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.

Ive seen mentioned elsewhere, but recently it looks like they blocked all vpn access. When using newpipe, it all works again for me when i turn off my vpn!

Remindme! 5 years

One glance at the GitHub issues reveals just how much of a struggle it is for the NewPipe developers to keep the app functioning, with YouTube constantly targeting every trick they use.

It's draining so much of their time and energy that there's barely anything left for working on new features.

The mental exhaustion of the developers is another issue entirely, one that should be obvious to anyone familiar with the demands of maintaining a relatively popular open source project. The fact that it involves YouTube only makes things worse for them.

for me its Grayjay even tho its not foss i had the best experience in any frontend

Didn't block me

Facebook still exists, so I'm not so sure

Yes. I was searching for a video about a panda refusing to bathe on YouTube app of a friend’s phone.

The first 4-6 results were Shorts, and I had no way of knowing if they were what I wanted apart from the thumbnails, since the titles were truncated. The next four were only semi-related videos, in the sense it was about a panda.

The rest of the videos that followed were absolutely bonkers. From Minecraft clips to random mobile arcade games I have never heard of, and many, many, MANY AI generated Chinese videos featuring a baby doing farm work, masonry, or other kinds of labor.

In a way, it felt like a display of arrogance. In the sense that YouTube was confident it had already served me what I was looking for in the first 10 results, and then said: “Now that you have seen what you searched for, why not watch this crap?”

I blocked YouTube. No ads.

it’s getting hard to keep up with the changes YT does and especially as an ios uYou+ or ytLite user (like me) as now you need a jailbroken device that needs to be on an ios version that support the last youtube app version and decrypt and build the modded app with this whole workflow…

Before you ask I’m ios because reasons and need to be on it until apple drops support for my iphone 12 pro. I miss Android…

I'm not going to disable my VPN, I'll try again later to see if it's fixed.

It's an arms race. And when Google stops me from downloading videos to avoid ads, YouTube's videos will be replaced with other content. I mean, the videos are convenient, but there's absolutely enough content to avoid them. Plus, I can develop new hobbies.

If you have access to a command line, yt-dlp.

Look, there's people who host videos that we must watch at any cost. But not really any cost, because we don't feel we should pay, or watch ads... or anything, really. But we deserve to watch these videos. It's our right. We're entitled damn it!

So we're going to barge into this place and watch videos while blocking ads. We're going to use tools to watch through the windows. We're going to smuggle content out of the building.

Because we need these videos. We'll modify our browsers, install new apps, change our habits, fight pointless fights, get accounts terminated...

But we're not going to pay a dime. It's not like Youtube means anything to us. Gross! We'd just leave if there was no choice. We'd just go to... somewhere else. These guys don't have a hold on us.

Devil's advocate: if you do things the legit way, absorb the ads or go for the pay tiers, do you think there's ever a point the advertisers and platforms say "this is the right amount of ads." ? Seems like it's an infinite process of cramming in more garbage. Personally I'm happy to engage in the arms race because it's not bothersome to me personally, and I'm fine with some "theft" as long as I'm paying back into the creators by whatever their preferred support structure is.