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Louis Rossman/FUTO's YouTube app, GrayJay, now supports Sponsorblock... and shames you if you use it (lemmy.ca)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Seriously this was very surprising. I've been experimenting with GrayJay since it was announced and I largely think it's a pretty sweet app. I know there are concerns over how it isn't "true open source" but it's a hell of a lot more open than ReVanced. Plus, I like the general design and philosophy of the app.

I updated the YouTube backend recently and to my surprise and delight they had added support for SponsorBlock. However, when I went to enable it, it warned me "turning this on harms creators" and made me click a box before I could continue.

Bruh, you're literally an ad-blocking YouTube frontend. What kind of mental gymnastics does it take to be facilitating ad-blocking and then at the same time shame the end-user for using an extension which simply automates seeking ahead in videos. Are you seriously gonna tell me that even without Sponsorblock, if I skip ahead past the sponsored ad read in a video, that I'm "harming the creator"?

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

This ignores the fact that these apps don't have the functionality to tell YouTube a video or segment of a video has been watched, therefore they literally can't make money off these users period, it's just the way these clients work, they don't send analytics data to YouTube, so they don't count views. It's as if the person paused the video, let it buffer all the way then clicked off without watching.

People can argue semantics about watching or not watching or what it means philosophically but in the end the views aren't counted by the software on these apps, it doesn't matter how much or how long you watch something it just doesn't count the view, because they never receive any tracking data. So in that regard there really is no sense in shaming SponsorBlock usage, if it seems like a problem you shouldn't be using these apps in the first place because they defeat the money-making part of the segments in and of themselves.