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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.
They've destroyed all the competition by offering a free service on the back on unlimited funding and then switching to an aggressive payment model once they have complete market dominance.
Google doesn't care if ad block users stop watching. They want ad block users to watch ads or go away.
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.
Allow me to help. Get the libredirect pluggin for Firefox. Go download and install freetube. Set libredirect to direct all YouTube links to freetube. Enjoy!
This. Works great.
FreeTube is also available as a webapp and on Android: https://marmadilemanteater.github.io/freetube/#/
https://github.com/MarmadileManteater/FreeTubeCordova
I've had trouble importing subs on the Android version though, and haven't really tested the webapp.
To YouTube people like you and me are not the intended demographic. We were never going to pay either directly or through watching ads, so they don't need us.
My YouTube homepage has been set to the subscriptions tab for 7 years now.
Didn't know I could do that. Gonna change it now.
To clarify, I changed my bookmark to be the subscription page
Got it.
Even though I have premium, YouTube recently has been very hit and miss. Live streams keep buffering for no reason. Some videos failed to play and needed a refresh.
Just odd behaviour all around. In their battle to take out adblockers they destroyed the average viewer experience as well.
I use Brave Browser (with Ublock Origin and AdBlock) and rarely have any issues. I do have Freetube downloaded, installed and ready to go for when they escalate their game (and they will). For certain other applications, a youtube downloader can be quite handy.
Ads truly are the most annoying, counterproductive and least creative way of putting yourself out there. Even worse, they can never seem to match an ad with the content it gets forced upon, and this serves only to train people to associate their brand with uselessness and irrelevance. Even if you have a product that is good, you've just presented yourself as an obstructing pair of clown shoes and that becomes your first and long-lasting impression. When the time comes that they may need it, most people will not remember your product from that ad, only that your brand is a pair of clown shoes.
The simple truth is, if you have a good product, you do not need advertising. You only need advertising if you have a bad product and you are worried that negative word of mouth will spread faster than you can dupe your share of people into buying it.
Edit: Replaced a word that may be taken as a slur.
In your second sentence, please remove/change the 'r' word. It is considered a slur and is not nice. Thanks.
I kind of cringed at that one, too :(
I use Brave Browser (with Ublock Origin and AdBlock) and rarely have any issues.
You don't have issues because Brave is based on Chromium, which is basically Chrome.
I don't have my adblocker on and I get the "Your YouTube history is off" message. I cleared my cookies specifically for YouTube and Google. I still get that message.
When I go to Private mode in Firefox, the message disappears. Same thing happens when I change my User Agent in Developer Mode and changing device size.
Makes me wonder how they are specifying my non private tabs...
There’s a small army of cookies and local storage data on any of their sites. Private tabs are devoid of cookies and storage data on initial launch which starts YouTube in its default state. Unless you’re clearing cookies and storage every time you visit YouTube they’ll track you.
Thank you for the information.
https://amiunique.org/fingerprint
If you are unique, and keep browsing with the same set of parameters, then they can track you (any web, not just YouTube).
Private tabs tweak some of those parameters to make you appear less unique, so webs have a lower confidence in you being the same person, are less likely to correlate that tab with your actual browsing habits, and less likely to punish you for "past transgressions" like having used an ad blocker.
Private tabs also clear up any data stored in your browser by a given website when you close them (not just cookies or site data, but also whether it has some fonts or tracking pixels in its cache), usually have fewer extensions enabled (each extension and data stored in it can make you more unique), and so on.
Thank you for the information and the link.
Edit: I just ran this. This site basically says I am unique because of I updated my OS on my old computer. There are a lot of other factors but those are the main ones. This is so interesting. I'm gonna do more research on how to mess these variables up. Thank you very much for this. Bookmarked.
This site basically says I am unique because of I updated my OS
The site is more for illustrative purposes, since they don't have nearly close the same amount of users as large sites like YouTube, and there is no way to know which data points exactly does some website take into account at any given moment or to what level... but you can export the results and compare them between devices, places, over time, or try to mess with them, like you said.
Jesucristo. Can you guys just not use YouTube for like a month? Seriously, when they roll out unpopular features, just don’t fucking use it. Why is this all too hard to understand?
YouTube is still the best source for long format content. They're trying very hard not to be... but still are, for now.
Because addiction.
I have been using revanved for years, never really had major issues.
Also just not using the service isn't going to change anything. I think Reddit was a good example of how companies really don't listen to their users.
So I'll just keep using it without ads, once it doesn't work anymore I'll just switch to the next solution or stop using YouTube. I do have Nebula so maybe I'll just, only use that at some point.
I use the desktop FreeTube app and watching YouTube works smoothly. On mobile, I use invidious via a browser or Safari in iOS with 1Blocker and NewPipe on Android.
Firefox + uBlock as well and I the only issue tha I have is that YouTube always takes a few seconds to load, before that the page is basically frozen
You could get around the load time by spoofing your useragent to chrome on Windows
I did try that with the extension, but unfortunately didn't work
If you dont like it and dont want to circumvent it just leave. Dont need to make it hard for yourself.
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.
I have a powershell script with the settings I want to use for yt-dlp, open VSCode, paste the URL in the variable and click run, and it just goes.
So far I have yet to find a reason to get multiple videos, but that just needs a foreach-object loop and a quick array to get that working.
Won't the the most efficient solution, but it'll be fine.
I have gotten so advertising adverse in my old age that I no longer listen to or watch radio, cable TV, magazines or any of the "old" media that I grew up with. It has gotten to the point that my mind revolts to hearing them or seeing them. It's like smelling shit and to be expected to find that entertaining. So good luck Google, if it comes down to it I will turn off the internet if ads become mandatory(advertising creep) the same as I have done with any other forms of advertising supported media. Edit: I do donate to sites that are user supported.
I don't know why I don't have ad problems and errors like I've been reading for a while now. My laptop has Kubuntu with Proton vpn set to block ads, and just bare bones Brave with ad blocking set to whatever max in the settings. My phone is Android with FF and uBlock, and also Proton vpn. I haven't been blocked or seen an ad, although I don't use YouTube very much. If I open YT links on my phone, is there acutually ads there that I'm not seeing? I can open YT in FF and just get a home page, play a video uniterrupted. Lately tho, if I wanted to look up something specific I just used piped.video, but I was frustrated by a java error on piped for a bit, so thats when I started using just YT again, and like I said, I have't seen any ads. I'm using piped again now.
mpv also works well from the command line.