I mean like the downloading aspect. There are a lot of youtube downloading tools available for practically every OS desktop or mobile (well except iOS)

For about the last 3 years I've been hearing about YouTube cracking down on ad blockers. Not once has it affected my. Ublock still stops ads on the browser. Revanced stops em on the phone.

I already do this. There are several apps for it but I really like Pinchflat because it has metadata settings for Jellyfin.

All I have to do is add a video to a playlist and it gets automatically downloaded. I use it for archival but there's nothing stopping you from making it the only way you consume YouTube content.

If you are a content creator please consider upload your content on other video platforms too.

And i stop using youtube when my adblock doesnt work. fuck em

Depending on which services you want to replace, Nextcloud might also be worth a look. There are quite a few hosted options available by Hetzner and others.

On LG WebOS, the Homebrew Store has an Ad-free YouTube app that works well too.

Technically that's 100% buffering.

Touché

There have been periods where one of my accounts was getting an ad-length black screen with buffering throbber (I hate that name) and, the most recent time, it was accompanied by a pop-up asking me if I'd like to find out why that was happening. Yeah. I know why that's happening, thanks.

Then that stopped happening again. Either they gave up or UBo have worked around it somehow. Never ending arms race.

But I don't have adblockers installed and I still get told to turn my blocker off. I have no extensions and YouTube randomly stops my video to tell me I'm doing it wrong.

Edit: I guess this is the result when dealing with the kind of users who refuse to watch ads, but also can't fuck off like decent human beings. Just millions of people who will climb your fence, pick your locks, smash your window, because they deserve to watch content, but they won't pay or watch ads.

FWIW, I've been using ublock origin, too, and it's mostly worked fine.

Until a few days ago, when Youtube started detecting it and showing down the site and telling me I can only watch 3 more videos before it cuts me off. That hasn't happened yet, but I definitely feel the slowdown. I'm hoping a ublock upgrade will fix it soon.

YouTube might just go fuck itself!

Can't slow down videos I've downloaded to my Plex server.

Idk how one gets content on Nebula, but I wish more creators would join. Ik nebula isn’t Fediverse like PeerTube, but I still really like it and think it’s worth the $30/year to not get ads.

Umm.... Maybe. Let's take a look.

Redirecting to /statistics/267606/quarterly-revenue-of-google/

(www.statista.com)

In the first quarter of 2025, Google's revenue amounted to over 89.52 billion U.S. dollars, up from the 79.97 billion U.S. dollars registered in the same quarter a year prior.

... They'll survive.

I guess the content creators take the hit when users block ads or refuse to use premium.

Edit: your addendum is false. Technically YouTube freely delivers (answers http gets and posts), the user just refuses to watch all of their content or take part in the tracking. No broken windows or climbed fences.

I actually wouldn’t mind that. An ad blocking method that just plays ads in the background with the sound muted and not visible on screen.

If google only lets me stream the content I want when I stream content I don’t want, that’s fine, I just don’t want to watch it as it’s my eye balls, not theirs so it’s my choice at the end of the day

I had a time, when i had frequent internet disconnections, and connection speed was slow in general, so while i had the internet connection, i just downloaded a bunch of videos, to then watch offline. Suprisingly, downloading video even with slow internet is faster than streaming it, despite when streaming it, videos was always buffering.
Now i have stable internet and i can just stream videos without the problem, even by using third party app with no ads and without account.

Their attacks are never a global rollout, you somehow dodged them all! Lucky.

If I thought that way about YouTube, why not just be a sovcit about laws in general? I don't want to cherry pick philosophy. Let's go all in on technicalities and loopholes and definitions and wording. Life is a video game where X leads to Y because that's the rules. YouTube is merely answering requests, and I'm merely watching a curated selection of data. They have a TOS but I never agreed to it. For I'm not a user or customer, but a Netizen, and we have rights.