Most servers are not able to access the Google API.
Invidious report of the same(ish) problem: https://github.com/iv-org/invidious/issues/4045#issuecomment-1674373088
I watch more YouTube than I do television these days.
As of now, I’m able to watch it ad free on both Brave and Firefox. I don’t have revanced as I’m more or less too technically stupid to do it.
If it becomes impossible to watch YouTube, I’ll walk away from it just like I did cable in 2009 and Netflix in 2023.
I haven’t sailed the high seas since the eighties, and I’d honestly prefer not to, but you gotta make a product that doesn’t consistently try to piss me off.
If all you do is take without contributing you’re literally worthless to the platform any every other system you join. Your life will be a series of jumping to the next free platform that eventually crumbles to nothing.
Don’t want ads? Pay for premium. Want no ads and no payment? Why should anyone worry about your views? Your existence and use of a product then is a liability and not an asset
We’ve been spoiled hard by free money in the tech space. It’s going to bite and there won’t be a place to run eventually except community spaces like this that will never quite be sustainable long term.
It’s not trying to piss you off, it’s trying to make money, as it should. Do you have any idea how much money it costs to run the infrastructure behind YouTube? Neither do I, because it’s unfathomable.
I pay for YouTube Premium along with 5 friends. It’s $5 per month per person. Beats any streaming service by miles.
I do, however pirate all my movies (except for the occasional cinema visit) and TV shows.
i can really recommend https://freetubeapp.io for desktop.
Somehow I’ve missed the existence of this! Thank you for the recommendation!
The only answer is Ublock Origin.
Aside from that, you can do adblocking for your entire network and everything on it via Pi-hole. It requires no modification for the devices on your network and will work for literally any device connected to it.
If you combine those two, the odds of seeing any ad anywhere isn’t zero, but it is close enough to zero to effectively be zero.
I have a pihole and it’s great. Unfortunately it doesn’t do much against YouTube ads, as the ads are served from the same server that the videos are sent from. I still recommend it- it’s great for random banner ads and embedded trackers.
Ublock origin definitely still works tho… For now.
I have a spare pi4 I should set that up. Although it’s had issues with WiFi so idk I’ll be able to do it.
[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin/](uBlock Origin)
