I’m so damn tired of corporations telling me what I can and can’t do.
You will definitely get the best content in the countries where YouTube is blocked /s
“In order to enhance your viewing experience, we’ve sold your data to your government”
The man sighs as he read the text on his computer screen, as loud knocking is heard on his apartment door. He looks through the peephole, there are men with uniforms outside.
[Ending 42/666, The Gulag Ending]
That’s probably not too hard to detect based on IP. They only do it for some content though. The only content I watch that has this block is official Formula 1 content on YouTube. It’s probably something that creators can enable when they want to region lock content or something
I currently watch YouTube with the Wcosia browser on my phone and have barely gotten any ads since I started using it for this purpose. I dunno why it is like this. I think I have gotten one ad in months and all I had to do was refresh the browser and it went away.
Used to use DuckDuckGo and their video player which also works fine. No ads.
It probably won’t last forever. YouTube seems hellbend on becoming AdTube, but for now, this is a fine alternative. I dunno how watching YouTube works with ecosia on the computer, if there are ads there, but on the phone, nothing.
Listen at this point, we either re-upload our favorite creator’s content to other platforms. Convince them to join alternatives or help out their replacements on thise alternative platforms to grow.
Either way I do not respect content-creators that do not support alternative platforms (& decentralization) on principle
I vote for all of what you said
Listen at this point, we either re-upload our favorite creator’s content to other platforms. Convince them to join alternatives or help out their replacements on thise alternative platforms to grow.
I am with this, tired of using a yt frontend to watch videos (sometimes real website) and no reuploads nor have alterntives
This will allow Youtube to locate
the best contentand spy on you more easilyFTFY
I have a Tridactyl rule to rewrite YouTube URL to
youtube-local(repository https://github.com/user234683/youtube-local/ ) e.g. https://www.youtube.com/ becomes http://localhost:9999/https://www.youtube.com but as others have suggested, I do my bet to avoid YouTube entirely, because Google is bad, Big Tech is bad.I love that this complaint is posted to Lemmy: a platform that forces me to pause my VPN to make a comment.
Using Tor right now, no idea what you are talking about… oh right you use that instance.
.world =/= “Lemmy” 😉
Yeah, world is kinda shitty for that
Everything detects VPNs. Reddit has an error screen I’ve never seen before about network activity when I use a VPN and I’m not logged in. YouTube refuses to let me watch embedded videos when I’m on my VPN. Many pages simply refuse to load.
Reddit?! Okay, that’s pretty terrible. It’s one thing to have region-locked copyright for stuff, but disallowing VPNs for a web forum? While we don’t need more evidence that they’ve turned heel, that’s an awful big red flag.
Not to defend that shithole, but honestly, it’s probably just to enforce IP based bans.
I mean… detecting (some) VPNs is as trivial as
fetch('https://github.com/NazgulCoder/IPLists/raw/refs/heads/main/output/vpn-ipv4.txt').then( res => res.text() ).then( res => console.log( res.includes( "1.2.3.4" ) ) )thanks to https://github.com/NazgulCoder/IPLists/
FWIW though I did try, connected via a random VPN from ProtonVPN from Argentina… and it wasn’t in that list. So it’s not perfect. Also ProtonVPN has apparently today 13K servers according to https://protonvpn.com/vpn-servers
That being said I can imagine that Google, which is literally built on crawling the Web, has all the infrastructure and expertise needed to have such lists and up to date ones.
I’m not justifying blocking VPN here, only trying to clarify that unless you self-host in a rather specific setup (i.e. not relying a popular cloud provider but truly self hosting) it’s technically not hard to block VPNs.
Many websites now just block a large range of cloud and VPS services in order to reduce DDOS from AI crawlers. For youtube and reddit you can still access if you are logged in though.
Yeah, detecting the VPN isn’t really difficult at all. VPN providers sometimes try to cycle through IP addresses to make it harder, but there’s only so much they can do.
This isn’t really noteworthy, especially when you consider how many services require a sign in when you’re on a VPN anyways. It’s shitty, but not really surprising; They want to be able to tie your traffic to you, not just to a random VPN server. Hell, even without signing in, they probably have your browser fingerprinted. If you’re privacy focused, you probably have a lot of privacy based extensions, in a privacy based browser. And that makes you easy to fingerprint.
Understanding is the first step to fighting draconian policies.
“This will allow Youtube to locate the best content” 🤡
But I don’t want the best content.
I want the old YouTube
It’s so insulting they add flavour text like this as if to call you a fucking moron to your face
It seems like most people will believe any technical-seeming message shown to them.
“We know what’s best for you”
Tip: Peertube Companion is a good extension for directing you to duplicates of the video you’re trying to watch if it can be found elsewhere.
I watched youtube religously 10-15 years ago. Now when I try to enjoy some content, I struggle to find anything of quality that’s in my feed. Sometimes I’m scrolling for 10 minutes and give up. Their algorithm for what might interest me was so much better back then.
I needed to fiddle around with YouTube a lot, so it won’t try to shove mediocre Pewdiepie clones but Hungarian (or more recently, Hungarian chud slop) down my throat.
youtube sucks ever since googol bought it. I cannot believe people still use it.
Google bought YouTube in like 2006. I liked it before they bought it, sure, but I would be hard pressed to say it’s been all downhill after the first year.
