More reasons to never subscribe to YouTube.
this post was submitted on 25 Aug 2025
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Privacy
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Lol, it's like paying to lose your privacy, it's dumb!
A year ago I would have been worried about this, but YouTube is so full of AI slop now that I barely watch it.
They are totally doing it to themselves. there is just too much crap there.
Who paid for premium? I can watch ad-free and my screen off on my phone for free
I used this addon and I watch stuff in the phone's browser
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/video-background-play-fix/
I used to leave Firefox in the background, then resuming from the Notifications.
this makes it a lot more convenient. thank you
That's what I do too 😂
They could have just ignored this
ReVanced for the win
This is why you don't give them money.
Also other reasons.
Of course not seeing ads on YouTube doesn't mean they don't want to profile you to shore ads somewhere else. Premuim is ad free, not tracker free
On what terms? I have my VPN permanently on. That doesn't mean I'm trying to cheat.
On terms of using a VPN. They don't need a reason. They can just do it
You know, I was trying to pay for YouTube Premium. I do think that was fair even though I knew I could use ad blockers for free.
The prices are outrageous where I live so i used a VPN to find a more reasonable price. Every so often, YouTube would cancel my account and I’d do it again.
This happened several times, but I finally realized that YouTube doesn’t want any money for my account! They would rather I pay nothing at all! That’s so generous of them.
So, now I use ad blockers and I get the same service for free.
Also fuck Google.
Firefox + uBlock Origin on desktop.
ReVanced on Android phone/tablet.
SmartTube on Android TV.
Enjoy a good user experience as it should be.
They're literally taking money out of their own pockets. Idiots!
Fuck me if I want to securely access stuff on hotel wifi I guess?
Stop giving youtube money, use ublock and revanced.
And SmartTube on your Android TV.
Not OP but for me I'm fine giving them some money in exchange for me not having to watch any ads while using their services. Just not the amount they want to charge me in my home country. 5€ a month feels fair, 15 does not.
That's fair, but my code of ethics prohibits me giving money to a corporation that engages in mass surveillance and actively radicalizes young men and women into the alt-right rabbit hole.
Also fair.
Thanks Youtube, once more showing why Peertube is better!
Does anyone actually upload to peertube though? I mean my "recently uploaded" is a few videos from days ago and then from weeks ago
Yeah and majority of them aren't as popular. Think Fedi.Directory has selection of various PeerTube channels which the popular ones like The Linux Experience, Veronica Explains more used PeerTube as a mirror for people who don't want to use YouTube and then there's some FOSS Project (think KDE?) that use it just to show off features related to their project.
Beside Tilvids' instance, there's barely much video on PeerTube I feel like I want to actually watch
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YouTube is trash. I was watching a cooking video, and I swear, after 60 seconds of ads, the YouTuber talked for maybe one whole minute before it went to ads again with a 60 second timer.
SponsorBlock skips sponsor segments. SponsorBlock also supports Invidious and Piped if you enable Support 3rd Party YouTube-Sites in the SponsorBlock options.
Nice — I absolutely use SponsorBlock on desktop (/laptop). Did not know it was on mobile.
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Every time YouTube raises the price of Premium or messes with their ad-model, it raises the value of blocking ads! 😊✨️
I do value my adblockers very highly, and I blocks ads in the browser, via DNS on my home network, and on my rooted phone too. Every time I access the internet on a device that isn't mine, I'm blown away with how bad it is.
Every time I access the internet on a device that isn’t mine, I’m blown away with how bad it is.
Sometimes my friends will ask if I can take a look at their computers because it's not working as expected or something is definitely wrong. I am always blown away by all the ads and crap all over the screen. It's like going to a porn site. I always ask 'How the fuck do you do this?' At the very least, install an adblocker. Sometimes I'll just go ahead and install UBlock, but there's an issue with doing that. Ublock Origin has a little bit of a learning curve. You actually have to put in a little work before it really works optimally for you. I find that people are not willing to do the work.
Not sure what you mean - UBlock Origin works great for me out of the box.
If you don't have Bypass Paywalls Clean too, some news sites won't let you read their articles when they detect your browser- or DNS-based ad-blocking. The user might want to know how to turn it off for a particular site (or learn how to switch to reader mode and/or how to use a site like 12ft.io) to get around that. Or if they turn on extra uBlock lists like the "annoyances" ones they might not see certain social media sign-in pop-ups they're expecting to see, for example.
YouTube is already hostile towards vons
As far as YT & Google et al, I don't participate. A good while back, I tried to promote some of my music on YT. The experience was...... terrible afaic. I used to use YT for tutorials, but there is no way I'm going to jump through all their hoops and endure back to back, un-skippible ads, to find out that the tut is shit. Screw that noise.
Reddit has been silently rejecting accounts that sign up with a VPN for quite some time now. If you make an account using a VPN, an alias email, using a hardened Firefox, and all the blockers, you can expect that your account will be shadow banned almost immediately. So, as long as Reddit front ends work, I'll still use it as a resource....for now.
I foresee that private forums will become a thing again where people of like minds congregate and exchange info, expertise, ideas, content, etc. They were once quite popular but people gravitated to these multi billion dollar corp owned social media outlets because it was the next best thing, and now the other shoe has dropped.
What about platforms like Lemmy and Peertube? Seem like a solid alternatives to Reddit and YT.
Honestly just need to bring back Usenet newsgroup traffic
at this point i'm using invidious almost exclusively now.
youtube keeps insisting that i use an account at all.
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