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”?
Grayjay doesn’t block ads. It simply doesn’t load them in the stream. There is a difference.
Grayjay also doesn’t send analytics data back to YouTube, so watching the sponsor or skipping it look identical to YouTube’s servers. One can’t make the argument that you are supporting creators by watching their sponsors if the sponsors have no way to know that the sponsor part of the video was watched.
As far as I’m aware, creator sponsorships rarely care about whether or not you watch the segments, but about how many people follow the link or whatnot. So you could make the argument that sponsorblock makes you never follow the links, but that really assumes you would otherwise, which…
Yeah, and there are no products that I care about that get advertised by youtubers so I would never click on those links. I don’t shave, I don’t need to build a website, I don’t need a VPN, I don’t need a food delivery service, I don’t listen to audio books, I don’t need earpods, I don’t play mobile games…
Listening to these sponsors literally loses me time. I reinstalled revanced 2 months ago and sponsorblock already has skipped 50 minutes worth of sponsors. (oh these sponsorblock stats also seem to be missing from grayjay. Grayjay doesn’t seem to have any sponsorblock settings besides allowing you to manually skip instead automatically)