Youtube let the other shoe drop in their end-stage enshittification this week. Last month, they required you to turn on Youtube History to view the feed of youtube videos recommendations. That seems reasonable, so I did it. But I delete my history every 1 week instead of every 3 months. So they don’t get much from my choices. It still did a pretty good job of showing me stuff I was interested in watching.
Then on Oct 1, they threw up a “You’re using an Ad Blocker” overlay on videos. I’d use my trusty Overlay Remover plugin to remove the annoying javascript graphic and watch what I wanted. I didn’t have to click the X to dismiss the obnoxious page.
Last week, they started placing a timer with the X so you had to wait 5 seconds for the X to appear so you could dismiss blocking graphic.
Today, there was a new graphic. It allowed you to view three videos before you had to turn off your Ad Blocker. I viewed a video 3 times just to see what happens.
Now all I see is this.
Google has out and out made it a violation of their ToS to have an ad blocker to view Youtube. Or you can pay them $$$.
I ban such sites from my systems by replacing their DNS name in my hosts file routed to 127.0.0.1 which means I can’t view the site. I have quite a few banned sites now.
Newpipe is still working great, I haven’t used an official interface in like 3 years.
How/where to get newpipe?
https://newpipe.net download the apk on GitHub or F-Droid
Work on Android? I feel like I had it running but it broke after an update or something.
Works for me
Jailbroken?
It’s just newpipe with sponsorblock. All you have to do is download and install the APK. I haven’t done anything special with it, it’s stock if that’s what you mean.
No, you can just install it. The biggest drawback is you can’t easily follow your subscribed channels. There is a way to import the list, but no easy way to update. The rest works great!
I’m on android. I got the app from fdroid. it’s working fine.
Really liking freetube, for my fellow Mac users out there
Is there anything like that but instead of showing the trends, it shows what I watch most based on my subscribed channels, kinda like an algorithm or something?
To my knowledge it doesn’t have that, but the suggested videos are pretty good. Like if I’m watching a science video, it will suggest other science videos. Otherwise I’m just subscribed to a few hundred channels and I mostly use the latest releases tab (not sure what it’s officially called but it shows everything put out by your subscriptions every time you refresh it).
Also highly recommend setting up Invidious. Having a self hosted youtube frontend with built in youtube-dl and 0 ads has been a game changer