alt Hacker NewsYouTube Blocks Background Listening Workaround for Free Users
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Whenever I see this particular "feature" being blocked, all I can think of is my own past personal usage of this feature. It was purely to listen to podcasts or whatever while in the car. So by default this feature should just work, and it should be: turn on the source and listen.
Instead its disabled to try to extract more revenue out of users, so my personal use case becomes a potential road hazard for people who didn't give in and instead are fiddling with their phone to ensure that it keeps playing.
Can't imagine this is even a moment of discussion in 2026 when making the decision to block something like this.
my current flow for this if i ever have the misfortune of only having youtube as a source, is to turn on the video, and face the screen away from me in the cup holder. So personally I've found what i consider to be a safe alternative.
Can't imagine younger drivers are going to go through the same amount of caution to avoid grabbing their phone or looking at a video playing while they are driving.
Some alternatives recently discussed:
NewPipe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47020218
PipePipe: https://pipepipe.dev/
As recommended by https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47021252 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47020412
I haven’t used any of these alternatives myself.
Seeing Google do things like this (and the change to how they display ads on Google.com) makes me wonder how much hot water they are in with AI spending.
At least they had a few tricks up their sleeve to keep it looking like growth is happening. Wonder how long it can last, though.
Vinegar extension still works on iOS. It restores the native HTML5 <video> element to websites like YouTube that go out of their way to circumvent it or add listeners to pause it when focus leaves the page. Since it’s the native video element, it works with the native iOS picture-in-picture.
It should frankly be illegal for Google to interfere with this like they try to do, but luckily this extension solves the problem.
“Last year, video watchers using them were greeted by longer video loading times and increased buffering on YouTube.”
Ah yes, the Five Second Gaslight. “Experiencing interruptions? Find out more!” when it’s the site intentionally shoving a 5 second delay in and getting people to blame their ISPs for connectivity issues when YouTube was the one dicking around.
It seems crazy and impossible now, but imagine this notion: Software should serve the needs of the user.
Software that does things the user doesn't want, like try to trick money out of him, waste his bandwidth, or fill his screen with unwanted ads used to have a name: Malware. We've redefined that term to mean when a non-BigTech firm does those things, but the definition used to be functional, not attributional.
RMS warned us of this day, and now it is here. You don't control your data or the code that operates upon it. That would've sucked in 1990, but since then, we've migrated our entire lives into that code/data. The degree to which it embodies your very existence is the degree to which you have lost control over your life, which for most of us is total. You lost that control but it didn't disappear; it is now owned by someone else, commoditized and exchanged, redirected and engineered. Enjoy the ride if you can, because you're just in the passenger seat.