Exactly as the title suggests. My friends and I are getting fed up with the ads showing up in Skype, so I'm now asking all of you what you'd recommend as an alternative. Bonus points if it has both Windows and Linux builds and video support, though Windows builds, text chat and audio chat are the main features desired.

Google Hangouts

Going from Skype to Google is just trading one evil for another one. Here is what I got Googling (shut up) for "open source text audio chat" (no quotes): https://jitsi.org/. Seems like an open source video chat solution. No telling how stable it is, but I'd look into that first. Google is no more trustworthy than Microsoft. They might do a slightly better job of hiding their evil, but it's there regardless and supporting them just makes them stronger.

Google Hangouts is really really excellent. Skype is nice too, but I haven't used it in a while.

Considering Google is continuing to break YouTube, I won't be supporting them by using their products. Forcing people to use Google+ in order to post comments on YouTube was bad enough. Now, they've completely removed YouTube's "Feed" system, meaning you can't post text updates on your channel anymore, meaning if you want to inform people of things you're doing on YouTube you need to use Google+, which means people who aren't subscribed to you can't read about your YouTube updates unless they go through the trouble of visiting your Google+ page... which is a nightmare to navigate since you can never tell what is the most update to date thing due to the layout unless you read the dates on everything, plus your text updates get meshed in with absolutely everything else you do on YouTube like marking favourites and commenting on other videos...

Brilliant, Google. Just... brilliant.

Also...

Microsoft has been rolling out a new advertising system to users at random whereby fairly large, graphical ads are shown on practically every window now, including text-chat windows. It squishes how much room you have on every window to see chat text to the point where it's almost impractical to have more than one chat window open at a time now.

I second Jitsi. It's still early in development, but it's great.

Whaaaa?
Just to be clear, before I rip into the rest of your rant: YouTube is a subsidiary of Google.

Whaaa? I never visit the G+ site.

I never even knew I could do that! I usually think of channels for video, though.

I don't use Google+ directly for anything. I still see friends updates on YouTube and I'm able to post my updates, follow subscriptions... what're you referring to specifically?

What happens when you go to YouTube.com/Derezo? Do you not see me and my YouTube updates? Do you see something else?

It is! I love the new updates rolled out this week. It's nice having only one account to access all of Google's services, and it makes it incredibly easy to add new ones.

I argue that YouTube is better today than it ever was at any point in history..

None of your quibbles have an objective basis or even have anything to do with videos (which is what YouTube is about -- videos).

+1

People complain way too much just because a service changes.

Fact is, if the change was truly "negative", Google would be reverting the changes. You'd better believe any changes to such a high profile service will have undergone enormous amounts of testing to ensure its progress.

Of course I have some minor complaints here and there about some very small things, but in general, Google has done an excellent job with it. Evidence of this? You, I, and everyone else in the world is still using Youtube.

We're still using YouTube because it's virtually a monopoly. I do not know of any other service like it that allows you to freely upload gigabytes of video for public consumption. They can severely fuck up the service and people will still begrudgingly use it because the communication it offers is still revolutionary. Google didn't invent that. Google bought that. Now they are exploiting it, much like Facebook would. "Don't be evil" was last decade. "Fuck you, we're rich" is 2010s.

It is unlikely that Google shares your distaste for capitalism. Exploit it indeed!

Bambam, have you ever done any professional software work, particularly with Fortune 500 corporations? This tinfoil hat way of thinking usually comes from people who have no idea what they're talking about.

I bet you also think that all corporate executives are evil, evil people

Hahaha. Testing and Google used in the same paragraph. Ahahahaha.

Every other youtube change has lead to major breakage of features. They don't actually seem to test the changes they push out.

That said, the latest layout change doesn't seem to be broken. In fact they fixed one major thing they broke a while back, and thats that "automatically switch to HD in fullscreen" option that you can find in your youtube settings. It hasn't worked for many MONTHS, until today that is. And it seems most videos are HTML5 in chrome now. All of today I haven't seen a single video that used the flash player.

It may be related to Youtube getting a new manager.

Also, a second point... It could actually have been quite negative for them (tons of large profile content providers disabled commenting entirely), but it's likely they don't care, and are prioritizing G+'s long term growth over any short term losses in other services.

I've been doing professional software work for 7 years. Never for a "fortune 500". That is an American phenomenon. That said, of the larger companies that I have dealt with, I am always faced with a moral dilemma knowing full well that the company is absolutely willing to hurt people to make a buck. It's sickening.

They do.

That is the mechanism that quantifies their decision as good.

Please explain why every single change to youtube in the past couple years (at the very least) has come with a ton of bugs and missing features that people depend on?

Time will tell. So far G+ isn't working out all that well.

I've always had a pleasant experience, luckily. What's something that's gone awry for you?

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http://marketingland.com/google-hits-135-million-users-27904

That is incredibly hyperbolic and plainly untrue. I have yet to lose access to a single feature I depend on, even for a moment, and if such an event did occur it has not persisted through time.

Am I the only one surprised to see Derezo defending these companies?

I am a highly objective person. The fact is that Google is a corporate capitalist entity inside the capitalist system. It holds capitalist goals and objectives, and it operates under the principles that govern the system.

There has been no support provided that the service offered by them is not the best there is, or that it is unusable, or even unpleasant to use.

Oh, but don't get me wrong. I certainly haven't changed my belief that capitalism on the whole is entirely unsustainable and a detriment to humanity... but we're not talking about that.

Thats because people got seriously upset and youtube reversed the changes, eventually. Usually it takes months for them to even fix a bug, soooo...

The main feature of the site that I use the most (other than the video player itself) is the Subscriptions feed. They have messed with that several times the past year or so, hiding it, hiding it even deeper, then bringing it back to the menu in two places (after a lot of complaining). They have also completely broken the subscription feeds themselves, so you miss a significant amount of producer's content.

Then the content producers keep losing monetization on a fairly regular basis with no acknowledgement from youtube at all. Sometimes for a week or more at a time. Other times it takes hours to upload a video that would normally take maybe 30 minutes. And yet other times even if the upload was fast, it would sit in the processing state for upwards of 24 hours.

Then there was that really crazy issue recently where they re-did the logic on their content-id bot. And boy did they botch it up royally. It sent hundreds to thousands of content-id matches to people for videos that had already been up and not flagged by the content-id system for months or years. It takes months to actually resolve a content-id claim, and you can only have 3 open disputes at once. Imagine what happens if a person gets hundreds or thousands of them? They can also permanently lose their channel after 3 claims. So yeah, pretty serious issues.

There are more I'm not remembering.

That's not "broken". That was testing a change.

That's not "broken". That's just a change.

That's not "broken", and things of this sort are covered in their ToS. These people have agreed to the ToS.

These are just things that you don't like.

Are there any bugs that can be reproduced, or did they fix them all?

We've already done the whole argument about YouTube thing on here lately and it's actually really important that I find a suitable alternative to Skype, so I would appreciate if we could get back on topic.

You could try installing an old version of skype... as long as you manage to keep it from upgrading it should work (it did a few months ago).

I've tried Jitsi before and while I think it is very promising last I tried it it just didn't work as well with my webcam.

While this worked for me it's not working for everyone I know. I don't see any ads in the version I'm using now, yet one of my friends running the EXACT same older version does.

Have you thought about Teamspeak or Mumble?

You don't test a major new feature on the entire userbase That's not how "it" is done.

I completely disagree. I highly doubt they meant to not show you all of your subscribed videos. It actually harms the ratings of the channels you subscribe to, and likely both youtube and the channels get less money in ad revenue due to it. I certainly less watch youtube when my favorite channels have nothing new.

How is that covered in their tos? This part isn't about the content-id stuff, its just randomly not monetizing videos that would normally be monetized with no rhyme or reason.

I wouldn't say just.

They regularly break things, then fix them eventually, but it often takes months. They seem to do their testing by rolling out to production. That's what I call incompetent.

It wasn't a feature, it was a change. And yes, "it" is sometimes done that way.

Sorry, but you're wrong. If you want, you can go and change the settings so that you see all the updates/videos from channels that you're subscribed to. Not broken, just a change that confused some users.

They don't have to give anyone "rhyme or reason", as stated in their ToS. People in agreement with their ToS should understand this, but often users forget (or never even knew) what they've agreed to.

You still have yet to show us anything that was pushed to production that was broken aside from this content-id issue.

There was no setting. If there is now, I've never found it.

Maybe you're talking about how they started defaulting to the "What to Watch" page instead? I am not. I'm talking about the "Subscribers" page. Which should always, ALWAYS show all videos from people I'm subscribed to. period. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't. Its like there's glitches in their system, and they can't always find all the information. Sometimes videos that got missed will suddenly show up 12+ hours later, but in the correct chronological place in the list, so you have to scroll down to find it.

I'm sure they have stuff in their ToS covering every conceivable scenario just to cover their ass. Everyone does. Now, is it acceptable or good business practice? No, it isn't.

So am I. It looks like you're mistaking changes to the behavior of the service as bugs. I agree that when these changes to the subscriber page were rolled out, it was weird, but a minute of exploring how it worked solved any quirks I had with it.

Sure it is; if a person doesn't like their ToS, they don't have to use the service.

However, I do remember the problem where some users were automagically unsubscribed from certain channels. Not sure if there was a statement about this, but that may have been a blatant snafu.

You also have to realize that you have also agreed to their ToS, so if things sometimes don't go absolutely perfectly, you just have to deal with it. You can complain all you want, but remember that you're voluntarily using the service. If you don't like it, no one is forcing you to use it

/randomly/ not showing me all the videos available from the people I'm subscribed to isn't a quirk, its a bug.

No it's not. It literally takes seconds to see all the videos from people you're subscribed to. Just go into your subscriber page settings and turn it on. Once again, not a bug.

You'll have to explain to me where that setting is, because it isn't there in any of the youtube settings pages. As far as I can see.

And again, what is happening is random, and sometimes fixes itself.

In the upper right hand corner where it says "Manage n subscriptions"

Funny thing: I'm not sure when this was rolled out, but my sub page is simply showing all content by default without having to enable it in the settings. You might have the same rollout too.

None of those options say "Always show me all video uploads in feed". they have to do with NOT sending you updates via mobile/email, and filtering out the G+ posts of the channel creator.

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Yeah, that just filters out text updates and G+ comments.

This is quite the sig for me.

If you want to see everything, just click on "All activity". You're complaining about literally nothing. The solution to your problem is right in front of you.

I don't WANT To see everything. I want to see all videos. Which no matter what that setting is set to, doesn't always happen (some of my subscriptions have that set, some don't). Its a random glitch. a bug.

Ooohhhhh you're saying that some new videos are not shown for channels you're subscribed to. That makes more sense.

Yeah I wonder what that's all about since it looks like it's been happening for a long ass time. Luckily I haven't been affected by it

A lot of people just haven't noticed sometimes I don't notice till I realize I haven't seen a specific video in a series, and have to go back to the person's channel.

Sometimes I notice it just because a bunch of channels have nothing new that day, which is very strange because most of them put out at least one video a day. at least one.

Really annoying.

Uh... Skype alternatives? Hello...?

Oh who am I kidding? This is the Allegro.cc forums. I should've expected instant thread derailment.

I made a couple further up, after the last time you complained

Two options are Teamspeak and Mumble. then theres other IM programs that support voice chat.

Well, the OP decided to break into that can of worms again!

Please refer to the first two replies.

Ho ho ho yeah and Allegro.CC bugs are fixed within minutes and retains a 99.9% up-time.

Youtube has a massive team of developers and testers. We (used to) have Matthew. I'll let that sink in.

Allegro also has less to maintain.

One of them makes a billion or two a year, the other loses money.

YouTube doesn't lose that much money!

Errr, Monday reading comprehension... Move along.

The FSF has this on their list of high-priority projects, alongside video-editing. Here's hoping Jitsi and PiTiVi grow featureful enough to fill in those gaping holes.

Ahaha

After doing some research, and reading what few relevant opinions this thread produced, it looks like Jitsi is the best alternative to try first.

If it turns out to be a disaster I'll let you guys know.

I've had this issue before.

I just gave up on it except from using mumble a few times.

Hopefully tox will change it.

You might want to try Talky. It works in-browser, requires no plug-ins, and is free software.

It probably requires WebRTC support in browser, which you'd have to look into, if your browser supports that or not, or the right version of it.

Block the ad servers in your host file?

While the concept of Talky is interesting, I really don't trust browser vendors with that responsibility. Can you imagine the security holes this is going to introduce? Holy fucking Christ. Your browser sharing your screen with a Web site! That's insane. Software is buggy. This will not be stable and secure for 20 years. From day one they need to make sure that this requires a per-page or per-domain prompt. It doesn't sound like they're going to do that. I weep for our technological future.

I'd only use Talky under the assumption that I'm being watched.

I generally assume I'm being watched.

It's not me! I swear! Honest!