Yeah they are, I noticed it get really, really bad this week. It’s an awful experience. But they’ll leave my browser before my adblocker does.
100%. Half the time I get blocked due to VPN or whatever I just close the tab and go with my life. The rest of the time I try all known workarounds. If those fail, I just go with my life.
My hatred for monopolisation and enshittification is stronger than my desire to watch content on any platform.
So say we all.
So say we all.
Lol, this is exactly why I use Lemmy. Sure there might be less engagement than reddit. But I’d rather gargle a bucket of diarrhea than go back to that shitty place.
Amen.
The thing is, their anti-adblocking measures are still less unpleasant than actually watching ads.
just use invidious instead
This is also a good beginner way to learn about self hosting in docker.
Freetube can make a great backup for when google inevitably breaks something.
And for thise videos you really cant miss there is always yt-dlp scripted to download a channels latests video on a schedule straight to jellyfin of course.
I have not visited the youtube website in more then a year.
It’s not perfect, but I use grayjay. They have an android app and a desktop client, and are usually pretty quick to make updates that will sidestep Google’s anti-adblocking measures (within 1-2 days.) Again, not perfect, but I don’t mind a slightly worse experience to avoid having to see an ad. Plus it has sponsor block support built right in
This doesn’t seem very straightforward…
it’s like lemmy: you choose an instance, make an account, import your subscriptions from YouTube and done. you can watch all channels from there
Ok, so there are hosted instances? At face value this looks like you need to self host. Which I am more than capable of both in terms of equipment and experience. I just don’t want to go that far to watch youtube. Thanks for explaining.
not many but there are
Sadly, most of the instances seem to be completely nonfunctional. Nadeko.net seemed to be the only one working for months.
yehh it’s been a while since i used it and my instance seems to be down too…
I’ve started bulk downloading videos with yt-dlp and watching them locally. No ads or throttling to deal with.
If Google really wants to, they can crack down on
yt-dlp, and I assume that if enough people are using it, they’re likely to do such a crackdown. Like, this works for the moment, but…I’m sure they could. Other methods will crop up. All else fails, I ditch YT altogether.
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Hmm, but in this case you would be recording either the ads or the buffering.
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It will happen eventually. All they need to do is start new/rotating keys on wildvine and put the ads at random times right in the stream, then disable fast forward if you use it to skip ads. It’ll be a UX hit, so it’ll need to be worth it to them.
In the end, they can’t stop us from HDMI capturing and using comskip to detect / remove but there are a million ways to play tag between where we are now and that which don’t require people posting videos to pirate bay :)
can’t stop us from HDMI capturing
Look up HDCP.
There are HDMI splitter boxes you can get from China that conveniently strip out the HDCP.
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How would one DIY HDCP stripping? I’ve never looked into this.
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They aren’t fool proof, and relatively easy to detect from the source.
Source: high end AV tech for like half a decade
strip out the HDCP
Interesting, I had figured that was possible in principle but hadn’t kept up with what was actually around.
But still, the HDCP stream is decompressed video, so if you want to save it, you’ll have to either put it through yet another layer or lossy compression, or burn a ridiculous amount of disk space compared to the compressed stream that Youtube sent to your computer.
We’ll see how things go. Google in the past has made occasional modest gestures to get in the way of downloading, but they haven’t made serious effort to prevent it. Who knows whether that will last.
It’s certainly not an ideal solution, but it’s an option that will usually work.
I break HDCP right now. Those keys have been leaked for AGES. $10 amazon HDMI copy in between your videocard and the capture.
My ip was blocked a LONG time ago by google for using yt-dlp. Works with VPN but nothing else. Fun times. I think I only pulled a couple of videos off for archival services. On my own channel non-the-less.
You might try again. I was blocked for a couple weeks after I pulled a bunch of videos from a channel using
yt-dlp, and for a while YouTube required an account (which I will not get) from that IP. But a couple weeks later, things were working again.Ok cool! I updated yt-dlp via pip, and it looks like its working again. No warnings or anything. Awesome.
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This is the way.
When YouTube wanted to throw me some entertainment and a couple ads, very conveniently, I was down for that.
Now that it’s an all out technology knowledge battle - well, I’m quite good at that.
So I spend the time I would have laughed at their ad instead working around their bullshit.
I haven’t seen an ad in years, but I still enjoy the same content. 🤷♀️
To me, it seems like they’re working really hard, just to fail to serve me ads.
Me too. I’m up to 3TB locally. Had to do that slowly though. Hit some temp bans a few times.
DVRs are back in 2025. Who would have thought?
I’ve been doing this with band love videos and storing them on a hard drive. One I love got taken down and almost lost a while back and it’s made me paranoid ha
I’d sooner spend five minutes waiting for the video to buffer than five seconds watching an ad
Too true
Truth
Welcome back to 2007
A wild YouTube appeared!
Go, uBlock Origin!
Wild YouTube used Throttle!
It’s not very effective…
uBlock Origin used Evolve!
It’s super effective!
YouTube fainted!
This made me laugh. I wonder which one will prevail in the end
Piracy always prevails
Ive been commenting on creators videos asking them to upload elsewhere as well. I doubt it will work, but we could try
A lot of my favorites are already on Nebula. I’d ask the rest to follow but that would require a google account.
I also asked some creators, but they can’t because of the Google partnership Programm, it prohibits reupload on other platforms
Great idea. Eventually, and if enough ask, it could be a thing.
I love how you’re just doing your bit lol
Very good news!!
Is it possible to post the same video both to youtube and peertube without trouble? I wonder if this is prohibited cause I think many creators would mirror their content to peertube if they could.
I watched videos on Newgrounds using dial-up
They are going to have to slow ad blockers by a lot for me to consider it slow
My wife and I were discussing this. This isnt “slow” to us, its just a tiny bit inconvenient. We were used to the old AOL pictures taking a good minute or two to load.
We would get rid of Youtube before we get ads.
Ahh seeing images load line-by-line and you get excited as you can actually start to tell what the image is!
“Finally, a nipple!”
I’ve been seeing this for a couple weeks now along with a popup telling me “ad blockers aren’t allowed” at work where I’m forced to use Chrome. I have UBlock Lite installed. Typically a refresh takes care of the popup and a 10 second delay later, the video loads.
I run portable Firefox on my work PC. I refuse to use chrome. some of our apps require Edge, but outside of that, I don’t touch chrome.
I switched to Firefox basically as soon as ublock origin didn’t work on chrome. It was easier than I thought it would be.
So it’s wait a few seconds and watch a black screen or watch a minute of ads? What a choice…
We can live without YouTube, they can’t live without us.
This is their way to try and get you into their money making fold.
God damn American companies love fucking up everything for money!
Just Americans?
Nestlé: I have done nothing wrong, ever, in my life.
OTOH, Danone is a B corporation, so there are choices in that space.
The US government: I know that, and I love you
American flavoured capitalism has poisoned the well.
Oh hey I ran into that issue, fixed it by blocking the element on ublock and spoofing my user agent
Edit: I put more details under nameisnotimportant’s comment, I was about to head to bed so I didn’t really provide details LOL
fixed it by blocking the element
Which one? That’d certainly help to know how to do that
www.youtube.com/##.paper-toast-open.yt-notification-action-renderer.style-scope.toast-button
I believe it was this one, just add it as part of the filter list in ublock
The extension I used for user agent was this one. I don’t think it matters what you spoof as, but I chose to spoof as chrome. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/user-agent-string-switcher/
So far it worked and I’m back to no ads and no interruptions
Thanks, I’ll have a look at this later and I’m sure it’ll prove useful for everyone!
Okay, I am trying to add it. Just copy your YouTube stuff -> go to myFilters -> paste?
Yea, I have a couple more that I forget does what (I think a couple are for hiding youtube games and shorts and stuff), but it should just look like this in my filters.
Ty so very much kind person.
Lemme know if they ever reply.
Yes they did! See right above or direct link https://sh.itjust.works/comment/19270078
I have ublock, with sponsor block and some others, and don’t have any issues on yt as of yet. Just in case though, how do I block an element and spoof a user agent?
YouTube does a shit ton of A/B testing so they probably didn’t roll that change out to everyone yet. I currently don’t have any issues either but they will eventually hit us with that shit.
Also interested in how you can do this.
“Do evil.” Google’s official new slogan.
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You’re right, but also They get alot more from the deal than you acknowledge. The service has never been free. They already had a profitable model, and now they want even more. I call it evil, but in a sense it’s standard corporate behaviour.
The line must go up, it enshitifies every company eventually.
They can get fucked. A while ago O was like you know what let’s give them money, seems only fair. So I finally subscribed, and then like a month later they sent me an email they’re raising the prices effective immediately - basically changing the deal on me without any delay.
So I unsubscribed, because fuck that.
More recently I looked into sharing the family plan with …my family, but it turna out they consider family only in a single household, and I’m not gonna try to give them money while also potentially having to prove how much of a family we are, so yeah…
Fuck them, either take my money when I’m actually trying, or I guess they didn’t need it that bad. I’m over YouTube, and would probably ditch it earlier than ever watching an ad there.
Or “Might as well do EVIL”, what is anybody going to do about it, maybe make some noise but we just pay off TACO and we good.
Oh no, where will I get my AI slop?
Like it or not, YouTube still has a fuckton of good, informative tutorials and advice on how to fix things or make things made by individuals with a phone camera and no script, who make them not for money but for the pride in sharing their knowledge. I shared some fix it videos for my van and a very obscure phone, and consumed a lot of fix it videos for washing machines, motorbikes and furniture.
This. YouTube is extremely helpful for anyone who can’t afford to take their stuff to a repair service or hire someone to fix something at their home. Just a few months ago, I thought my washer was done for, but it turned out to be a super simple fix that no website mentioned except for a super obscure YouTube video with only a couple hundred views. Saved me hundreds of dollars. There’s countless other anecdotes like that over the years.
This is what sucks so much about Google’s monopoly. I truly wish a cooperative of governments and/or academia created a publicly funded alternative as well as hosting an archive of YouTube on it. It would of course need to be administered by a non-partisan committee made up of representatives from multiple countries that had numerous safeguards against governmental political censorship. Hoping for a grassroots alternative is a lost cause, as the hosting and administrative expenses are just way too cost prohibitive, so publicly funded is the only solution I can see as being plausible
Give it a couple of years. AI is just getting started.
