Youtube has become rather broken of late. The nagware popup complaining about my ad blocker can no longer be removed. I don't want ads and I certainly aren't going to pay. So far, I download the videos via Jdownloader. Is there a less bothersome way? How do you go about it?

With the Youtube adblock debacle going on, and my account on Firefox+Ublock getting the dreaded popup, I was trying out the Piped alternative frontends for Youtube. If you're unaware, this is basically lets you browse Youtube without using the actual Youtube site or your Google account, and there's no ads. Whenever this adblock issue comes up, everyone starts pushing other frontends like Piped as the solution. There's also a dedicated bot that automatically replies with the Piped link when anyone posts a Youtube link on Lemmy. People seem to think very highly of this site! The simping for it can be very strong.

I tried using the main instance, https://piped.video, but it was laggy! Completely, unusably slow. I've also had it crash whenever I try to watch certain videos. I heard there were other instances that would have less users and less pressure on the servers, so I tried out the other public instances. One of them worked great for a couple days, now it just stopped loading videos all of a sudden. All the other instances I've tried either don't load videos, or the domain is down.

Are they cracking down on Piped now, or are all these instances just not good and you need to self-host to get anything out of Piped? Are there any other alternative frontends that you've liked?

I've always been a bit of a privacy enthousiast. Have had everything blocked that Google and by extension YouTube wants to scrape off you. This means I've also blocked my view history.

Recently YouTube started giving out a warning on the homepage that you have blocked your view history, that you can change it in your privacy settings and that it helps them serve you better content. What it also means is that your homepage is just one big popup to guilt trip you into sharing your data. The homepage won't show any suggested content anymore.

While it is in their interest to do so and since they are a company wanting to make money it is understandable. Nevertheless it seems harsh from going to see content that you might like to only seeing a big warning sign right now.

What are you experiences with this?

YouTube limits ad blocker usage in new test
YouTube could be testing a three-strikes policy for ad blocking (Update)
So its clear now that YouTube is going to limit the usage of Ad blockers in the coming future
I use Ublock Orgin with Firefox which basically used to block all ads and on mobile device I use NewPipe

Would love to watch videos that are well designed edited, especially done so in an original manner but have a low subscriber count (less than 75k subscribers?). The content could be vlogs, video essays, travel, design!

My experience with the extensions below is solely from Firefox.

For livestream chat, I use Hyperchat mostly for the cpu usage reduction.

Youtube-shorts block (Firefox,Chrome) forces shorts to play in the regular video player, avoiding the horrid shorts UI.

Hey everyone,

It’s my first post here so my apologies if I mess something up.

Recently I’ve been refreshing my YouTube homepage constantly because I feel like it’s either:
A.) Suggesting me things I’ve already seen before
B.) Suggesting me things I have no interest in

So I’m going to go straight to the source and find some good YouTuber Channels I may have not heard of.

I primarily enjoy gaming critiques, history topics & natural disaster docs (kind of random I know), videos detailing scammers (SBF, Elizabeth Holmes, etc) but I don’t limit myself to these, I’m pretty much open to anything as long as it’s entertaining and/or informative… preferably both.

YouTubers I currently watch:

• NeverKnowsBest
• LiamTriforce
• Knowing Better
• Internet Historian
• Ordinary Things
• RennsReviews
• Scott The Woz
• SAWS
• ADoseOfBuckley
• DAngelo Wallace

Any recommendations are seriously appreciated. I don’t limit myself to a specific genre, but longer form content is definitely preferable.

So I've been watching a lot of Youtubers the past year or so, and I'm about to run out of content! So I'm curious what you all are enjoying? I'll start of course - some channels I really like:

Contrapoints - rarely uploads nowadays but makes great videos about social issues, especially trans and queer issues as she is herself lesbian and transgender.

Perun - weekly 1-hour videos consisting of analysis of military economics, primarily about the Ukraine conflict. He also branches out though, and has done great videos on China's military's modernisation, and the German military's procurement processes, to give some examples.

World War Two - you may remember him from The Great War, this is Indy Neidell and co. who goes through the Second World War in chronological order. It is very in depth as they do it week by week, so this is the most thorough documentary on the war available.

Skip Intro - analysis of TV shows, particularly his Copaganda series is very interesting, in which he goes on deep dives of different TV shows' portrayal of police and how, most of the time, this portrayal is very dishonest.

Climate Town - very informative and funny content about the climate crisis. Lots of things impacting the climate that you wouldn't have ever thought of before.

Jenny Nicholson - makes videos about her own interests, fandoms, nerd culture etc. Very funny but rarely uploads.

Edit: Thanks everyone for the recommendations and discussion! Lots of stuff to sift through now, thank you!

I subscribe to quite a few youtube channels to get notified when there are new videos posted. I've had this set up for several years.

Today I tried to add a new channel I've discovered. My RSS reader informs me it's blocked. I check all the other youtube feeds. Every single one of them reports "Error transferring <feed url>." server replied Forbidden (201).

Update: One day later and every feed is connecting and transferring again. It seems to be a temporary block. My IP address has changed overnight though so that's still my main suspicion.

It seems like I'm not the only victim

That contains a link to the author's issue on google's issue tracker

The official response is

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/29752447/how-to-get-a-youtube-channel-rss-feed-after-2015-april-20-without-v3-api


They completely misunderstood the question - it's not asking how to find a feed, it's asking why that feed is getting blocked.

Not only this but using DuckDuckGo bangs for to search google get randomly sent to a captcha page - issuing the exact same query a second time goes through perfectly. The same is happening with keyword searches I set up in my browser. .

Any ideas what to do about this?

So sick of google's monopoly.