I love watching YouTube kill itself off.
I will not watch ads. That’s the first, unbreakable premise. If the service does not provide videos, I leave the service.
Thanks YouTube for the evolutionary arms race with ad blockers resulting in truly amazing ad blockers. I hope this is used as evidence for your monopoly with 90% of the market for online advertising. Time to standard oil Alphabet.
Eh, it only lasted for a few hours, then I updated the ublock origin filters and things were back to normal. In the meanwhile I just streamed youtube videos via a media player that had builtin yt-dlp (smplayer) support.
It’ll always be a game of cat and mouse.In my case a couple of warnings popped up and videos still played when those were closed, then they stopped showing up altogether. We’ll see how it goes, I suppose.
This ends when Youtube is subscription-only, probably.
For the few creators I follow that are on peertube I always make sure to watch them there, but youtube’s pull is just too big. I’ll use whatever method that skips the ads, but as soon as a subscription is the only way to avoid them, eh. Maybe that’s the day I “move” to Albania or some other country where there aren’t ads on YT.
Yeah, I’m always torn on that one. Technically I watch more Youtube than many of the streaming services I do pay a subscription for. It shouldn’t be a bridge too far to move one of the ones I use least to YT.
At the same time the idea that YT is a fundamentally user-driven, social platform is still there. It’s very debatable at this point, but it’s at the core of the idea, so it’s a hard adjustment to make.
And Google going ham on trying to close loopholes and enshittify their closed platform with no recourse is such a reversal of that pitch it’s very hard not to go “well, screw you” and see how far you can push back.
yt-dlp
it or a front-end to it is always #2 on the list of applications to install on my own new os installs–right behind firefox.
i don’t use yt much, but it’s sure nice to have. i can just drag over or copy/paste urls or video id right from a serp and never have to give google a even single page view.
Once I get my NAS setup this year, I’ll start actively downloading and backing up the videos I like from yt.
Huh. I got a couple of popups the other day. A quick refresh fixed it though. In my experience, YT has been miserably failing its war on adblockers. I’ve yet to disable mine to watch a video.
