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?

  • RobotZap10000@feddit.nlEnglish
    17·
    2 months ago

    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).

      • abbadon420@lemm.ee
        3·
        2 months ago

        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.

      • linearchaos@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        2 months ago

        Tubular>newpipe>freetube>brave

        If all four of those fail I’m not watching YouTube videos until one of them does.

      • yonder@sh.itjust.works
        2·
        2 months ago

        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.