First time this happens to me. With a German protonvpn server.
YouTube doesn't like VPNs. Harder to track you (and sell/monetize your data) if they can't tell who you are.
this post was submitted on 09 Oct 2024
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Privacy
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I desperately want a viable alternative to come along. There’s a lot of great content on YouTube, but the platform is increasingly being enshitified.
It's a gigantic money sink, it's going to be extremely hard to come up with a profitable (or break even) alternative.
I agree. We just haven't gotten to the point quite yet. Where the creators revolt. But that stage should appear somewhat shortly.
There's platforms like Nebula that noticed the decline and also wanted to give creators the freedom to create without needing to deal with an ever changing algorithm
I’ve considered Nebula a few times. That could absolutely be the alternative I’m looking for if they keep adding creators and topics and variety.
They seemingly are adding more creators. At least the ones I've followed. I recently just started contacting creators to ask if they've even heard of it and willing to contact so ppl can support them that way.
Patreon is cool but I don't want to have a subscription for every creator I like and decide on the amount.
None of the creators I follow have LiberaPay or crypto as an option either. I don’t want to pay on a proprietary platform.
Thanks for doing the legwork, I appreciate the initiative :) I’m guessing that I’ll end up with a Nebula subscription, I just haven’t pulled the trigger yet.
If you want, I can give you a guest pass (one week for free). Just DM me an email address
Thanks for the offer, but I’ll support them from day one when I decide to subscribe :) I already know that several creators on Nebula make good content.
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LIFETIME MEMBERSHIP $300
I’m inclined to buy that just because it exists. I hate subscription services so, so much!
This is the best option if you think you’ll use Nebula for more than 5 years.
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Third party app without an account maybe? Freetube on the desktop and newpipe on the phone is what I like to use. There's stuff like grayjay, tubearchivist, and pinchflat as well. Or just go straight yt-dlp.
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I go the other way. My youtube account is used across my family. My recommendation is a fucking mess.
So, the home page includes Peppa pig videos alongside with gruesome skateboarding accident compilations. Something for everyone!
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This helps protect our ~~community~~ revenue.
"Protecting our community" isn't even a good excuse, you can't leave comments without an account...
Protecting our ~~community~~ profits
This is the result of them blocking invidious. They targeted large Datacenter nodes and check for the number of requests from those datacenters that aren't logged in, and block them until that number meets a certain threshold. This also causes people with VPNs to get this message. The solution is to connect to smaller self-hosted invidious instances or using proxies hosted on normal residential ips.
This has always gone away for me when I change my location in my vpn.
I don't believe anyone mentioned this yet so... here goes nothing, there is a suspicion that this is due to A/B testing
This is a bug report from the Invidious project; this is back in June 6 (so four months ago), but the hoster of a fairly large instance noted a very bizarre error message on the Invidious project...
Conclusion is that Youtube is very likely rolling out A/B testing of requiring all clients to login before viewing videos
Refreshing will probably work considering this is most likely result of an A/B test, but unfortunately I don't see a way of this problem going away
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Yea, been having this BIGTIME. Even occurs on grayjay, and pipe apps (newpipe, etc.) Its aggravating. Can't even download vids either, and the ones u have downloaded are held ransom until u turn it off too 😂 at least in my case. Fuck google.
Try clicking the sign in button, then navigating back to the video without actually signing in. Seems to work every time I've tried it so far.
Have you considered trying out NewPipe or its fork Tubular (with SponsorBlocck built in)?
Tubular works like a charm like 98% of the time (which is way more than YouTube apps, LOL).
Yeah when google breaks something newpipe and its forks usually get updated within a day or two. I really gotta donate to them again.
Unfortunately NewPipe will not help with that. I get this message in a browser and in NewPipe.
Have you tried if yt-dlp works? Cuz if that also doesnt, then maybe they actually temporarily blocked your IP?
I have never gotten this message on yt so cant test it.
Here's the log from yt-dlp:
[youtube] Extracting URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kR1buRTIKhk
[youtube] kR1buRTIKhk: Downloading webpage
[youtube] kR1buRTIKhk: Downloading ios player API JSON
[youtube] kR1buRTIKhk: Downloading mweb player API JSON
ERROR: [youtube] kR1buRTIKhk: Sign in to confirm you’re not a bot. This helps protect our community. Learn more
Been seeing that a fair bit too lately. Freetube, Grayjay, and Newpipe seem so sometimes get around it, even if the error is in the browser the video will sometimes load in those apps from the same IP. If you get lucky and find a working invidious/piped instance that might work too.
Otherwise, turning on a VPN and switching between servers will usually eventually lead to a working one. That, and if you're up for it, check to see if your favorite creators are on places like Peertube, Odysee, or Rumble that don't block IPs like YouTube does.
Yeah. Our work endpoint is in AWS. YouTube hates that. So does reddit.
Oh that's how they broke invidious
It's a VPN thing. I have a work VPN that gives me the same error on piped API front ends like piped.video
If I use my regular device without a VPN the alt front ends work fine.
This can be a soft limit where Youtube limits the connection rate so that artificially inflating view count becomes more costly. There are inexpensive 'services' especially in India or Pakistan where you can buy human (like a whole internet cafe) view times to your scam video to make it float in suggestions and to promote a channel.
I don't work for youtube so it is just a guess.
As much as it isn't preferred, I can usually bypass the sign in shenanigans by going directly to the website to watch something without signing in. I usually only get the login prompt when going through my browser or a search engine.
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SmartTube, my go-to way to watch, is having issues again today too. I presume it is to make people subscribe to YouTube premium but my first thought was to use Nebula instead.
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