I have a Premium subscription, but I can give you an even bigger reason to never use YouTube. They actively push brain rot in their search. No matter what words I use to search for something, it is almost always the same results. Looking for nostalgic videos from the 90s? YT: "Here is the most recent brain rot on the Internet."

Interesting writeup with some interesting techniques. I should read these some more

Use the grayjay app from the FUTO team

I paid for their app and I've never felt more torn about recommending a product. On the one hand, it works pretty darned well (except for the inability to comment ON YouTube). On the other hand, I've contacted their support at LEAST three times and have no response. No bueno.

Wait, what do you mean you paid? That's a free app

It is both paid and free.

I finally had to update (19.16.39 --> 20.12.46) and repatch my YouTube on Android via ReVanced. I'll probably need to do that again in 6 months. I use uBlock Origin and LibreWolf on PC and SmartTube on my TV. I hope Google understands I won't be watching YouTube with ads.

ReVanced

Continuing the legacy of Vanced. ReVanced has 40 repositories available. Follow their code on GitHub.

GitHub (github.com)

LibreWolf

Codeberg is a non-profit, community-led organization that aims to help free and open source projects prosper by giving them a safe and friendly home.

Codeberg.org (codeberg.org)

uBlock Origin – Get this Extension for 🦊 Firefox (en-US)

Download uBlock Origin for Firefox. Finally, an efficient wide-spectrum content blocker. Easy on CPU and memory.

(addons.mozilla.org)

Home

Free premium app for Android boxes and tvs

SmartTube (Official Site) (smarttubeapp.github.io)

I use Pop_OS & the other day I was browsing the Store & stumbled on this app called 'youtubedl-gui'. Then I found out it's also available via apt.

Really cool little piece of software. Maybe check it out

'"Mark Zuckerberg buys WhatsApp", what a douche... It's free in the play store!'

Sams everything

From the Grayjay FAQ:

Does Grayjay require a subscription?

No, We offer a way to pay for the app once. The app will function identically without paying.

YouTube is really cool right now. The video ads that come up are ai voices just rambling about some new discovery and a minute in I have no idea what the ad is supposed to be for. Another cool thing that happened while I was at work was YouTube showed me some sort of blocky AI generated image in the top left right of what appeared to be a woman performing fellatio. The neat thing was that it was an ad for roof repair.

I wonder how much they spend trying to defeat adblockers versus how much revenue they lose because of them.

Something tells me that 5 years from now YouTube will no longer exist

honestly waiting 3 seconds of buffering is not the end of the world. i just have ptsd from the last isp, and makes my brain think i dont have net.

currently experiencing this on librewolf, however cromite desktop loads in instantly. google also have to fight against revanced, smartube, tubular...etc. this is a long ass battle and bless every codemonkey fighting the big brother.

Meanwhile on Newpipe: just another day with no ads.

Same thing on Google results. I don't use Google but I use what are basically frontends for Google and all it feeds you with every search is AI-generated slop.

Every Google search must be precedented by writing "Reddit", now.

NewPipe simply does not work for me. Every video fails to play.

The best YouTube experience I've achieved so far is still using the official website with a ton of firefox addons.

try pipepipe

Even if only 1% of people used adblock, then that's 1% of millions of dollars of ad revenue. It's easily enough to put several people on this as a full time job if they want to.

I'm sure Google saw it as only a minor issue at first, but the number of people using adblockers is presumably going up all the time.

The irony being of course that adblock usage is skyrocketing only because companies like Google have made the Internet so thoroughly ad-polluted it's intolerable to go without one.