Mildly Infuriating

I guess I'm lucky that this ain't happening for me at least

"This will allow Youtube to locate the best content" 🤡

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 those alternative platforms to grow.

Either way I do not respect content-creators that do not support alternative platforms (& decentralization) on principle

They always could. What appears to be happening is that channels now have the option to turn on "a switch" so that content wont play if a VPN is detected. Most VPN ip addresses are well known, because they arent a secret. Everyone who uses the VPN goes through it.

If you come across the above message, its because the content creator turned it on. I had it come up with "stick to football". Its the only thing that it comes up with. I just unsubbed and wont watch anymore. Im not turning off my VPN for anyone or anything. Id rather just go with out. I encourage all of you to do the same.

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.

I'm so damn tired of corporations telling me what I can and can't do.

When I see content blocks like that anymore, I just leave the content behind and go elsewhere. Malicious companies will not get my clicks. They can fuck right off.

Good sign though, means they are getting desperate. It is our duty to starve them of traffic.

The "best content" being ip-located ads, probably.

I encounter VPN blocks everywhere frequently. I usually just reroll my selected server until the block goes away

They always could, they're just more confident these days.

VPN ads seriously need to stop promising that you can get around content restrictions.

Well, they need to make sure the right people are watching the right propaganda.

Oh, so what they’re really saying is that a platform owned by GOOGLE has trouble FINDING the best content?

Everyone knows.

My ISP has started throttling YouTube to ~2mbps when viewed from desktop. Using a VPN gets around this and lets me watch in HD. Luckily I've not encountered this error yet, but if I do I guess it's no more YouTube for me, 480p is just way too blurry to put up with.

This will allow Youtube to locate ~~the best content~~ and spy on you more easily

FTFY

It's time to switch to Newpipe or Invidious, YouTube clients focused on privacy, without adverts and without Google's clutches.

You will definitely get the best content in the countries where YouTube is blocked /s

Sure, there's big lists of them right here.

https://github.com/az0/vpn_ip

Hardly a secret.

youtube sucks ever since googol bought it. I cannot believe people still use it.

Dude, I seem to find more sites that break when using my VPN than those that allow it. The bastards are winning

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.

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.

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.

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.

locate the best content

Hell nah, please dont

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

People don't realize how much shit youtube/google ignores over time, for whatever reasons (but mostly because it's cheaper to ignoer I'd guess). With most major consumer VPN providers, this is very easy to detect. Adblockers are easy to detect. Tampering with the website structure? Believe it or not, quite easy to detect when someone hide a component or change a title or a button.

If they decided to seriously get after people that circumvent geofencing, people that block ads, people that change the interface to their liking, or people that plainly use alternative websites, they could easily. And it would require far less effort on their end to keep things complicated than it would require on our end to keep things working at an acceptable level.