Modern Web Woes - I'm mad at the internet

I'm part of SIFO research, they're... social research and statistics I guess. To be a part of this program I am registered with my real name, address, phone, e-mail and all that.

They have a new thing going right now where they want to measure youtube activity, sort of like Nielsen ratings, where they collect every youtube video that I and everyone else in the program clicks on. It's an old organization, never done anything wrong that I can remember so I trust them when they say it will be anonymous data etc. Who cares if they see the lame shit I watch on youtube.

What worries me is that this is not done by installing a browser extension or anything, it looks like when you agree to be part of it they get it straight from google like they had a search warrant. Fuck me...
 
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smegma enthusiast said:
How every modern social media website requires you to log in after 2 seconds of scrolling. I fucking despised it when Pinterest did it, but now I can’t use Instagram or Twitter whatsoever on incognito mode. Gotta hustle for that personal data now.
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for twitter there's nitter.net
for reddit there's teddit.net
for youtube there's invidio.us

instagram and facebook can get fucked.
 
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It's almost impossible to grab videos from any website anymore.
Remember the days of vixy.net and Zamzar? Remember when Google Videos straight-up allowed you to download videos hosted on the platform? It was so fucking easy, even a monkey could do it.

Nowadays it's so difficult to just rip videos from websites, especially streaming platforms, which use WideVine and other encryption to prevent you from streaming it off-site.

Even YouTube is stupidly difficult, with 480p and 1080p missed by a lot of addons and command line programs unless you specify you want those resolutions. Even then, they usually don't have sound unless you download a lower-res version and splice the audio on.
 
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Becky McDonald said:
Even YouTube is stupidly difficult, with 480p and 1080p missed by a lot of addons and command line programs unless you specify you want those resolutions. Even then, they usually don't have sound unless you download a lower-res version and splice the audio on.
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Jdownloader is a piece of shit made by retards but it is also good in that you can set permanent preferences for youtube videos(resolution, formats/codec etc) and they mux the video at the end with the sound in the format you choose, some formats can't be muxed with some containers which is what I think happens sometimes when people misconfigure youtube-dlp and the sound is lost because of that. It is really good but I would like to beat the people who made it for crimes against UI.

There's also Videodownloadhelper, a plugin/addon/extension for browsers that can grab HLS streams but it sometimes need the companion program that hooks into the add-on and it feels sketchy... idk, haven't used it in years but it worked really well and it appears it could get anything. I would also like to beat the developers of that.
 
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Smaug's Smokey Hole 2 said:
Jdownloader is a piece of shit made by retards but it is also good in that you can set permanent preferences for youtube videos(resolution, formats/codec etc) and they mux the video at the end with the sound in the format you choose, some formats can't be muxed with some containers which is what I think happens sometimes when people misconfigure youtube-dlp and the sound is lost because of that. It is really good but I would like to beat the people who made it for crimes against UI.
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I agree that JDownloader has a UI that aspires to Indian levels of UI/UX despite being coded by Germans... but you can change the weird 'synthetica' toolkit they use to look a bit more like proper Java Swing controls designed in 1997 by human beings. Although text may no longer fit in the areas it is designated for.
lol.png
 
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Becky McDonald said:
Even YouTube is stupidly difficult, with 480p and 1080p missed by a lot of addons and command line programs unless you specify you want those resolutions. Even then, they usually don't have sound unless you download a lower-res version and splice the audio on.
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I've never had issues downloading videos from YouTube and other sources with yt-dlp.
 
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I've seen over 4K elements blocked on a YT vid. Just what is YT spamming so much of that the adblocker blocks?

Becky McDonald said:
It's almost impossible to grab videos from any website anymore.
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I think there's an easy explanation: if one can't download videos, it's easier to censor them if they go against The Narrative™.
 
Also speaking of YT, these "shorts" are getting really annoying.

No way to rewind, they have that vertical smartphone look, comments are in a small window, you scroll down and it autoplays an unrelated "short" below it, and now there's this malfunction where you click on a "short", and it takes you to the "short" below it. And if you try to scroll up to the "short" you want to see, it can be blank white with audio only. At least there's a way to see "shorts" normally: copy and paste the video code into a "normal" video URL. But that shouldn't need to be done.
 
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So YouTube had a bit of a redesign over the week of the Forums being down.
Good news: Shorts and Livestreams have their own tabs to select in now instead of cluttering up the main channel's Videos section (about fucking time).

Bad news: Sorting videos by oldest is gone now and the redesign looks like shit.
My love for this website grows tenfold by the fucking day... @ me when an extension comes out to restore sorting by oldest.
 
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Colon capital V said:
So YouTube had a bit of a redesign over the week of the Forums being down.
Good news: Shorts and Livestreams have their own tabs to select in now instead of cluttering up the main channel's Videos section (about fucking time).

Bad news: Sorting videos by oldest is gone now and the redesign looks like shit.
My love for this website grows tenfold by the fucking day... @ me when an extension comes out to restore sorting by oldest.
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That isn't completely rolled out yet(started a week or two ago) so it might hopefully get reverted. I only saw it in one browser/computer but not my main where the old functionality still exists right now.
 
ToroidalBoat said:
Also speaking of YT, these "shorts" are getting really annoying.

No way to rewind, they have that vertical smartphone look, comments are in a small window, you scroll down and it autoplays an unrelated "short" below it, and now there's this malfunction where you click on a "short", and it takes you to the "short" below it. And if you try to scroll up to the "short" you want to see, it can be blank white with audio only. At least there's a way to see "shorts" normally: copy and paste the video code into a "normal" video URL. But that shouldn't need to be done.
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I can't tell if youtube auto converted all the shorter videos or if the channel owners are just retards but I seriously want to shoot whoever thought it would be funny to crop tons of classic videos into a little box.
 
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ToroidalBoat said:
At least there's a way to see "shorts" normally: copy and paste the video code into a "normal" video URL. But that shouldn't need to be done.
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There's an extension that automatically redirects you back to a regular YouTube watch page for shorts: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-shorts-block/

I wonder if there's an extension to just make them disappear from my subscriptions page as the few times I do watch the shorts, they're all complete and utter garbage. What really baffles me is they also don't perform as well as regular videos and yet certain channels (bigclivedotcom) keep fucking making them!

Kosher Dill said:
Here's my woe of the day: the annoying hoops you have to jump through to use an open-source email client on major providers now.
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Webshits screw with an old but otherwise stable protocol! The results may shock you!
 
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Flatline said:
Reels and Shorts... it's Google and Facebook trying to be TikTok and failing miserably.
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Giving it less than 12 months before Google shuts it down. Then something else will be a fad and Google's engineers will make a half-ass clone of it.. and the cycle continues
Kosher Dill said:
Here's my woe of the day: the annoying hoops you have to jump through to use an open-source email client on major providers now.
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Pegasus Mail is an indie email client that's been around for nearly 30 years. The developer has spent most of this year trying to get his implementation approved by Google for use with Gmail and now has to to write an embedded webserver (!) to do the Google OAuth2 shuffle:
The solution involves — and I'm not joking here — writing our own web server, and starting it up to receive the token from Google when you authorize Pegasus Mail to access your account. Fortunately, I have written web servers before, so this process is not as serious a problem as it might have been, but the simple fact that I should need to do it at all indicates just how ridiculous this whole 'OAUTH2 migration' has become.


I am now well into the process of completing a small web server I can include in Pegasus Mail to accommodate Google. It should require no configuration or setup, and Pegasus Mail users should not even know it's there, doing its work in the background. I hope to have the amended module in testing around the middle of August, and if all goes well, should have Pegasus Mail v4.81 with full GMail OAUTH2 support ready a short time after that.
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So much for the open standards and an open web. We've already reached the point where anything interacting with a webserver will need to be approved App-store style to do anything.
 
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Kosher Dill said:
Here's my woe of the day: the annoying hoops you have to jump through to use an open-source email client on major providers now.
https://www.claws-mail.org/faq/index.php/Oauth2
https://github.com/M66B/FairEmail/blob/master/FAQ.md#user-content-authorizing-accounts
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I mean... in most cases you can just use app passwords, right? Seems preferable to me, especially if it's for something like a corporate Google account where you have to change the main domain password arbitrarily, at least your email will keep on working.
 
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