Use Invidious while it still exists as a project I'm a fan of the yewtu.be instance. Pretty reliable. The Piped project is good as well. Don't even use the YouTube domain at all, hate giving them analytics and site usage info nevermind ads
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Here is my take on this.
First, I am with OP on this, but with mild counter points:
- I block ads because they are intrusive, contain scam and viruses
- I don't want to pay YT because I am already the product, and my trust is long gone about them saying they respect my privacy
- "Hosting is expensive" is what we hear left and right but...
- letting people upload many hours long is not what YT was supposed to be,
- 4K vids and up are huge, so is HDR, do we really need such fat video files/streams? I don't...
- for those who need 2000inch TV size quality, yeah, they want to charge those.
- I would be OK to pay, but google will rise the price eventually and it feels like changing a contrcat I signed to begin with and I dan't agree with that. (price raising reason are the previous points above, I am not concerned by those and I don't see why I should pay that much)
- I am a google pixel user, google already got some of my money anyway, which I am happy with.
In the same vein, I wait Netflix to raise their price again (I bit the bullet twice) but there won't be a third time.
Same for Spotify.
Those services should realize they are not essential, just bare useful, and should be priced as such.
Just my 2cts.
As soon as I have to see ads, I'm gone. Not mad, I get the business need for them. It's just not worth it for me. Most of my actual subscriptions are through a rss reader, and that effectively blocks all but the sponsorblock ones. For which I have sponsorblock.
I finally bit the bullet and switched from Chrome to Firefox last night after they flagged my adblock for YouTube as malware and forcefully disabled it. Fuck that noise.
Netflix is bringing ads to paying customers. Lets not assume Youtube will be ad free if you pay, because the whole business model is shifting away.
Regards the history thing, YT/google dont actually need that. They have their own register of users and histories. Not sure why they need to tell you to "switch it on" unless you're actually consenting to something else? Third party tracking, perhaps?
A lot of users are switching to sites like LBRY and Odysee, even Rumble. I've been using Odysee to watch stuff lately.
FYI if you delete your watch history, then watch one video, you can pause it again and get a proper homepage. Just don't clear that one video. I just clicked on a DJ set from someone I liked three weeks ago as that one video and it hasn't broken again since.
I switched to Firefox a few years ago when Chrome started forcing HDCP, my uBlock hasn't been affected at all in the most recent changes.
just use frontends like invidious - for mobile there are tons of apps for these frontends, i recommend newpipe if you dont care about shitty recommendations
Thank you for mentioning the overlay blocker. Never heard of it. I was just on YouTube today and haven't seen this. Are you in the US? I feared this day would come. Not sure what I'll do.
Silly question if you don't mind me asking, when you got the pop up:
- Which browser/adblocker where you using (also did you use any custom filters)?
- What device are you watching youtube on when you saw the block (windows, macos, ios, android, linux)?
- Where are you located? (like which country)
I never saw these popups just curious.
Also my setups using a web browser (no issues):
- (Mac OS Soma) Firefox Stable with ublock origen stock filters
- (iPadOS 17) with adguard safari content blocker stock filters
Setups with third part clients (no issues):
- Revanced android
- Smarttube (Fire TV)
- YTLitePlus (iPadOS)
Use an alternative front end like https://piped.video
You may want to try various instances (in preferences) as the main one has been under a lot of load