Of course, this won’t work for livestreams. I never watch these live, because I have a life, but if it’s something really interesting, I just download the VOD afterwards.
If you really want to watch something live, say a game of football, you can also stream to any better media player. I typically don’t do that, but it’s an option. I prefer to watch football at a pub with my friends, so that getting drunk and cursing at the screen is not as pathetic as doing it alone at home.
You can download video statistics and comments with yt-dlp. Or you can log in with your Goolag account and use the youtube[dot]commercial website to LeAVe A CoMmeNt aND SMaSH tHaT lIKe bUttON, and still download the video, because it’s more pleasant to watch it offline. I sometimes do that, too, keeping in mind that Goolag is watching.
This can get annoying (though not nearly as annoying as watching an ad) if you only watch one very big video. I usually watch several videos in a row, and I just download them all at once, so by the time I’ve watched the first one, the others are already on my drive, ready to be played.
I use AdGuard Home on my NAS for DNS level blocking and then uBlock Origin on the browser for what AdGuard can’t block or misses. I haven’t had any trouble with YouTube yet.
I now only use third party open source clients. They are much more private, lightweight, and there is nothing preventing me from blocking ads and trackers.
For web clients, I recommend Piped and Invidious. For desktop I recommend Freetube. For mobile I recommend Newpipe.
Adblockers will probably always find a way to keep working on these predatory platforms, but I don’t want to go through all that hassle to use adblockers on the bloated and not private official platform when I can use third party clients. If i really need to use youtube’s website I’ll use it of course, but it’s temporary.
For me the solution was simple Stop supporting Youtube. The reason isn’t because its Google even though it doesn’t help that it is. The reason is because here is the Corporate Giant one of the Richest Corporations in the World and they are nitpicking at the end customer. While smaller venues such as Odysee and Rumble are available without the stipulations to the end users. Seems to me the smaller venues would need to advertise more and be more worried about users seeing advertisement than a Mega Corporation like Google who gets major tax write offs for the “loss”. So I stopped supporting because i’m tired of them trying to control me.
For subscriptions use rss reader of your choice. For watching use mpv+sponsorblock+yt-dlp. For in-browser use — invidious (selfhosted prefered). On android devices you also can use rss-reader with mpv (build with yt-dlp) or NewPipe with sponsorblock.
Or you can change your useragent to windows phone apparently it blocks ads too xD
I watch a lot of YouTube and I don’t care about the ads at all. The ads usually run for less than 30 secs and in this time I just check my phone or fetch a drink or prepare a smoke.
I had cable TV for years (still have it but essentially don’t use it anymore) where you had 7+ minutes adblocks every half hour and that was annoying but those few secs on YouTube I really don’t care about.
Unlike the ads on TV which doesn’t do any data mining, Google has been known to have malicious ads in its services. This means people paid Google to put up a malicious ad and Google does nothing until complaints come. That 30 second ad is all the time one needs to steal your information. Never trust anyone to have your best interest in mind like you do.
With how aggressive they are being with the ads, as time passes my fear is that youtube ends up adding DRM to the videos in a way that not even third party clients and downloaders/parsers can bypass
instead of the youtube address in the urlbar just enter: piped.kavin.rocks/trending
I haven’t had any problems with it. Don’t even have a login for youtube, as i never want to comment, never want to upload and never want to make playlists. (I find the comments on music videos particularly stupid and pointless so i don’t even read them anymore.)
The only thing is the error 1002 that sometimes appears and seems to be related to a bug.
hm, that’s strange because I haven’t updated uBlockOrigin in about a month. The fact that YT is working again can’t have anything to do with the version of uBlock, because YT recently stopped working with the current version
Interesting! Could you pls provide more information on this? I never heard of this and a DDG search for “YouTube malicious ads” doesn’t bring up anything.
Sorry for the misunderstanding I said Google not Youtube. I also am unsure if they were actually paid for or if scamed to look like the payed for its been a minute since i’ve actually paid any attention to Google problems as Google itself is a problem IMHO.
