Ever since around 2017, I have not visited (or even seen) the contemporary Youtube site.
I had been using a combination of Invidious and yt-dlp (youtube-dl).
Just within the last year or two, Google has been making efforts to obstruct these tools. This can most clearly be seen with Invidious, currently suffering from a generic “This helps protect our community” error message.
It has got me thinking that Google might eventually succeed in extinguishing these islands of safety that I’ve so enjoyed.
People who still use raw, unmitigated Youtube today; how much of a hellscape has it become?
Our teacher pulled up a video to demonstrate a certain gravity experiment. The whole class got to watch two consecutive, loud, annoying and UNSKIPPABLE 20 second ads.
Needless to say, it totally justified all of the time that I spent switching Invidous instances and updating NewPipe (or Tubular).
Just fyi, if you embed the video in a Google slides presentation it doesn’t play the ads
I’m not sure if this is true anymore, but IIRC all embedded youtube videos have no ads. Which would explain why creators can prevent their video being played embedded.
Tubular was having issues the other day and the dev was slow to update so had go apply patches from upstream manually but overall would reccomment.
Newpipe was having issues a month or two ago. I had to go a couple days without a decent frontend. I tried the official app, off course, but I decided I’d rather go have a nice walk in the woods and do some mindfulness exercises.
Tubular>newpipe>freetube>brave
If all four of those fail I’m not watching YouTube videos until one of them does.
Ooh I know exactly the video. The one with the blue sheet.