I’m using a stock Samsung Galaxy 8 phone right now (with Android 10) and I disabled the YouTube app. I was basically sick of its s***. Since then, I never sign in to the app/site, and so may aspects of using the site are much better now.
- Everything is faster, since they don’t know me / aren’t tracking as much.
- I always open YT in Firefox Focus, which doesn’t ever keep cookies or history each time I close it, so there’s no history for YT to mine each time I visit again.
- I’m pretty sure I see fewer ads since I don’t have a deep history for YT to mine / target.
- More random suggestions from YT means I am mostly broken out of the bubble caused by their tracking. I find new, interesting music, for instance, now, from the suggestions.
- Hitting “back” in the browser means I go back wherever I was before, not to the YT home page (like the app used to do to me)
I still visit the site often, and appreciate all the good music and channels I watch, but now it’s overall a much more positive experience, more like YT was a few years ago versus the horrible mess it’s become recently.
I’d still appreciate any other tips anyone has for making YT visits even more enjoyable.
Pro-tip: use NewPipe and you’ll never want to go back. You can install it from F-Droid.
Revanced is not from the play store you buffoon omfg. It’s one thing to want to denigrate another (better) app, for whatever reason. But at least don’t be an idiot about it.
The only problem with newpipe is you can’t log in and manage your own stuff.
On the other I love that you don’t need an account to be able to “subscribe” for a custom feed, group channels into custom categories, or make playlists. And all being able to get backed up locally.
Yah, I use Piped and https://yewtu.be/ now too.
But the last time I tried to use NewPipe, it was slowwww and would frequently be broken by changes made by YT. I’ll have to check it out again.
I use bubble upnp. If you share the yt link to it, you can cast the video to your Chromecast devices https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bubblesoft.android.bubbleupnp
Install Newpipe and you get an even better YouTube experience. Can be a Holy Shit experience for people who never knew YouTube before it became shit.
Another app is LibreTube, although it uses piped, which I kinda dislike as it means (depending on the instance you connect to) videos load slower and the subscriptions don’t all get refreshed.
I know there is a toggle for disabling piped, but the subscription issue doesn’t seem to get affected.
There’s a fork of NewPipe with sponsor block. I’d highly recommended getting that.
The equivalent on your PC would be an app called freetube
Is newpipe on any playstore or do I need to go find the apk myself? I assume the latter, lol
Install f-droid, It’s a reliable alternate software store for Android and it’s been around for a very long time.
I don’t understand people not wanting recommandations based on ehat they watch… I discovered so much great channel because of it
My issue was just that YT puts me in a bubble where it thinks I want to be. But then you only see videos like the ones you’ve been watching - a bubble. Imo, it’s better to see lots of different videos.
That’s true. But personally, if I want something different, I will simply search on DuckDuck “Reddit good “something” Youtube channels” and I will find a lot of things. I did it for horror channels, I start watching a lot of them and Youtube then show me other horror channels that I didn’t see before. And when i’m bored of the same subject, I rinse and repeaf
Yes I do t like that either and sort of want it too for some channels so what I do is use YouTube revanced with login , I purge my history once three months , and start a random video for first time like may be a documentary or a really.old/new song and then it germinates very different things for me from there on. And I got no ads at all. :)
For me it’s because I don’t use YouTube for that. I don’t watch channels or personalities. If I go to YouTube, I’m there searching for something specific.
And when I find the video that shows me how to open my key fob to replace the battery, I’m not interested in a series of key fob videos. If I watch a video related to a news story, I’m not interested in all the reaction videos or analyses by people who don’t know what they’re talking about. I’m most certainly not interested in any other video with a thumbnail of someone with their mouth agape at something
I don’t want it suggesting more of them, and I certainly don’t want it automatically advancing to some other video after it’s done. All I want is a video host that plays the videos I asked to watch. Everything else is just a reminder that the kind of videos they push are the exact kinds of videos I don’t want to watch.
They get in the way, they draw attention to the wrong things, and they encourage people to make more of the kinds of videos that get in the way of finding the actual useful information
Yeah YouTube overall does quite a good job recommending me videos I’m actually interested in.
Because it leads to echo chambers. It’s working for you now. Great. Then a few months later you get a totally different kind of content and you didn’t realize of that transition. Amd that’s not a good thing.
I’m not saying that will happen to you, specifically. But it has happened to a ton of people.
YouTube recommendations shows me spoilers if I rely on it, since I don’t get around to games right away. I also hate most YouTube channel personalities. Me and YouTube channels don’t get along. It gets the topic right but I’m too picky over channels I want to even watch, and back out of so many videos I check out. I’m fine with my current list of streamlined subs, and periodically unsub from a bunch due to ending up not watching most of the content anyways and it just cluttering my feed.
Firefox for android supports uBlock which blocks all youtube add btw. I’ve been using the website as my YouTube client for nearly a year now
A Firefox install without uBlock is half baked. Also, Firefox Preview let’s you use any addon, including Sponserblock.
My Firefox for Android crashes about every 3rd time I open a YouTube video full screen. It finally got so bad that I installed Newpipe.
I’ve had some weirdness with youtube in the past too. For a few weeks firefox would refuse to go into landscape when i opened videos in fullscreen. Kinda cursed
I think Google intentionally breaks it on Firefox, but it’s just a suspicion, I don’t have any proof.
I always open YT in Firefox Focus, which doesn’t ever keep cookies or history each time I close it, so there’s no history for YT to mine each time I visit again.
This is not true. Google doesn’t much care about cookies; they employ far more effective means of fingerprinting.
