Technology

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 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.

I cant imagine flagging a whole account over 18 years old as attached to a minor.

alot of time its right wing shorts, or thirst traps videos. and this from not logging in.

I just discovered it because of your question, downloaded and it works. :)

Ublock Lite still works on Chrome. There are no custom filters and it doesn't block a lot of annoyances (like "Sign In With [brand]"), but it gets the job done for most people.

But honestly if you want have the most reliable adblocking experience, then Firefox w/Ublock Origin is still your best bet (also YouTube ReVanced for mobile and SmartTube/SmartTubeNext for TVs).

This is why I will never get premium. You pay the motherfuckers money and still have to take it up the ass.

"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

The issue is that comment sections are disabled and video descriptions claim to be empty

So it makes the page even better?

odysee as much as possible

Just a heads up, Odysee became bankrupt after its parent company LBRY (owned by a hyper racist and fascist ancap who was trying to politically takeover New Hampshire with a right-wing libertarian community to, among other things, revoke child-labor protection laws before being kicked off the board for his racism) did a pump'n'dump of their LBRY coin without reporting it on their taxes, which the government sued them for since it was illegal.

Odysee was then bought out by Arweave; a blockchain crypto scam company created and owned by Forward Research, which itself is owned by Sam Williams; another venture capital crypto techbro libertarian/ancap who also bought a big NFT company during the Odysee aquisition. So unfortunately, Odysee is no better than Google.

Peertube is great though.

There's nothing to see in Peer tube

It surely doesn't help that YouTube has replaced broadcast TV for most people. You can't even go back if you wanted to because TV is all but dead these days. Not unless you don't mind 24-7/365 marathons of Ridiculousness on MTV, and nothing but reality TV and old reruns catered to 80-year-olds on the remaining channels, cause that's the only demographic left still watching TV.

I suspect that if Google hadn't bought them, it would have been only a matter of time. Storage back then was hella expensive and without the ad cache, i don't know they could have afforded to grow and stay 'free'.

YouTube was pretty damned good for quite a while, even after Google purchased it.

Back in the day, when you got 1 30-second ad, or even two 30-second ads, right in the center.

Things started to go to shit around the 1 min unskippable ads.

Yeah uBlock Origin has worked fine through every single one of these "adblockers are broken!" articles I've seen

I don't mind, it's still good to raise awareness about Youtube's bullshit - especially since I'm getting ads for Border Patrol, OpenAI, and the fucking Melania movie now when I do see them (when I am lazy and using my Roku TV instead of HDMI). But it hasn't been a problem for me yet.

Yes, but you are the minority.

I dated a girl over the summer, and we were watching youtube videos in bed.

My phone has revanced, and it kills all the ads.

Then she shows me one of her videos.

It was.......oh my god. Do you have ANY idea how awful the vanilla youtube experience is?

And thats just how most people watch it. They just watch youtube, with the official app. Ads and all, and are fine with it.

So even if all the fediverse minded people quit youtube in unison, it would still be less than 1% of their viewership.

I recall having some firefox addon once upon a time to specifically remove youtube comments.