Try using FreeTube
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.
I see a lot of people saying X and Y are safe. Eventually nothing will be safe. All they have to do is require login to view content. Make login require CC or SMS then enforce a ratio of content played over time.
Price wise, they're just insane. It's all B-Rate content for more then the price of any other streaming service.
i've still never seen this message outside of a screenshot; ublock origin in firefox (including tor browser, just need to hit the new circuit button sometimes) still works fine as of today. and so does yt-dlp.
the fact that some ad blockers are seeing this is a bad sign though :(
The enshitification of youtube is complete. Nothing stopping them from just upping the rate and duration of ads to the stratosphere.
I dual boot and in Windows they are blocking me now. In Linux, I am not seeing the message. So it's not IP based. I run Firefox in both instances.
I mean, it makes sense no? They are a business after all. Why wouldn't they try to enforce their ads? I personally don't watch YT that much but why not just pay up if you need ad free experience? The content on YouTube is good because creators get paid well from ads
Creators get paid well by their sponsors. They get shit on by Google which is why every video is sponsored. The aggressive ad rolls before and during the video pretty much just benefit google.
Something I don't think anyone is talking about is that, if this is now considered a ToS violation, Google will probably decide at some point to start banning accounts over it. Oh, you use adblock? Now your email, Drive documents, and photos are gone.
I use FreeTube on my desktop and Newpipe on my GrapheneOS Pixel 7, I don't see any ads or graphic overlays. The family uses AppleTV and the YouTube app is a horrible experience with the amount of ads, even for a 3 minute video. Future project is to look into Pihole or something to block ads at the router level.
I use SmartTubeNext on a Fire TV and it works fine.
It even skips over in-video ads.
Copy URL, alt+F2, mpv 'paste URL'.
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