID they can go fuck themselves and I'll go back to as blockers and fresh accounts

Lol "paying for youtube"
- nothing wrong with that.
  you support the people you watch without having to see ads. also, comes with YT music.
  it's a pretty good deal
- I mean, people pay for Netflix or Amazon or whatever, why is YouTube different? It's my primary video platform and I watch more than 50 hours a week (I'm low balling that number to hell as well).
  While paying is more convenient for me than breaking their shit, I'll pay. Also means creators actually get paid for my views as well
I still have the original Google Play Music All Access intro deal of $7.99/month from 2013.
They contractually can't raise the price on me ever. 12 years so far.
- I couldn’t keep paying for it in good conscience when they killed the original Play Music app and along with it: their awesome selection of curated playlists, the best library organization I’ve seen before or since, and the critical one, the ability to upload your own music that wasn’t available already. I just can’t stand YouTube as a music organization platform.
  Edit: Oh! And not to mention the I’m Feeling Lucky button that somehow no one else has managed to replicate.
- You pay each month that amount for music ,😂

I'm slowly making peace with the thought of losing the internet as it is. Maybe it'll become something broken you wade into from time to time, some sort of blinking, blabbering wasteland to scavenge valid, valuable information from and return to your oasis. Some people will stay trapped in there forever, but it's useless to try to communicate with them.

So real
We can still pass flash drives around, at least until ID requirements come to file systems, ports, and peripherals.
Clippy stage 2: revive many aspects of the old web

Imagine YouTube telling you to submit ID to prove that your 20 year old account is 18+ lmao

Also, imagine living in a country pretending that it's amazing while they treat their citizens like they do... United States of North Korea vibes

Reddit does if you are in the UK, and reddit marks loads of stuff suited to under 18s as NSFW. News about what Israel is doing in Palestine for example.
following the facebook method.

There's really 4 5 spaces in the main internet:

the public corporate web (YouTube, Facebook, twitter, Reddit, etc)
the private corporate web (requires login to view any content, Software as a Service, Cloud Apps, Gmail, etc)
the public web (Wikimedia, Wikia, Archive.org)
the indie web / small web
private web - inaccessible except through login or through VPN or TOR/Onion, but not corporate (media servers, email servers, darkweb, file servers)

And currently the main issue is that the corporate web is intentionally trying to strangle the other spaces on the web.

But there are some movements against it, https://indieweb.org/ and https://neocities.com/ and https://smallweb.cc/

Edit: missed one of the spaces

What about the darknet?
- That s beyond our borders. You must never go there, ~~Simba~~ quick_snail
- That's just private web with extra steps, really
- At that point, you're almost talking about a private web.
  Accessable public information seems to me to be a different beast.

My account is old enough to drink in most of the world. They better not try and age verify me lol.

The article says they take the age of your account into factor. You should read it.
- I just don't believe them. They will find a way to screw it up with AI, the same way they've screwed up youtube moderation.

Just curious why is this entire thing even in the Android community? This is a privacy topic or a YouTube topic etc. There's nothing about it that ties it to Android. Can we keep stuff like this out? It's just one more topic that devolves into politics, scare speculation etc. Just read the comment threads if you need to see.

Exactly. People needs to know Android is not Google
- Hard to escape Google unless you are willing to use a custom rom which is getting harder and harder to do with devices with unlockable bootloaders becoming rarer. Google also has a pretty big influence on the direction of Android.
  Even GrapheneOS that is talked of often requires purchase of a Google phone.

Youtube/Google/Alphabet out of aaaaall the companies out there, should already have a mindblowing amount of info on 99% of its users. There's no need at all to even ask for ID.

Gotta support alternatives such as Peertube, Nebula.. so there are nice places to find videos as YouTube becomes worse and worse.

It's almost impossible for any of those to suceed beyond being niche because its not viable to run against the economics of scale and the practicality of the corporate solutions provided by the Big Techs companies in capitalist countries.
Believe me, I've tried to talk to real people about the dangers of sending data to a single company like Google (Alphabet) or Facebook (Meta) and depending on that for media comsumption, how it can and how it's really used to manipulate public opinion on countries... The fact is that for non-tech and non-privacy minded people (which I'd sure Must be 99.9% of the population) they really don't seem to care, they just wanna a "free" service that they turn on the TV and there are the videos of their "influencers" or YouTube channels to watch, on YouTube I really hate how it shoves ads like there's no tomorrow nowadays every 5 minutes, but I also understand there's a cost to run their business, I, myself, if were to pay for similar service provided without ads I'd pretty sure the YouTube Premium offering would still being a bargain since Google's infractucture and running costs are really optimized.
So yeah, I really don't believe any capitalist country can compete with the Big Techs companies, they are probably deeply rooted into common user behavior in all capitalist country, in the capitalist "democracies" it's impossible to lobby against them in privacy concerns since they can easily sway public opinion in their favor with invisible chances to their content delivery, so anyone trying would have to have a lot of resources to do so (a popular movement without money funding in a capitalist society is basically doomed, theres a very pow chance to suceed imo) and any national alternative, or any actual alternative to their services is almost impossible to suceed since they already have their economy of scale set up with minimal costs and they can also run years on and on with a loss untill any competition does due to being unable to compete with their lower artificial prices.
- I don't know how or why you see ads on YouTube. I have been using firefox and before that whatever else, for a very long time. I have not seen an ad of any kind on YouTube in many MANY years. And since sponsor block came out I've only seen a few that managed to slip through. I just fast forward. But why would anyone suffer YouTube with ads? You're volunteering for it at this point because it's insanely easy to block them.

Friendly reminder that Tampermonkey has a script for this:

https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/521089-youtube-age-restriction-bypass-stealth-version

Cool, if GrayJay could integrate similar functionality that'd be great.
Doesn't work

I've lived on the internet before youtube, I can go back. I've even noticed I've been forcing myself to check out whats on youtube more and more over the past 5 years instead of wanting to check it out. So I kinda feel like I can drop it as a website I visit on its own and only consume it when specific posts link to it (like from lemmy). Next step after that is dropping it completely as video creators naturally move to different hosts.

Every company want to be a platform.. I just them to host videos I can watch embedded on lemmy or some other site.

Obligatory message from Invidious gang

Freetube and pipepipe FTW!

I will use free tube as long as it functions. Wish my creators would go somewhere else.

Quitting Reddit was hard in several ways.

Quitting D&D (because of WotC being assholes) sucked because I was an Eberron/Keith Baker fan and have a lot of money sunk into D&D.

But I don't know if I could quit YouTube. If that happened, I'd try to find ways to hack my way around it. I might ask my favorite creators to migrate to other platforms. But if I had no options to get their content but to give YouTube my ID, I might honestly have to do it.

I'd give YouTube an ID, but never my ID. They probably just have AI checking them to see if they look real enough. As long as it's a convincing enough photoshop, it'd probably pass the litmus test.
- I thought the days of needing a fake ID were decades behind me
- Finally a legitimate use for generative ai: fabricating ID
Why quit D&D? Whether WotC is stinky or not, it's just books and resources you can get anywhere... So acquire the books in ways that don't support WotC and have the best of both worlds, no?
- I wouldn't want to encourage others to patronize WotC. (And, if I'm running a 5e campaign - which I did for a short time - players who want to play are going to want books even if only the PHB.) So I wouldn't want to run 5e. I might play 5e as a player if invited. But I'm kindof a "forever GM."
  Yeah, I'm good with acquiring stuff in ways that doesn't support WotC. I don't consider buying used to be permissable, however. If I buy used, that's one used copy that won't be available to someone else who may instead resort to buying new from WotC. And WotC profits directly from DM's Guild. Piracy is the only way I'd be ok with it. (And if I don't want to run 5e, and given that I already have all the core books, the only WotC content I'd be interested in pirating would be Eberron stuff. If I wanted to support Keith Baker without supporting WotC/DM's Guild, I could just pirate and join Baker's Patreon. Assuming I can find a good place to pirate that stuff from, of course.)
  I specifically do want to participate in TTRPG ecosystems that are more explicitly dedicated to more sane licensing schemes and have very explicitly Ulysses Pact'ed themselves in no-takebacksies ways. Like maybe Paizo/Pathfinder 2e for instance. (I'm currently between groups... and have yet to acquire the PF2e books... and honestly am enjoying a bit of a hiatus from GMing... but when I get back to it, I'd love to do either PF2e or... I dunno. Something not 5e. Even though the 5e system is pretty decent, I think.)
  There was a short period of time during which I thought WotC was backing down after the OGL 2.0 debacle, and if they hadn't immediately proved themselves 100% evil with the Pinkerton fiasco, I would have ended my boycott. But they did, so my boycott remains.
  I haven't seen the D&D movie, nor do I intend to. And I'm not just boycotting WotC. I'm boycotting Hasbro. So, no Transformers movies either.
- Search "dnd 2024 phb anyflip" or replace "phb 2024" with any other book
  Look for urls that look like https://online.anyflip.com/mldog/ynbn/mobile/ (this example is the 2024 phb), the "online." and "/mobile" is what you should look for
  arr free stuff soyjaks pointing
Same for me. I've been using YouTube for long enough that my over decades curated subscription feed is my primary source of both entertainment and learning, and while I'm successfully degoogling all other aspects of my life, this one will be hard.
Who on youtube are you that attached to, out of curiosity? I definitely follow a few creators that would hurt to lose as well, really just looking for recs haha
- Well, I guess just to list off who I watch frequently, kinda sorted into categories:
  TTRPG:
  Critical Role - Really famous. Live-play of TTRPGs. It's really a huge investment of time to keep up with it, though.
  Just people I have parasocial relarionships with:
  Any Austin - Kinda "philosophy of gaming" is how I'd describe his latest content. I've been a huge fan of his for many many years and am way more invested in him than the content he currently makes. But he's really fascinating. His alternate channel "The Excellent Man From Minneapolis" is music he writes/records. Good stuff as well IMO.
  Memoria - Gaming entertainment content. Found her when she was featured on Austin's channel.
  gl;hf - A podcast that Austin and Memoria do together. It's about everything and nothing.
  Long form deep dive investigative and social commentary stuff:
  OKI's Weird Stories - Cool expos on things like conspiracy theories and cults.
  Fredrik Knudson - Similar cool expos on things like gaming communities, fandoms, niche infamous figures, scientific experiments, etc.
  Folding Ideas - Somewhere between expos and social commentary. Does stuff about flat earthers, gold, cryptocurrency, etc.
  Contrapoints - Insightful and really well-edited/highly-prodiced left-wing social commentary stuff.
  Philosophy Tube - Quite similar to Contrapoints but different. I'd imagine if you like one, you'd like both.
  Munecat - Also similar to Contrapoints and Philosophy tube.
  Innuendo Studios - Maybe discontinued, but really really good source for info on how the alt-right "works" and how to fix (particularly American) fascism.
  Tech/hacking:
  Ben Jordan - Stuff about privacy, police tech, fighting scraping for gen-ai training, etc. Informative.
  Marcin Plaza - Hobbyist mobile computing device prototyping. Quite entertaining as well.
  James Channel - Fucking hillarious. Mostly game system modding content, but way funnier than that makes him sound.
  Satanism:
  The Satanic Grotto - A small satanist group based in Kansas that made the national news big time not too long ago holding a "black mass" at the state capitol. I'm just fascinated by all the legal fallout of the whole thing. And... I think the Satanic Grotto is the good guys. "Part of the solution" if you will.
  Behemoth X - Just really dark and atmospheric content about rituals to commune with demons. Dude 100% believes demons are real and powerful and he does blood sacrifices to them and talks about what wisdom he claims they've shared with him. Also life advice. Lol. Really interesting. Only major downside to the guy: he's really leaned into using AI art in his videos lately. It's pretty cringe.
  Other creepy stuff:
  Tales From The Trip! - Substance use trip reports. Only bad trip reports.
  Night Mind - Essays on horror media. Mostly video games and ARGs.
  Nexpo - Similar to Night Mind, but occasionally does stories about grisly murders or creepy cults.
  blameitonjorge - Similar to the above, but with a lot of focus on lost media.
  Nick Crowley - Mostly creepy internet and TV history rabbit holes.
  Vidja gaming content:
  Summoning Salt: History of speedrun world records. Way more interesting than it sounds.
  Pointcrow - Bit of a guilty pleasure. Popular Twitch streamer who does speedruns and challenge runs and stuff. Quite entertaining, but a bit sophmoric.
  I'm sure I could think of more if I thought for a bit. I should mention that I don't usually log in to YouTube. I keep my subscribed-to list in NewPipe on my phone. But I also do a fair amount of just searching by topic or happening across YouTube content on Lemmy or Hackaday.
I wish Nebula were an alternative, but there's no way for new creators to start out there the way they can on TikTok or YouTube. And being paywalled, they'd be taking a lot of really important educational information away from public access, essentially restricting themselves to preaching to the choir.
Would Twitch work?? I don't love these options.
- Another thing is youtube's value isn't even career creators. Its random people uploading stuff because they thought it'd help someone despite no expectations of any career or monetary compensation.
  Im sure lot of us have searched some fix on youtube then been helped by the video posted by a channel where that's the only video there. So not everyone is looking for a netflix alternative from youtube, but its the encyclopedia of knowledge it offers. I've had professor who uploaded their lessons on youtube so people could refer to it.

I alredy quit youtube when commercial crap hit the fan. Never used Zuckerbergs surveillance anyway. Very happy to spend more time on my real life

i watch it, but it has to be adblock, otherwise it becomes intolerable.
- protip: if you wish to watch on your android TV, get an app called smarttube next. You'll need to side load it (so i don't know if it will work much longer with this shit that google is up to. don't know if their block on sideloading affects android tv), but once it is installed, it auto updates and shit. no more adverts on youtube.

Same with blue sky. They hit me up with an age check.

Never looked back.

Gonna be fun if they ask me to verify my age. My account is old enough to drink.

Yeah. I've never been asked but now I wonder if that's why. Haven't heard of anyone with a drinking aged account having to do this.

That's what I said about my IP. Now I can't watch YouTube. I mostly just use PeerTube

What do you even do there? I can almost never find anything to watch on PeerTube.
- Oh, me? I do more posting than viewing, honestly. If we all do the same, it solves this concern
- For me there are actually some people making videos I like. For example thelinuxexperiment, Veronica explain, privacy guides yeah not much though
- If you mostly care about tech and especially Linux and Open Source there is some good content there. Other than that, good content is unfortunately few and far between.
- Gravitytube is starting to mirror a good handful of youtubers
- Yeah it doesn't have much content atm.
  So how about we populate it?
  Record videos about your interests. Install kdenlive and edit your videos. Post them to PeerTube.
- I don't understand what you do on YouTube.
  I don't enjoy it. I've never enjoyed it. I truly don't understand how people can spend time watching it

They ask for login on my always-on VPN so Youtube doesn't exist for me.

Shall I introduce you to my good friend Invidious and his neighbour Searx.

Yeah, I'd quit watching YouTube videos had the audacity to question my age and try to verify it in a way which is hostile to one's own privacy.

If you use Android you can just export your subscriptions and import them into a third party app like Grayjay or NewPipe. There is no reason to use the YouTube app or even remain logged into an account, unless you absolutely need to watch age-gated material.

You can't watch age-restricted content on any Youtube client without a verified account because the server itsself looks for authentication.
- Yes, that's what I just said.

While it may be hard to cold turkey YouTube, at least I could make a start on that reading list...

Wouldn't you only need to give ID for adult stuff though? Which is a small part of YouTube to quit using.
- Depends on what they decide to determine is adult stuff.
  I've seen videos about politics and history be deemed adult stuff because it discusses violence, despite it being in an entirely academic style.

Well, duh. I don't spend much time on youtube, what is there worth watching? Not much.

So can I do without looking up some nostalgic crap from the past? Yeah I could live without it.

I am finding out now, as youtube keeps demanding that I sign in. Fuck off, aint nothing worth that.

This is a strange opinion, YouTube has an insane amount of content for just about everyone. There's so many fantastic creators and it has just about the best edutainment content anywhere. Terribly managed and the platform itself sucks, but there's an incredible amount of amazing content on there for free.
- I am not sure I need "content" in my life. I can waste time in a lots of ways. I always found myself thinking what am I getting out of this really?
  Also, there is just so much on it, where would one even begin? I miss youtube when it started out, now that people make things for money, the idea is to just stretch things out and waste time. Like and Subscribe!
  I made it a point to never subscribe to anything unless it was anonymous through a third party tool.
  So, what do you think is actually "fantastic" on youtube?
- there are alot of good ones, but theres alot fo bad ones that overshadow the others. PROPAGANDA, AI, and other forms of slop.

There's PipePipe.

I quit YouTube when I saw they were treating their content creators like shit.

and then some youtube content creators are POS themselves(the main ones of course). alot of them turned that way. i only mainly follow the pet based ones now, and some smaller pet ones called pushed about youtubes algorithim a while aback, they had to quit youtube because they could not earn revenue.
and asian ytubers i used to followed drank the koolaid of maga during the pandemic, consistent attacks women for causing thier decline of thier channels(it was a whole drama by the way if you were a long time fan now its the new parasocial fans vs the old fans who know thier insidious behaviour), and hosting pos like TULSI gabbard on the channel right before the election.
- Most youtubers I ended up still following have been ones who aren't even trying to make a living off of it and just sharing stuff because it seems cool. Sometimes posting something maybe once a year or going silent for years then popping in with a video.
  So kind of like how there isn't really money to be made on lemmy and filled with people shilling stuff or going viral to start gets money off interactions.
  There's just a very desperate car sales person vibe to the career youtubers.

Honestly I think ID verification on the Web isn't a bad thing. I know a professional (highly paid) propagandist in real life which made me fear trolling and masquerading as someone else is way more prevalent than assumed, because trolling on the Web is part of what he does. I'd love to see a forum where I didn't have to second guess whether users are bots/trolls and there are no people using tens if not hundreds of accounts to skew votes.

Obviously it shouldn't be for-profit unethical corporations that handle this, but well-run governments.

15 downvotes, 0 proper counter-arguments. If someone's missing something so obvious, it should be equally trivial to explain.