I use FreeTube on my desktop and Newpipe on my GrapheneOS Pixel 7, I don't see any ads or graphic overlays. The family uses AppleTV and the YouTube app is a horrible experience with the amount of ads, even for a 3 minute video. Future project is to look into Pihole or something to block ads at the router level.
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Sometimes I forget people like watch YouTube on purpose. I pretty much exclusively use it for music that's not on Bandcamp, short clips of old shows, and the occasional guide for something that's too visual to be described well in words.
Old man out of the loop, yells at clouds.
Youtube is effectively the only form of streaming my wife and I use. We have access to others through family members accounts but probably 19 times out of 20 we go straight for YouTube.
Name another streaming service where I can watch a 171 video saga spanning six years covering every single nut, bolt, plank, and brass fitting of a historic sailing ship restoration.
I have lost count but I think we are up to something like 130 subscriptions.
I use YouTube for tutorials, education, and entertainment all the time. And YouTube music is how I listen to all my music.
I've been paying for the YouTube premium version for my family since day one.
Recently they took away my grandfathered-in pricing. It really costs me a ton of money.
But I remember that I'm keeping ads off my screens, my parents' screens, and my kids screens... And we all use YouTube music all the time.... So...
Yeah, a lot of money, but honestly, probably the best subscription I have.
I could never go back to ads.
The enshitification of youtube is complete. Nothing stopping them from just upping the rate and duration of ads to the stratosphere.
I will let you know but I haven't have issues with ad blocker on PC yet
Here is my take on this.
First, I am with OP on this, but with mild counter points:
- I block ads because they are intrusive, contain scam and viruses
- I don't want to pay YT because I am already the product, and my trust is long gone about them saying they respect my privacy
- "Hosting is expensive" is what we hear left and right but...
- letting people upload many hours long is not what YT was supposed to be,
- 4K vids and up are huge, so is HDR, do we really need such fat video files/streams? I don't...
- for those who need 2000inch TV size quality, yeah, they want to charge those.
- I would be OK to pay, but google will rise the price eventually and it feels like changing a contrcat I signed to begin with and I dan't agree with that. (price raising reason are the previous points above, I am not concerned by those and I don't see why I should pay that much)
- I am a google pixel user, google already got some of my money anyway, which I am happy with.
In the same vein, I wait Netflix to raise their price again (I bit the bullet twice) but there won't be a third time.
Same for Spotify.
Those services should realize they are not essential, just bare useful, and should be priced as such.
Just my 2cts.
Something I don't think anyone is talking about is that, if this is now considered a ToS violation, Google will probably decide at some point to start banning accounts over it. Oh, you use adblock? Now your email, Drive documents, and photos are gone.
This is great, I'm sure I"m not the only one that now no longer thinks of Google as a safe place for my email and photos. And their search sucks now, there's not much reason to have Google in my life at all anymore. The era of Google is over (I hope!).
As soon as I have to see ads, I'm gone. Not mad, I get the business need for them. It's just not worth it for me. Most of my actual subscriptions are through a rss reader, and that effectively blocks all but the sponsorblock ones. For which I have sponsorblock.
Copy URL, alt+F2, mpv 'paste URL'.
Hasn't happened to me yet, but I know it will.
Sucks; but to be honest most of the YouTube things I watch have been moving off YouTube for awhile anyway.
First Reddit, now YouTube. This year is a year of change for my Internet habits.
I use SmartTubeNext on a Fire TV and it works fine.
It even skips over in-video ads.
just use frontends like invidious - for mobile there are tons of apps for these frontends, i recommend newpipe if you dont care about shitty recommendations
Use Invidious while it still exists as a project I'm a fan of the yewtu.be instance. Pretty reliable. The Piped project is good as well. Don't even use the YouTube domain at all, hate giving them analytics and site usage info nevermind ads
Thank you for mentioning the overlay blocker. Never heard of it. I was just on YouTube today and haven't seen this. Are you in the US? I feared this day would come. Not sure what I'll do.
My Ublocker works fine, and I have never seen this message come up