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?
So far, YouTube itself with uBlock Origin (Firefox) and SponsorBlock is working swimmingly.
Until they ban Firefox and/or proper adblockers I’m still using it, and everything works as intended.
It’s absolutely unwatchable. It’s so infested with ads that it’s not worth even trying. You get frustrated and give up.
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).
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.
Just fyi, if you embed the video in a Google slides presentation it doesn’t play the ads
Depends on how patient you are.
If you’re a patient person, its annoying but fine for the most part. If you have no patience, you’ll think its completely unusable.
Exactly. It comes down to a person’s patience. The videos I watch are things from HLC, habitual line crosser, this is part of how he makes his money. I watch a video and a commercial and he gets paid. I can work with that. Also Critical Role, same thing there. If I want the entertainment then in some way shape or form they need to be paid. Either I pay them directly or I watch an ad.
Ads are usually skippable. Even if they aren’t, I click on the computer screen then wait for a whole 8 seconds to watch what I want.
Except 10 to 20 seconds of advertisements play every 2 to 5 minutes. It’s not a matter of patience
That’s odd. Haven’t seen that much of a problem. Not saying you aren’t having the problem.
Although most videos I watch are about 4 minutes. The only exception would be critical role. Haven’t really noticed a big problem when they are doing their live stream.
What a stupid question. Just go visit it??
