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.

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.

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.

+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.

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

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.

They do.

That is the mechanism that quantifies their decision as good.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.