I just wanna say... FUCK YOUTUBE! I was watching a live video from a conservative black lady dropping truth bombs, and less than 7 minutes in, they cancelled it saying: "This video has been removed for violating YouTube's Terms of Service." Bull. Fucking. Shit. Fuck you, YouTube. Your CEO is a cunt.

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[–][deleted] 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (6 children)

Not sure it does that. I just traced the REST calls HookTube makes and it still all seems to go to YouTube and Google. They do seem to have their own endpoint, for some things, but most still calls the Google endpoints. Not sure what you would be robbing from them anyway, how that would hurt them. For the purpose of companies running ads, I think they are getting different analytics. You are probably fine just using an adblocker, if you are on their website or not. If you use their services, you use their bandwidth. If you want to hurt them, you don't stop using what they give for free -- you stop giving the part they want from you. So, I think the best thing is to use adblock, crank up the video resolution, and leave it playing all night long. The more you use YouTube without them getting what they want the better.

[–]NastyWetSmear 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (5 children)

Heh, well, that's one way of wounding the beast.

It's a shame, though. I thought Hooktube was robbing the creator of the views, allowing someone to watch a video without supporting it. So, for example, if you wanted to watch some Anti-Vaxxer say that there are nano-machines in vaccines, but you didn't want them to get the encouragement that a view would give, you could watch it through Hooktube. I'm sure that was the original purpose, though I know they got a hard pushback from YouTube.

Oh well, thanks for the insight!

[–][deleted] 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (4 children)

You can still watch YouTube without the view, I believe. If you use most desktop players, I think many of the calls it expects are skipped. Especially if you use youtube-dl, I think it retrieves the video URL directly. VLC, etc. should be enough to circumvent the view counter, unless YouTube really looks at how much of the video was downloaded. It's probably easy enough to give this a try if someone would find a video with a low view count, or maybe upload on one's own channel, and watches it with VLC. If it doesn't add to the view count, I think it should be pretty conclusive that this works.

But, apart from social media stats, I am not sure what view count really does. Bragging rights? In the end, it's about ads, I think.

If someone has confirmed if this works, drop a comment.

[–]NastyWetSmear 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (3 children)

Working or not, this was very helpful. Thank you.

[–][deleted] 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

NP. BTW, if there are issues with notifications, as many people complain, use RSS:

https://danielmiessler.com/blog/rss-feed-youtube-channel/

https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=THE_CHANNEL_ID_HERE

This way you can't get unsubbed and it bypasses geo-restrictions, if a channel is blocked in someone's countyr.

For example, Timcast RSS feed:

https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCe02lGcO-ahAURWuxAJnjdA

Invidious makes it easy to grab channel IDs from the URL: https://www.invidio.us/channel/UCe02lGcO-ahAURWuxAJnjdA

You will never miss notifications again and you cannot be unsubscribed by YouTube and you no longer need a Google account. I wish this was more widely known.

[–]NastyWetSmear 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

You're a hive of wisdom!

[–][deleted] 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

No, I'm a hive of common sense. It's not wisdom that is absent but common sense in this case.