For about a year, I’ve gotten notes from readers asking why our YouTube embeds are broken in one very specific way: you can no longer click the title to open the video on YouTube.com or in the YouTube app. This used to work just fine, but now you can’t.
This bothers us, too, and it’s doubly frustrating because everyone assumes that we’ve chosen to disable links, which makes a certain kind of sense — after all, why on earth wouldn’t YouTube want people to click over to its app?
The short answer is money. Somewhat straightforwardly, YouTube has chosen to degrade the user experience of the embedded player publishers like Vox Media use, and the only way to get that link back is by using a slightly different player that pays us less and YouTube more.
ISPs will only be aware of the site you’re visiting though, not specific content. So they know you’re on reddit.com for instance, but not what sub. They’d know you’re at neocities but not what personal site (i think). That’s why the likes of lemmy.world are so important. Non commercial space to talk that ISPs can’t snoop on.