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?
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So far, YouTube itself with uBlock Origin (Firefox) and SponsorBlock is working swimmingly.
Until they ban Firefox and/or proper adblockers I’m still using it, and everything works as intended.
If they ban Firefox or make it more difficult to watch videos with Firefox, I fully expect state AGs to bring antitrust proceedings.
+1 to this. Firefox, uBlock, Sponsor Block. Haven’t had a single issue, ever
It’s absolutely unwatchable. It’s so infested with ads that it’s not worth even trying. You get frustrated and give up.
Our teacher pulled up a video to demonstrate a certain gravity experiment. The whole class got to watch two consecutive, loud, annoying and UNSKIPPABLE 20 second ads.
Needless to say, it totally justified all of the time that I spent switching Invidous instances and updating NewPipe (or Tubular).
Tubular was having issues the other day and the dev was slow to update so had go apply patches from upstream manually but overall would reccomment.
Newpipe was having issues a month or two ago. I had to go a couple days without a decent frontend. I tried the official app, off course, but I decided I’d rather go have a nice walk in the woods and do some mindfulness exercises.
Tubular>newpipe>freetube>brave
If all four of those fail I’m not watching YouTube videos until one of them does.
Just fyi, if you embed the video in a Google slides presentation it doesn’t play the ads
I’m not sure if this is true anymore, but IIRC all embedded youtube videos have no ads. Which would explain why creators can prevent their video being played embedded.
Ooh I know exactly the video. The one with the blue sheet.
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.
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.
Except 10 to 20 seconds of advertisements play every 2 to 5 minutes. It’s not a matter of patience
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.
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.
What a stupid question. Just go visit it??
They don’t actually want to know the answer. Their just high roading everyone about not visiting YouTube.
Ew, why would I allow my system to create traffic to Google controlled infrastructure?
It’s like seeing a mud crab. Horrible.
You need to slow it down with the skyrim. Perhaps some morrowind or some daggerfall? Just to slow down the aggravation.
In the last week, I came across 2 videos that started with an ad. Both were embedded YouTube videos. They must have found a way to circumvent adblocking.
It’s loud and annoying and I don’t have the patience for this. I just didn’t watch those videos.
It is genuinely infuriating to the point I simply uninstalled youtube on my iPhone and switched to using web-based alternatives. And yes, no need to lecture me on apple, I only have an iPhone for reasons. I’d rather have a linux phone instead.
2 ads play every time you start a video. Maybe you’re watching a playlist and realize 5 seconds into the video that you already watched this one, so you click the button to go to the next video.
Two more ads, no matter that you got two ads literally 5 seconds ago.
Looking for a specific video that you don’t quite remember the title of? That’s right, two ads every time you go “hmm no, it wasn’t this one”.
Two more ads are also guaranteed to play within at most minute 2, usually just after 60 seconds. So that’s a minimum of 4 ads in the first or second minute of any video you watch. After that, the amount of ads varies, but in my experience it’s not less than two every 5 minutes, and they happen randomly.
So every 5 minutes at most you get 10 - 20 seconds of advertisements in the middle of a sentence. Wanna go back 10 seconds to refresh the context that was lost by the jarring interruption? No problem, have 2 more ads. Sometimes as much as 3 times in a row.
The worst offender I had was a 30-ish minute video where, and I swear this is neither exaggeration nor hyperbole, two ads would play every two minutes, for the whole video (it’s also the video where I got two ads playing when I scrolled back 10 seconds, 3 times in a row). So overall on that 30 minute video I must have got around 45 to 55 ads (2 at the start, 2 every 2 minutes, 2 almost every time I scrolled back 10 seconds).
I endure it at work because I can’t just modify everything to my liking. Lots of political ads lately. Use the hardware mute button when you start the video. Alt-tab to whatever tedious spreadsheet or page of code. Come back and restart the video in two minutes.
Same. Back when there was just a single ad at the beginning of a video and you could skip it after only 10 seconds, I would just mute and look away from my phone for 10 seconds (counting out loud). Those days are gone. The petty “look away” is almost becoming a petty “go get some groceries”.
I only witness it whenever
any of my work colleaguesanyone with a phone wants to show me a video. Always have to sit through ads before & during the video. Absolutely horrific. Mind you they also have to close multiple pop up ads in every app they ever use on their phone. I couldn’t live with it & not learn how to deal with itEven without ads, the act of showing videos mid-conversation has never been a smooth interaction IME. Best not to fumble with devices while trying to talk with somebody.
So far its been alright with Brave browser on my iPhone. I don’t see nearly (any?) on there. PC, Firefox/Ublock Origin. Not sure how much it helps but also running pihole on my network too.
The few times I used another computer to watch a clip or two I couldn’t do it. I just closed the ad in rage and waited for watching it on one of my devices.
Pretty bad on my Roku. It really discourages you from watching more than a few videos. If I start a 10 min video and it wants to play 1 min of ads first I just go Back and hot play again, usually the ad length will get shorter. Usually have to do that 2 or 3 times to get to an ad I can skip after 5 or 10 seconds.
It’s too bad because Roku is good for everything else, fast UI and nice clean remote.
For me, on Apple TV, it became unusable without a subscription.
I’ve only been forced to watch YouTube with ads a few times this past year… Alcohol and gambling ads were very, very common. It’s unethical to show them, and I don’t feel bad about blocking them.
