If you're on desktop, download FreeTube. No more ads, ever. No more jittery youtube videos even though you have 300mbs down, you can download any video in app at max speeds, and its not algorithm fed. I imported my subscriptions, and now if I want to see something new I can use the not broken search function. Its like early early youtube and its wonderful!
Seconded.
Tis a beautiful experience.
And if you are currently using FreeTube, please throw a donation their way. They are putting a lot of work in to this app.
With the recent major update, Freetube implemented a new player which I like much better than the old one. With the new player, all keyboard shortcuts work well, that's great for me because my Home Theatre PC is controlled by a wireless keyboard+touchpad.
Freetube is great but it's also a source of endless frustration. Like if you walk away from your computer the stream times out and it won't resume. Then it says "reload" and they never implemented a reload button so you have to navigate to something else. Except their navigation doesn't work quite right so sometimes if you click too fast it stays on the new page after you try to go back to the one you wanted to reload. Rawr. (GitHub issues 1005, 1425, 1500, 1958, 4062, 4409, 5019, 5152, 6136, 6201)
I use youtube-local which is great, but it's more susceptible to breakage which is why I'm currently back on freetube and very very very frustrated.
In Freetube, reload is ctrl-R on Linux and Windows, and cmd-R on Mac. I have experienced the fact that if you leave a video paused for a long time (hours) then you need to refresh. If you have history active, after refreshing the video will resume from where you left, which by the way is better then actual YouTube where it will often resume from an earlier timestamp. I have not experienced the other issues you mentioned.
There's no reload button directly in the UI, but if you press alt and then go to View > Reload or View > Force Reload. It's not ideal, but it does work.
Edit: Didn't finish reading your comment, I've never experienced any of those issues, especially with navigation.
It’s a bit of a faff, but I use FreeTube to grab the URLs which I then drop into a yt-dlp command that I use to download my subscriptions to watch on Plex on my Apple TV. Works a treat, though I wish I could get Plex to display them properly.
Why not just use tubesync? There's another one like youtube archivist or something as well. If you already have a Plex server you probably have the skills to set it up.
I found tubesync kinda needs to be run on vpn if you don't want YouTube to ban you during the initial sync, I assume the same is true for archivist. Works fine after that first sync tho (I'm actually using as an archive since people tend to take their stuff down once they change hobbies for some reason, so I literally was archiving whole channels).
Fun fact, it seems this ban is IP based. (they're still testing in waves with a subset of overall users)
I switched to a new IP with my VPN, and while still signed in to the same YouTube account on the same video without ever clearing my cache or cookies, the block disappeared.
It was early yesterday, before filters had been updated, 30 seconds after a full purge and re-selecting of all relevant filter lists, done within the span of 2 minutes, so I doubt it was those.
I've landed on that page a couple of times. I'm just waiting to be blocked.
I almost never watch videos on youtube because I download them and watch them locally. The two things that I use to download them are Downie (Mac) and yt-download (cross platform). This helps me avoid ads unless they are baked into the video. I also like to grab a bunch of content all at once and then watch at my leisure.
I also like to grab a bunch of content all at once and then watch at my leisure.
If you're tech-inclined you might like pinchflat or Tube Archivist, which can archive channels/playlists in the background with video metadata automatically, which you can then use with JellyFin.
I run a Plex server for my movie and television library. I just watch YT videos once and delete them, mostly in the background while I do other things. But I'll look into both tools regardless because automation is always interesting to me. Thanks for the tips!
This is an interesting way to watch YouTube, and I have some questions about your system around watching the videos.
How do you plan out downloading and watching the videos? Do you download at the time of watching, or do you just download as many videos you like when you get the chance?
I download when I have free time to fill / kill. I watch one genre of videos and periodically check on a number of channels that have that content. I watch each video working down the list deleting them as I consume them. In the rare case that I want to save something, I toss it in an unmanaged directory of internet content.
My Plex library is where managed content lives. Stuff from the internet doesn't deserve that level of care (in my system of data management).
mpv youtube-URL
works just fine without even loading the crappy scripts to show a banner like that.
Manage your subscriptions with a RSS feeder and you don't need an account to follow creators.
If you disabled the list previously, enable it back.
Close all previously opened YT tabs and try in a new one.
Just a reminder: Please always treat disabling lists as a last resort/temporary solution type of thing. Without that list, you won't be receiving important filter updates and will likely encounter ads after a while. So don't keep it disabled forever - verify that it's still necessary (daily?).
Turns out Jews are aliens directing the Democratic Party and Hollywood to sacrifice babies for adrenochrome. Why is the lamestream media not talking about this???
It all becomes clear once you understand that the Jews returning to Israel is a precondition for the Christian apocalypse. Christofascists don't give a flying fuck about the Jews; they support Israel as a country (and Zionism in particular) for the entirely ghoulishly selfish reason that they wanna get 'raptured.'
Well, the Jewish Jews are the LORD's chosen, underdogs who are bravely soldiering the storm, but the American Jews are communist Satan worshippers who've sold their souls for control of the world. They've been battling for millenia to control the space lasers.
Also, now that I've imagined it, there's both porn and a Manga of it.
God I was looking for peertube apps and rumble was advertised in the app store. Boy did I have a surprise when I scrolled through the most subscribed list
Yeah, don't do that. The most popular content on YouTube isn't bad in the same way it is on Rumble/Odyssey, but in general, it's filled with clickbait/rage bait and is generally pretty awful. It's going to be especially awful on Rumble and Odyssey because it's a refuge for people who didn't like YouTube's policies, so it's going to largely be conspiracy theorists and far right nonsense.
That said, there's some good on every platform. On Rumble, I like Glenn Greenwald, who is a right of center independent journalist who lives in Brazil (also gay, but that's irrelevant). On Odyssey, I like Mental Outlaw (covers hacks, leaks, and privacy related news) and Naomi Brockwell (privacy advocacy). I don't have an account at either, largely because those platforms are full of trash, I just sub through Grayjay so I don't see that nonsense.
I wish a credible alternative existed, but for now, I'll hedge a bit with other platforms.
I'd watch the shit outta that with some popcorn. Between the logic jumps and the mandatory hand-waving of actual evidence to the contrary, and sheer numbers of fallacies to make the argument make sense it sounds like a hella entertaining time
There's some decent content if you look. I like Glenn Greenwald, and I sub to NBTV and Mental Outlaw on Odyssey. There's a lot of nonsense on all platforms, but if you're careful, you may find some decent stuff there. I wish more YouTubers would re-upload on other platforms, but I guess that's asking too much...
Ah yes, but what about the violation to our time where we've had to sit through 30 second ~ 2 minute ads of over-dramatized ways for shitty companies to get us to buy shit we don't want and subscribe to services we don't need? What about those violations and those violations happen more frequently than us blocking your ads? The hell with you.
I'm just so tired of ads nowadays, ads for cars i can't afford, ads for crap i'm never going to buy, ads for the supermarket i'm going to no matter if they have some discount...it's all useless and a waste of my time and invasion on my peace.
I bought the devices, i pay for the internet connection and i pay the rent on this house, i decide what makes it inside my house.
I don't need this funny clip my supermarket made to market overpriced holiday food 46 times a day that lasts 60 seconds and is only funny the first time i see it. I'm not going to buy a tiny christmas cake that barely feeds a child for €15, realistically it's value to me is €1,50 compared to my wage and amount of food i get in return. I'm buying store brand m&m's and a loaf of bread like i do all year.
If you can't keep existing without shoveling truckloads of ads into my face, then go bankrupt...i don't give a damn. You're not worth €16 a month to me either or whatever the price is nowadays. Just fuck off i'll get my entertainment elsewhere, heck i might dust off that ps4 and buy used dvd's for 25 cents a piece.
Malware has directly passed through as networks multiple times and neither the server of ads nor the ad network were able to be held responsible for it.
Right now it is common for ads to show apps that look like something popular but deploy malware. Nobody is taking responsibility for any of it. Ad networks aren't well policed.
It is irresponsible for a user not to block ads IMO but I also get to decide what packets of data traverse my network just like any other person or company. As a consumer I do not have to be responsible or care if a business model succeeds or not.
I would agree back in like 2010 but YouTube ads got so cancerous over the years that I won't give them money (Premium) out of principle until literally nothing works anymore.
The day FireFox and UBlock Origin stop working with eachother completely. Might be the day I just uninstall all of my browsers and use my PC more personally than before.
I didn't screencap it but today on YT I was given a modal that said I was using an adblocker (ublock) and I have three more videos before they require premium. I changed VPN locations and stopped getting the message.
Fuck reddit, this solution did not work for me. All YouTube videos stop buffering after 59 seconds. Only fixes i have found is with either making a custom userscript or disabling ublock from working on YouTube by whitelisting the entire domain.
I find the adblock yt prompt only shows now when I try to open two tabs of YouTube. Second tab has this message but the first plays fine. I think ublock probably deployed a half fix already
I kinda miss when places would host their own videos instead of relying on youtube, but that's the problem of a centralized internet, the majority of people won't want to leave yt/ig/fb/tiktok/twitter/reddit in order to watch or read whatever you posted.
People don't want to deal with the heavy costs and load of hosting their own content. That's unfortunately the sacrifice. Google is big enough to house it all, whereas, we'd probably see content from a creator last for a finite amount of time before they end up having to close up shop or beg for donations.
Beg for donations? How is being paid for your work "begging"?
As you said, hosting video is not only complicated but just fucking expensive, that's why people don't do it themselves. Google pays for it via ads/premium, not by magic pixie dust.
As someone who's written in-browser player and transcoding/server code...the lemmy/mastodon etc. version of this can work, especially if flexible bitrate handling is baked into it (i.e., bitrate offer/acceptance matching over a protocol). You can get this down to YouTube interface + install some software + open a port on your firewall.
Centralisation and large scale has it's benefits. There were also many problems with everybody hosting their stuff by themselves. Enshittification is results of private companies having to go profit first (and google being google of course), not so much because they are the only game in town. Being the monopoly merely enables the shitting on users for profit.
I see youtube and many google services more like internet's utilities that are privately owned and that is causing problems, not that they have gotten so big.
The whole idea that it violates the terms of service of a company to not let them show things on my screen without my consent is insane. It's like if every time you went to the grocery store, the employees held you down and force fed you a free sample, then banned you from the store when you started running away from them.
It’s not that bizarre. They don’t have to serve you the content without showing you the ads that make the platform profitable. The freedom goes both ways. I use an ad blocker too, but I don’t think that YouTube is really doing anything wrong here. (Other than possibly ruining their own platform, but that’s their problem that they’re making for themselves.)
If they weren't a monopoly, I'd agree, they can do whatever they want.
But since they are a monopoly, its a de facto the equivalent of a town square, and they are policing people's speech, and broadcasting annoying public announcements that nobody wants to hear.
I hate the way they‘re doing it and how they push their silly premium subscription in my face whenever I open the app to look something up quick. Adblock all the way. But you‘re right. They have to make money somehow. They‘re a corporation after all. It‘s naive to think they will ever give up.
When suggested adblock, my mother also do not convinced it's right to use them. Basically, my mother is grateful for the service provided, and will "pay" by watching ads. I guess this one is not so clear-cut.
The whole idea that it violates the terms of service of a company to not let them show things on my screen without my consent is insane.
Something something contract of adhesion something something. It is functionally a term of service to watch the whole body of content as a condition of watching any of it.
It’s like if every time you went to the grocery store, the employees held you down and force fed you a free sample, then banned you from the store when you started running away from them.
This effectively used to be how people would sell Time Share rentals. You would "win" a "free vacation" to a destination that hosted the time share. Then, in order to check in you needed to sit through a sales pitch that only ended when you agreed to purchase the unit you'd allegedly been awarded as a prize.
If you tried to leave the sales pitch prematurely, you were ejected from the venue.
Yes. The only positive thing the Dilbert creator ever did for the world was teach me (and others) that Marketing is bad. (He's a fucking creep and a Trump weirdo.)
It's worse than that. They use so much bw that most users have limited higher -speed to access, but they're not giving anyone vouchers to pay for extra bandwidth.
No one understands the astronomical bandwidth, CPU/GPU intensive calcs, and data storage necessities required to do anything close to what YouTube currently does.
There is no way under this warm sun that a fediverse version of YouTube will ever be feasible, unless someone like literally yourself is willing to pay extraordinary high amounts of money for all the required infrastructure and daily maintenance to run it.
I would want to see some data on costs, because I think you might be overselling the difficulty and cost a bit (I don't actually know, just my good faith belief). Imagine if every content creator ran their own instance. Instead of needing to worry about every user coming to a single group of servers, the Creator only needs to worry about the cost of hosting their own content and the traffic they get.
With the number of YouTubers who have to get sponsorships and Patreon anyway, it doesn't really seem that infeasible or unreasonable to expect content creators to run their own thing or pay to have someone else to do it. Doesn't seem like the YouTube money is that lucrative, anymore, so not like it would be all that different, either.
A "fediverse" version of Youtube already got made and subsequently killed, PopcornTime.
The Bittorrent backbone already has plenty of media and can handle more bandwidth than we'd ever need to throw at it. Encrypted Onion Routing provides a degree of insurance against copyright cops, too. The only problems left to solve are automating the discovery of user-relevant content and avoiding the legal system long enough to write and popularize an open source app that puts it all together with a couch-friendly front-end.
Reddit is mostly text, with a few images for memes, very low in storage, processing power, or bandwidth, its easy to have a fediverse replacement.
Youtube is a video platform. Video take a lot of storage, encoding/decoding, bandwidth...
And video platforms are small amount of content creators, with 99 percent of the users being non-content-creating viewers. Once the content creators are on a monopoly platform (like youtube), there's no incentive for them to leave. And fediverse wouldn't have the same money to make.
In contrast, anyone can find interesting links to post to a Reddit-alternative, anyone can make memes.
TLDR: Reddit is community-focused. Youtube is creator-focused. Difference in hardware requirements. Theres no practical alternative for Youtube, especially not a fediverse one.
I always wonder what part of the world those who do are in. Cuz I get the feeling YouTube is only doing this shit in certain regions. Or if it's just a hiccup with the adblocker itself, because it was shown pretty early on when these reports first started being posted that it was an issue with AdBlock Plus as well as there being workarounds for uBlock Origin due to some buggy Firefox updates.
Yeah, they're trying new things again. Gotta squeeze that stone for all the blood that's in it.
One of my accounts has been getting a long delay before the video starts. Pre-roll ads are trying to load and play but the add-ons I have installed are still stopping them from completely succeeding. For now.
I also have auto-play turned off, and I wonder if that has anything to do with it.
Pretty sure the systems at their side think that I'm seeing the ads because I've had pop-ups during the delay offering free Premium.
Wait yt premium has different rates in different countries? Anyway hosting a free to use service like youtube cost a ton in storage and bandwidth, contrary to nebula. I would rather support it as it doesn't do DRM and other too much user hostile stuffs (I'm using free software clients for long time, no issue. I'll continue after premium too as official client isn't that good). But ofc first I would like to know actual budget and ad money cash flow to see if it needs help really or just a marketing tactic to pump up revenue in typical corporate fashion.
Anybody has such income-expense data source for youtube?
A lot of companies have regional pricing. Some regions jist have way lower buying power and as such cannot afford 60$ games as it can be quite a significant sum of their income as compared to us.
YouTube is canceling accounts in other countries in waves at the moment. My account in Vietnam (I live in Germany) will also be canceled in mid-January 2025. I would have to add a Vietnamese credit card, which would be a bit much work for me.
But the venn diagram of the group of people who take voluntary surveys and the group you want to advertise to have no overlap.
The problem with ads is that we're barely removed from the era of all ads being malicious trojans if you clicked one. All ads are still malicious, just less insidious. They'll silo you off into an echo chamber rather than brick your computer. Some will still brick your computer though.
I block ads because I don't want to see ads, but I don't want to see ads because I don't trust any of them. Until they fix that, they'll stay blocked. I don't care if you're Google or some boutique website, I'll block them all.
Your last suggestion is basically what YouTube premium offers. I don't think I would personally watch ads voluntarily, but I've seen similar systems in some games. Smite (at least used to) let you watch ads to get gems that you can use to buy cosmetics.