I use Firefox and uBlock Origin. Not sure what kind of experience anyone else is having with YouTube, but recently my home page has been empty because I “don’t have watch history turned on”. Okay, fine. I won’t be able to browse suggested videos, and I’ll spend less time on their platform.
Then I began to get warnings about using an adblocker. Okay, fine. I know they need to make money, so I turned off the adblocker. Now when I’m having my time wasted by ads, I have to ask myself, how bad do I really want to watch this video? Not badly enough? I close the tab and spend less time on their platform.
Finally, I began experiencing glitches when playing videos. The video stops, but the audio continues. This never happened before. Perhaps mistakenly, I attribute this to YouTube, which is owned by Google, trying to force me off Firefox and on to Chrome. That was the last straw.
Now I use YouTube to simply follow the channels I’m subscribed to. When I want to watch something, I copy the URL, paste it into YT-DLP, download the video and spend zero time on their platform at all.
To summarize; Now I’m watching zero commercials, and YouTube is streaming the entire video to me, even if I only watch a small portion of it, and they’re collecting less information about my watching habits than ever before.
Nice job, YouTube. Nice job.
If pasting into yt-dlp works for you, go ahead, but if you (or anyone reading) wants a more user-friendly experience, I recommend FreeTube for desktop and LibreTube for mobile.
Both these apps strip ads, respect your privacy, and have Sponsorblock built-in. You can import your subscriptions from YouTube via csv.
EDIT: Forgot to mention SmartTube for Android TV, which blocks ads and has Sponsorblock but is less privacy-respecting as you have to login to your YouTube account.
Linretube only works for me about 50% of the time. I tend to default to NewPipe because of this. Both are great, when they work, though. FreeTube for desktop is amazing. The ONLY thing I don’t like it about it, is that download progress isn’t shown (they’re working on that, I think).
Give piped.video a try. Basically a youtube frontend that isn’t ass.
mpv also works well from the command line.
The YouTube adblocker battle is going to be a constantly moving target, so take this with a grain of salt as who knows when it’ll break.
I use Firefox with ublock origin and watch directly on YouTube. I don’t sign in, and I track the content I follow via rss. No ads, no nags, no issues.
Piped and similar as well as yt-dlp are also great and are better options for giving YouTube the middle finger, which I fully endorse. Just giving another option.
As of many things Google does. It does not have to make sense. There’s probably some high muckety muck with an OKR. They need to make some metric go up. Viewership, less ad blockers, less logged out users, something. And they’re going to move to heaven and hell to make that number go up. It doesn’t matter if they destroy everything else. They only care about their metric.
