Put a Condom on YouTube
Can the services of Big Tech be untangled from their manipulative algorithms?
It might only be a slight exaggeration to say that YouTube is a modern wonder of the world. Anything you want to learn, from shaving with a straight razor to downhill mountain biking, is available in an easy-to-consume format of quality videos made in large part by regular people who want to share what they know. Thanks to their generous efforts I have saved thousands of dollars fixing my own truck, growing my own grass, and doing some of my own painting, plumbing, and electrical work.
When my Jeep started making an awful high-pitched wailing sound, I learned from TheRealWillydigger how to replace the oil pump drive assembly, a part I'd never heard of up until that point. I was so grateful for his video that I tracked down his email address and sent him a thank you note.
When my toilet started leaking from the base, I learned from minthillbilly how to replace the wax ring that seals the toilet to the floor. When one of my bathroom electrical outlets stopped working, I learned from "Skobel Homes" how to reset the GFCI switch. That alone saved me the cost of bringing out an electrician only to have him press the button himself and laugh his way out the door with $150.
When I wanted to grow my own grass instead of paying $2,000 for sod, I learned how to do it from "How to Dad" and "City Kid Outdoors." Professional landscapers in my area claimed that it was impossible to grow grass from seed. "The birds will eat the seeds," "It'll be patchy," and "You'll just wind up calling us back anyway," were some the excuses I received. These were later undermined when I managed to grow a full lawn in only a few weeks for my children to enjoy the following summer.
This kind of content alone would qualify YouTube as the most comprehensive and accessible educational institution to have ever existed. A modern Library of Alexandria but more widely available. But that only scratches the surface. Anything you want to watch from old movies and TV shows to their more modern counterparts is available in clip form on YouTube.
I have the entire Sopranos box set at home but I still prefer to watch clips of the show stitched together by a young polyglot in Serbia called Borko whose skill with a video editor and insight into the characters make watching his clips more entertaining and satisfying than binge watching the show from beginning to end.
After Norm MacDonald died, I binged on his videos provided by a Filipino superfan called "I'm Not Norm" whose channel spans Norm's entire career from his early standup to his run on SNL to his final videos and podcast appearances. This would have never been possible before YouTube.
And lastly, isn't it now common practice to search for a product or service on YouTube before we buy it? Before I purchase a tool or piece of hardware, I check to see if Todd from Project Farm has tested it. In addition, when I was looking for a good quality pocket knife, I considered one from Benchmade called the Bailout. It was marketed as a lightweight knife that could stand up to hard use and I almost bought it. That is, until I watched SuperSteelSteve snap the handle and bend the blade in testing. In another video he demonstrated that the blade steel could not hold a sharp edge for very long. Another $150 saved.
I could go on all day about the positive aspects of YouTube. Until recently, the content available there provided by both amateurs and professionals spanned every conceivable human interest. Google's light-touch, mostly legalistic approach to moderation helped unleash the power of human ingenuity, demonstrating once again that when left to our own devices, human beings tend to produce a prosperous and thriving environment. YouTube spawned innovation on the backend, too. In order to host all that video (literally millions of gigabytes worth), new technologies and new job types had to be invented.
On the surface, it all seems right-leaning. For a while there, Google was a small government that largely stayed out of the way of its creators. But due to its centralized, proprietary, and surveilled nature, YouTube is far from right-leaning. As I wrote last week, YouTube's recommendation algorithm is in play, steering and directing its users in ways we cannot fully perceive. Since 2016, Google has activated it for use in "pushing" society in what it describes as a "more understanding and tolerant direction." We're increasingly seeing censorship of more topics, particularly in the areas of election fraud and COVID, which supports establishment narratives and suppresses dissenting voices. LGBT content is allowed in Restricted Mode, demonstrating a conflict of values between YouTube engineers in the Silicon Valley and regular parents across the country.
So is there a way to feast upon the bounty of YouTube content while avoiding the algorithm and engagement features with which Google carries out its intentions for society?
Yes. Meet NewPipe and Invidious.
NewPipe is a YouTube app for Android, and Invidious is the same for web. Now before you go running out to download them, stick with me until the end. This will be the first time in this newsletter's brief run that we're going to take a step outside the city walls and into the free wilderness. Instead of just yelling, "Don't use the YouTube app! Use NewPipe!" I want you to understand why we're going to figuratively sacrifice living in a vibrant and controlled downtown in favor of a rugged and free rural area outside the city.
When you load up YouTube in the app or a web browser, you're looking at what's called the "frontend." That's the part of the service that's exposed to the users. Imagine walking through an Apple store with its beautiful modern design of open spaces and light, accented with glass and wood. You don't see the break room, the receiving area, or the offices behind the scenes where the logistics and administrative work is done. Similarly, you don't see the databases, rendering servers, or the code that implements the YouTube recommendation algorithm.
NewPipe and Invidious are unofficial alternative frontends for YouTube. They take in the standard YouTube website and rearrange it in such a way as to provide the user with a different experience. In this case, a more humane, privacy-focused, and right-leaning experience. More to the point, they can remove some of the features we don't want and add some features we do want.
Let's have a look at the YouTube website and Invidious side-by-side.
In this first image, you can see the major similarities. Just about all the pertinent facts about this particular YouTube channel are represented in Invidious, including the profile area, video titles, thumbnails, and metadata including the view count and date of publication. That's because Invidious simply scraped the content of the corresponding YouTube page and redisplayed it.
In this second image, you can see the similarities between the pages of a specific video. Video controls are comparable as well as the metadata (view count and thumbs up/down). However, note that while the "Up Next" bar is prominent in YouTube (after all, as we learned earlier, that's one of the appearances of the recommendation algorithm), you would have to scroll down to the bottom of the Invidious window to find it. Finally, note the gray button beneath that dropdown menu.
Lastly, in this third image of a COVID-related video, note the COVID bar beneath the video in YouTube on the left. Here Google goes the extra mile to support the establishment narrative by elevating the COVID message to a place where you are virtually guaranteed to see it. Invidious simply doesn't display it at all, which is what we want.
Now let's turn to NewPipe.
In this first image we can see just how similar NewPipe (right) looks compared with YouTube (left). In fact, if they were not labelled it would be difficult to tell which was which.
This second image shows an example of a video's description. More or less the same thing except that YouTube contracts the description text and elevates the "More from" panel.
Overall it's clear that both alternative frontends look pretty much the same as the official YouTube frontend and app. Now I want to zero in on three reasons we should prefer them over what Google provides, specifically focusing on NewPipe since we live in a mobile-first world. But most of this will apply to Invidious too.
In reverse order, the third reason to use NewPipe over the YouTube app is that you receive many of the benefits of YouTube Premium for free, notably the absence of ads. That's right, NewPipe does not pass along the ads that normally play before, after, or inside of each video and it does not display the banner ads typically found beneath them either. Back in the day, YouTube videos used to be ad-free. They can be again if you use NewPipe instead.
In addition, NewPipe introduces the ability to download videos. But instead of the highly limited downloads that YouTube Premium provides (downloaded videos are contained in the app on your device and your properly credentialed account, so if you lose your device, forget your password, or delete the app your videos are gone, and you cannot move the video off your phone and use it for something else), NewPipe can download a YouTube video in the traditional sense, leaving you with a genuine unencrypted file on your device with which you can do whatever you want.
Another feature of YouTube Premium that becomes yours in NewPipe is background play. The audio from music videos, podcasts, or those Christmas fireplace videos can be heard once you begin playing the video and then hit the "Background" button in NewPipe. From there you can use your phone for something else and the audio will continue playing. It seems like such a basic feature, and it is, but Google took it away years ago and placed it behind a paywall in order to convince users to subscribe to its now defunct "Music Key" service and then "YouTube Red." Now it's locked behind YouTube Premium but you can liberate it once you start using NewPipe.
The second reason to use NewPipe over the YouTube app is the ability to feast upon the bounty of YouTube content without being subjected to the data theft or subtle manipulation of Google's algorithms. NewPipe acts as a middle man standing between you and Google, which is the genesis of the title of this post. While it is possible to browse YouTube and watch most of its videos while logged out, Google is still able to gather a surprising amount of identifying information about you anyway. NewPipe virtually eliminates this data gathering by standing in as a logged out user while passing along the content to you, thus disrupting the pipeline the cartel uses to addict us. This could be the main reason why NewPipe is not allowed in the Play store. Data is the new oil in the attention economy, and Google will not tolerate anyone getting in the way of its drills and pumps.
Finally, the number one reason to use NewPipe is to counter persuasive design. As I wrote last week, the key to addicting users for the cartel is by optimizing B=MAP. The engineers and team leads in Big Tech work tirelessly to raise our motivation to use their products, to make them simple to use, and to prompt us strategically with rewards or FOMO-inducing notifications in order to draw our attention to them and keep it. NewPipe can help us disrupt this formula by making it less addictive for us and safer for our children.
NewPipe contains a number of settings that can help us lower our (or our children's) motivation and ability to use YouTube. Specifically, NewPipe allows us to disrupt the YouTube recommendation algorithm by allowing us to hide the Trending page and completely turn off the Up Next queue. You may remember from my previous post that those are the two places where the YouTube recommendation algorithm makes its appearance.
We can go even further by turning off video descriptions, comments, meta info (views, thumbs up/down, etc.), and best of all, thumbnails. The absence of thumbnails dramatically reduces our desire to watch another video and while its jarring at first, its great for young kids since they won't even know what they're looking at if they can't read yet. Furthermore, ask a creator what would happen to his video watch count if he stopped creating fun and exciting thumbnails for his videos. It would plummet.
Whatsmore, we can turn off autoplay and utilize one of my favorite tricks, lowering the default video resolution (quality) to 360p or lower. For comparison's sake, your TV is probably 1080p or 2160p (otherwise known as 4K). Try getting excited about a toy review video when it looks about as pixelated as it would have been back in 2005 when YouTube first came out.
Hypothetically, if we did all this we would wind up with a YouTube experience which feels more like a relic from an older time, when video first made its appearance on the Internet. If you're wondering why anyone would choose an old school RealPlayer life over a more modern Netflix one, the answer is technological autonomy. Its a new way of interacting with technology, one in which we explicitly request content and it is delivered to us, rather than passively accepting whatever the cartel sends our way. And with the advent of alternative platforms like Substack, Patreon, and Bitcoin, there are more ways to contribute directly to creators instead of relying on the old ad-supported model which helped usher in the Big Tech dystopia we have now. Even YouTube recently added a "Join" feature.
Using NewPipe in this way, we now have to specifically seek out content to watch and therefore we are free from Google's influence. You can even subscribe to channels in NewPipe but bear in mind that its different than subscribing on YouTube. Google and the content creator are unaware of your subscription on NewPipe and it does not count toward his subscriber count. However he does get your views. Subscribing on NewPipe simply saves your favorite channels and displays their videos chronologically in the "Subscriptions" area. No recommendation algorithm is applied.
Finally, putting our young kids in front of NewPipe with low resolution videos and everything turned off allows parents to rest easier knowing that the product is much less addictive than running the stock YouTube app. Kids are much less likely to scream bloody murder when the tablet is taken away if they don't get hooked to it in the first place thanks to autoplay videos, fun thumbnails, and an Up Next panel to be endlessly tapped on.
Is this solution perfect? No, definitely not. Ideally, parents would be able to keep a whitelist of approved channels and block absolutely everything else. Even better, parents would be able to download copies of videos and use the device offline to further guarantee that junior doesn't encounter videos of kids cross-dressing or attending Marxist protests. I'll go over how to do this in an upcoming post. Google is unlikely to ever implement anything like that because of their leftist worldview. Children coming into contact with CRT, feminist, LGBT, or climate change content is considered to be an objectively good thing. To offer parents the ability to block woke content would be to support of the systems of oppression they seek to replace. So they tell to use YouTube Kids instead. "You can trust us," they say.
No, we can't.
Although it may not have felt like it, this post is a milestone in this newsletter's brief existence so far. If you stuck with me until the end, you have joined me for our first step outside the city gates. In an upcoming post I will detail why we will favor steps like this over the cartel's built-in parental controls in order to limit our children's exposure to the addictive and manipulative world the cartel has made. Spoiler alert: would you trust a cigarette company to make "child safe" cigarettes?
Over the last 30 years we've been corralled into the cartel's walled gardens. They provided a small but lavishly furnished living pod for which we paid no rent. We went about our day in blissful ignorance of anything the cartel chose not to show us, and we were largely unaware of the formation of a mammoth body of subjective "community standards" which could be leveraged against us at any time for any reason. And we had no say in their formation and no objective third party to which we could appeal a decision made against us. Why would the upcoming metaverse be any different? And why would we agree to lose ourselves in a world in which the progress of human civilization as expressed in our founding documents - liberty, representation in a limited government, equality before the law - would be discarded in favor of a technocracy of elites and their autocratic AI?
We have lots to cover, including installing apps on Android outside the Google Play store, installing and configuring NewPipe, using Invidious on iPhone and PC, and more. Stay tuned.
Don't forget to like this post, share it with your friends, and bookmark my censorship-resistant backup site in case I get deplatformed (Tor network access required).