Ever since around 2017, I have not visited (or even seen) the contemporary Youtube site.

I had been using a combination of Invidious and yt-dlp (youtube-dl).

Just within the last year or two, Google has been making efforts to obstruct these tools. This can most clearly be seen with Invidious, currently suffering from a generic “This helps protect our community” error message.

It has got me thinking that Google might eventually succeed in extinguishing these islands of safety that I’ve so enjoyed.

People who still use raw, unmitigated Youtube today; how much of a hellscape has it become?

  • @RightHandOfIkarosEnglish
    9•3 months ago

    Depends on how patient you are.

    If you’re a patient person, its annoying but fine for the most part. If you have no patience, you’ll think its completely unusable.

    • @andrewta
      1•3 months ago

      Exactly. It comes down to a person’s patience. The videos I watch are things from HLC, habitual line crosser, this is part of how he makes his money. I watch a video and a commercial and he gets paid. I can work with that. Also Critical Role, same thing there. If I want the entertainment then in some way shape or form they need to be paid. Either I pay them directly or I watch an ad.

      Ads are usually skippable. Even if they aren’t, I click on the computer screen then wait for a whole 8 seconds to watch what I want.

      • @[email protected]
        1•3 months ago

        Except 10 to 20 seconds of advertisements play every 2 to 5 minutes. It’s not a matter of patience

        • @andrewta
          2•3 months ago

          That’s odd. Haven’t seen that much of a problem. Not saying you aren’t having the problem.

          Although most videos I watch are about 4 minutes. The only exception would be critical role. Haven’t really noticed a big problem when they are doing their live stream.

          • @[email protected]
            1•3 months ago

            Ah, no idea about live streams as I don’t watch those. I would imagine they have a different format for those as two ads every 2 to 5 minutes wouldn’t work for those.

            Now that I think about it, it may be because I don’t have an account so maybe google has less data to harvest and sell and so I get more ads. Unfortunately they might think that this would make me think “I should make an account” or “I should buy youtube premium”. Instead, I just think I need to avoid that place as much as possible.