I have an extension that can individually disable all the most useless/addicting components of the Youtube site, such as shorts and whatnot. On the search page, I have turned on:
hide Shorts
hide For You
hide Trending
hide 'People Also Searched For'
hide Search Categories
hide Promoted Videos
hide Promoted Websites
hide Suggested Products
Do you know what Youtube has started doing? They are now inserting engagement slop DIRECTLY into the search results, as seen in the image above. It's literally a short, yet it's inserted like a video so you're forced to see it. The only possible way to remove it is by using a privacy frontend, as even on incognito mode, Youtube will look at the three videos you've watched and start inserting shit based off that.
Louis Rossman is right, they all have rapist mentalities... "just let me stick it in"
Things like freetube seems to be basically a simple yt front-end.
I don't know what happens if a significant amount of yt users used freetube. but that probably won't happen.
I find it a lot more pleasant to use than yt.
I use freetube as well, but I have a feeling that it's just a matter of time before google brings the axe down on it too, especially if it increases in popularity.
Well FreeTube never claimed to be a platform, it's a fantastic front-end for browsing YouTube videos without having to deal with Google's crap, but you're still using YouTube.
Look at what happened with Nitter (alternative Twitter frontend). They'll start changing around things so often that alternative frontends break every few days.