I’ve stopped using YouTube for the most part. Cut down a lot once they broke the search function and I could no longer find what I was looking for because every result would be flooded with random shorts and other irrelevant content.
Then, my account, which was made in either 05 or 06, got flagged as belonging to a minor and they asked me to verify my age with an ID. Why this even happened when the account itself is over 18 now, and I’m not in the US (which I thought was the only place their age verification BS was being implemented) is beyond me.
I wish there were more options for long form video sharing, since YouTube seems to be the only viable platform for it at the moment.
alot of time its right wing shorts, or thirst traps videos. and this from not logging in.
YT search is completely broken. It used to be that the first 3-4 videos were relevant and the rest were YT shorts or stuff you previously watched. Now, not even the first result is related to what I search for. I have to use Google in order to get the video I actually want. Even incognito in YT doesn’t help much nowadays.
I cant imagine flagging a whole account over 18 years old as attached to a minor.
I got flagged as a minor, despite an old account. They would not accept my card that I pay for premium with as a valid card. It’s valid enough to pay them the stupid fucks.
You can do the selfie thing, except use a 4k video of someone talking to the screen and it’ll probably work. I used an Evan Edinger video, scanned that and passed fairly easily. AI probably works if you can get a high fidelity image but all the free ones are well under 1080p and just don’t really register.
Why I use Newpipe on the phone, and Freetube.
Meh. My ad blocking strategy on my phone and desktop still works fine. I use Morphe (formerly Revanced), uBlock Origin on Firefox and AdGuard on my android phone.
No ads. No problem.
What is morphe? What happened to revanced?
For people who only go off headlines and comments and don’t read, here’s the important bits:
- This only affects some users, not everyone
- The issue is that comment sections are disabled and video descriptions claim to be empty
- The issue goes away with a refresh, you don’t need to turn off the adblocker, though you’ll have to refresh every video
- It affects all videos
- The link to adblockers is due to everyone who is reporting the issue being a user of an adblocker, and turning it off fixing the issue permanently until it’s turned on again
- There’s no specific browser or adblocker mentioned in the article
- It affects Premium users too
“there’s currently no way around it”
“The issue goes away with a refresh”
lol. sounds more like a bug if it’s also affecting Premium users though
YouTube premium membership, for when you like paying to be fucked over.
Not just the premium part, but also it affecting descriptions makes me think this is some kind of bug. At least partially. There’s not really any point to disabling descriptions specifically, most people don’t read them anyway.
“there’s currently no way around it” “The issue goes away with a refresh”
The way I understand it, the issue only resolves if you refresh while on the video you want to watch. Navigating to another video would unfix it again. So it’s not really a real fix the way most people expect a fix to look like. They want something they can apply and then they don’t have to deal with the problem anymore. Which, based on this article, only disabling your adblocker achieves.
All those issues have existed for a while now in non-Chromium based browsers; hell I get them using the app on my smart TV and that doesn’t even block ads. Especially with YouTube Shorts. I don’t think it has anything to do with blocking ads. It’s just youtube being shit in general.
Wouldn‘t be surprised if this was an accident. Wouldn‘t be the first time something gets messed up after a Youtube update where Youtube simply changed how some things work for functionality. These things can make Adblockers act up in a weird way.
I for example noticed last week the first video of a session starts at an automatic resolution of 360p. I have to manually change it to 1080p. Then it remembers this and keeps it for a while. I could blame Youtube for this but I bet it has something to do with the fact I‘m skipping ads and Youtube suddenly doesn‘t know anymore in what resolution the video should be served. Perhaps it‘s getting an error and thinks I have a worse connection than I do and tries it‘s best to load the video anyway.
What I‘m trying to say is: We don‘t know why exactly Youtube acts up. Could just be a bad interaction from an update that is purely unintentional. Either way Adblocker devs will find a fix for it quickly like they always do.
This is why I will never get premium. You pay the motherfuckers money and still have to take it up the ass.
I’ll never get it because first-party ads are only a small part of the problem. Shitty rec algos, Shorts absolutely rammed the fuck down your throat, third-party ads, dislike counters, gaslighting you about the resolution, clickbait blockers, cross platform feed, etc. These are all solved with third party clients.
there’s no point. I tried the free trial of youtube premium cause i’m on Qutebrowser and the adblocking isn’t the greatest. even with Premium i’d still randomly get ads every now and then. IF i were paying for it I’d be pissed.
Now I circumvent this by just opening all the videos in MPV.
With respect, I don’t believe you. I paid for Premium for half a decade and never saw a single ad. I stopped my sub and will advise people against it going forward, but your claim is highly suspect to me.
These kinds of things are often A B testing to see what they can get away with - especially in countries like the US where consumer protection laws basically don’t matter. It’s kinda like when they raise subscription prices in one country but not another, but with showing some people in that country a certain amount of ads per watch time vs another group with a different amount of ads. They see how much they can get away with before people start complaining, and then what they can get away with before people start cancelling.
I watched a video just this morning talking about how YouTube has built-in systems for similar A B testing with video thumbnails to tell creators which gets more watch time. You give it 2 thumbnails and it randomizes which one people see, and then tracks click-through rates and watch time percentages before giving you a result of which one performs better.
There’s a difference between AB testing, and fraud. Charging someone a sub cost to not see ads, and then AB testing if you can get away with still showing them ads, is fraud. If they saw ads with Premium, it’s a million times more likely it was an error, but I frankly just don’t believe it. That’s just my opinion.
Have you been paying like… literally any attention to US corpo activities lately? Fraud is not only not being punished, but actively rewarded, so long as you bend the knee to Trump, which Google has.
I didn’t say it was constant. I only said every now and again on the free trial I’d get an ad. Maybe it’s because I only used it with Qutebrowser. I don’t know. but I know that sometimes I would get an ad on a video.
my folks pay for premium, and i have to sit through constant tide or liberty mutual commercials surrounding every video when i visit. i asked why they pay for premium and they say it’s worse without it
Are you sure they don’t have Premium Lite?
what tf is premium lite? and to add, why tf is premium lite?
A cheaper tier than Premium that offers fewer features. Along with this, there’s still some ads.
I’ve never gotten an ad with premium. Been subscribed for about 5 years.
I’ve expressed this a few times already on Lemmy to little fanfare to say the least, but I use YouTube a lot. I use it a lot on my phone. I’d use it offline on planes. I want to pay for it. But I’m a yucky VPN user and I’m not even allowed to pay a blanket inflated price for it.
The algorithm is still absolutely amazing for music discovery. I already have channels I automatically yank things via YT-DLG from, but like using the service normally is nice too. I don’t see ads on my computer, but I suspect they might be feeding me extra ads on the phone to compensate. Because if this is the standard ad density for phone users it is vomitingly absurd.
Theoretically the folks you watch get paid from the fee. I don’t hate that system. I’m willing to pay, my payment is ready, I’m willing to pay 5 or 20 or however many bucks for it. But using a VPN to watch YouTube on a paid account can get your account banned. Incredible stuff. This is just about the only media subscription I can see myself using. And they’re cutting off all VPN users like that.
Yeah but if you were a YouTube Premium subscriber surely you’d disable the adblocker on youtube.com so you never get this issue.
I… Honestly don’t even think about my adblocker enough to even think to disable certain websites in it. Generally if I like a site enough to disable ads, I’ll also generally like them enough to pay them more money than they would have gotten from me turning ads off for a year
Why? So they can serve you ads on top of something you’re already paying money for?
But… you do not get ads if you have Premium, that’s the point.
You occasionally still get ads, even with premium.
I’ve had premium for a couple years now, no idea what you’re talking about
Same here, been using premium since it was bundled with google music when that was a thing. Aside from the creators sponsors, I never received a single ad as long as I was signed in properly to my account.
I had it for more than 5 years before abandoning it. I still got ads. I’d complain and YouTube would tell me it was a rare bug, or my browser, or the phase of the moon. They’d promise it’d never happen again and it still kept happening. I suspect it was a test to see what they could get away with.
Others in the comments have similar stories.
Counterpoint, it doesn’t make your experience ad free as many YouTubers have sponsored content.
There have been some users reporting they get ads despite being Premium users, especially in regards to Youtube’s efforts to bypass adblockers (even if they weren’t using one). I always assumed that’s because their measures were misidentifying the lack of ads as using an ad blocker, even if that lack was due to using premium.
Just wanted to give an actual explanation. I’m not qualified to actually confirm or deny whether those user reports were factual or made up. But people usually consider them factual because of herd mentality.
Then why would it fucking matter if you have an adblock on? Google shouldn’t give a fuck at that point.
Imagine being a paying Premium member and still get caught by this… That said, the YouTube comments are worth shit, so not much is lost there. The descriptions can be quite annoying when missing.
I really should start looking into yt-dlp or something. Anybody know if that’s still working fine these days?
“Who’s still watching in 2026”
first
Praise Jesus
Greetings From Brazil 😀 😀 😀 🇧🇷 🇧🇷 🇧🇷 💖 💖 💖
One thing is certain: Your distro’s repository’s version of yt-dlp - even on bleeding edge distros - is likely out of date, and you’ll have to find and run the appimage version from the devs.
You can just pass the upgrade flag when invoking yt-dlp. I don’t think the package itself needs to be up to date in order to work reliably.
Comment sections removed ? That should be a feature !
I had an extension that removed those, amongst other things, but that part broke. Most video comments on YouTube are incredibly stupid, I’d rather just not have to see them.
The issue is that comment sections are disabled and video descriptions claim to be empty
So it makes the page even better?
Right. That isn’t a problem at all. The only times I use either is when I’m looking for time stamps, but I can live without that.
Newpipe working for me right now. I hope it lasts.
There is no fucking way in hell I’ll ever a) watch ads b) pay for Youtube Premium. They created this monopoly with no alternative option and now we’re suppose to just get fucked while they get even more obscenely rich beyond all tasteful levels. Yeah, I don’t think so. And given how I ditched everything Google, if it ever comes to it, I’ll ditch Youtube too. It’s basically the only thing I still even use from Google because there’s just no alternative.
Soon will be a good time to quit YT completely. Suddenly, you’ll have lots of time to do all the things you were supposed to do long ago. You know like taking a walk, cooking nice food, reading books, getting to bed early etc.
My ad blocker won’t let me watch YouTube. I didn’t know there was a problem. Good ad blocker.
Don’t forget the phone. Almost everyone with a smartphone is either an Apple or Google user via it, and everyone seems to forget that.
The main issue with phones are fucking banks. Their bullshit insisting on phones having to have locked bootloader is so fucking annoying. I used phone with LineageOS but it was nightmare to work with my bank and they all do this shit to “protect the user”. Yeah right.
Yes, I do use Android phone, but I used ADB AppControl and just deleted and disabled all the Google shit on it (easier on Samsung since they have their own services which I prefer over Google if I have to). I also run DNS level filtering using Hagezi Ultimate list which filters so much shit. Not ideal still, but it works.
Yup. That’s the main thing stopping me from yeeting Google from my phone (also Samsung): the tickbox sanctity of a non-rooted phone that financial (and some other) apps require. Very frustrating.
you can kind of ungoogle youtube by using invidious https://invidious.io/
I just use it without account and subscribe to my favorite channels using external RSS feed reader. This way I still keep track of my fav content and doing it entirely outside of Google. If they track me as guest, I really don’t care that much.
the hardest thing to stop them tracking you is digital fingerprinting. they don’t need you to sign in, they have a profile with dozens of data points unique to your hardware/browser, unless you’ve got things installs specifically to prevent fingerprinting
Why does firefox allow random people to farm all that information? That’s the real problem here.
it’s not just firefox. pretty sure that’s just how the web works. i use librewolf with privacy badger, canvas blocker, and ublock, but it’s still built around firefox. i get a “unique fingerprint” notification, but also “you have strong tracking protection”
That site is brutal. No matter what I do or what browser setup I use, it always says that I have a unique fingerprint
i think the message is there’s no such thing as 100% private/anonymous–there’ll always be something giving you up
Ironically, YouTube is one case that’s much better with personalized recommendations. I even open links from social media in an incognito tab so as to not pollute my recommendations accidentally.
I think GrayJay already found a way around it lol
68% of people who responded to the poll at the link say that they are not affected. Only 10% of responders are.
Probably A/B testing.
I’m not lowering my security for Google.
It is just another turn of the enshittification downward-spiral. There have been steps before this and there will be more to come. Maybe this will drive users away.
You can decide if you need the platform and look for alternatives - but where to? Content creators want the range and the monetization of yt. Classic lock-in.
There are alternative frontends for yt. But the content stays there.
I’ll stop using YT before i start watching ads.
I’ll start paying for YT before I ever start watching ads. I won’t as long as I don’t have to, but the second they finally figure this out, I’m subscribing.
It’s well worth the money considering how much I use it and for how long I’ve used it for free. It’s honestly one of the few streaming services actually worth paying for.
no, it is not worth the money, I rsther pay for nebula or float plane or patreon
I’m in agreement with this, I’m mostly a content thief, because my use is so extremely limited it simply cannot justify paying any even more than a dollar for any service.
But when it comes to youtube, I get most of my scientific education there, all of the developments in astrophysics and sciences are there. I think I’d go bonkers without it, and yeah, I am not going to be watching no motherfucking ads.
But when it comes to youtube, I get most of my scientific education there, all of the developments in astrophysics and sciences are there. I think I’d go bonkers without it,
It’s hard to tell on the internet; is this sarcasm?
I think your comment is sarcasm, I was pretty clear in my statements!
There is a TON of educational content on YouTube. You can spend all day watching nothing but documentaries and classroom-style lectures/tutorials if you want. I would prefer to not use a Google service, but the actual content-creators include some wonderful people.
Does premium also block sponsors? Because if not, YouTube would still be unusable without an adblocker.
Granted, YouTube would probably be the hardest service for me to walk away from. Even without the entertainment aspect. How-tos on car repair and building projects etc are quite valuable.
If, when the ad read starts, you double-tap to fast forward, a little skip button will pop up which allows you to skip the sponsored section.
With a browser addon you can skip automatically without Premium. It doesn’t work with very fresh videos though, because they need time for the timestamps to get added into the database.
Youtube is Google. I don’t see a positive to handing over personal information to Google which is necessary to give them money, and just makes it easier for Google to have all information tied to one signed in account. Having no Google account is best.
Same. Especially since there’s more AI slop.
True that
Man gotta have a code.
For Android user I can recommend Newpipe. For the desktop I use FreeTube
Both have occassional issues when YT rolls out their latest enshittification features, but the devs are quite responsive.
Regardless, YT is a loosing battle, so prepare for the day when Google will win this arms race. That is why alternatives like PeerTube are important.
I was using newpipe but it wasn’t working for a bit, been having great luck with PipePipe though
Looks promising. Thanks for sharing
So I can still watch the video, just not read the comments that I never read anyway, and can’t click the "link in the description ", which hurts creators way more than it hurts me.
Makes sense … ?
YouTube comments are almost never worth reading in the first place (top comment is usually: who is here in <<current year>>? 😆). I never look at the descriptions, and the only time I watch YouTube is for either music videos or concert captures or links someone has sent me. Congrats YouTube, I don’t care about any of the features you turned off.
Exactly! I can no longer read ads for crypto scams, right-wing misinformation and porn bot spam? Do not threaten me with a good time.
Reading reviews on Google Maps in private browsing mode also got blocked for me.
My brave browser’s still working fine.
Apparently there is a way around it as I’ve been watching YouTube all day and haven’t encountered a single ad.
YouTube has been shadowbanning ad blocker users, where you comments appear to post but actually haven’t, for a while now.
I think the issue is with the EasyPrivacy list blocking the heartbeat signals that tell YouTube you are actually someone interacting with the page and not a bot.
Brave doesn’t seem to have this issue as they whitelist those scripts but it has other issues so I recommend keeping it as a YouTube only browser.
I noticed one of my comments was shadowbanned, I thought it was the channel that did it. Hmm, I don’t comment much on YT, I guess I won’t at all now. NBD.
The issue is with your ad blocker, not YouTube, though YouTube has no incentive to tell you what is going on as it would help out bots trying the same thing.
I don’t like Brave but they seem to have gone to the effort of whitelisting the heartbeats, so use that for YouTube comments.
- Why the fuck are you posting YouTube comments?
- Why the fuck are you using Brave?
Stop using the YouTube app/website, get an alt frontend like FreeTube, Grayjay, Revanced, etc. Not only do they remove ads and make it impossible for Google to track you, they have better UX than the official apps.
What alternative do you recommend for watching YouTube on a PC?
One of the options laid out above: FreeTube
What’s wrong with Brave?/gen I keep seeing positive comments about it, so there must be something I don’t know.
Here’s a pretty in-depth explanation. https://www.spacebar.news/stop-using-brave-browser/ The article is from 2023, so I’m not sure if they’ve improved since then.
