Solutions to the youtube bullshittery

[SSinHeartandSoul]

A little while ago youtube started a war against ad-blockers, slowly but surely they are targeting everyone who uses their platform demanding you to stop using ad-blockers or to pay them for youtube premium.

Personally i hate watching ads, no one tells / demands me to go trough 30seconds of garbage just so they can make a profit off of me, In a way they are stealing your time / taking you ''hostage'' if you want to make use of basically the internet. i have 0 trust in youtube (Big tech companies) for obvious reasons. It is no ones business what i do / watch online, for this reason i have done a little bit of digging to find ways around big tech and get back some of my online anonymity, freedom and security.

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1. There are alternative platforms for video's etc. I highly recommend downloading the NoScript addon, other than that if you want to stay anonymous use the TOR browser.

Alternative platforms:

a. Bitchute
b. Odysee
c. Rumble
d. Peertube

2. besides alternative platforms, there are ways to watch youtube trough certain apps, one such app is freetube and is available for android, pc, linux etc. I recently downloaded it, and i must say it is a great app, works pretty well, very responsive, can recommend. Be aware! as always there are harmful clones around, so do a little bit of research before downloading.

Name of the app: Freetube
https://freetubeapp.io/

3. This is best thing i have found, there is a company called Futo, This company has brought an app to the market that combines all of the streaming services like youtube, rumble etc. it lets you watch and download videos without being traced and without ads.

This app is called Grayjay, it is open source, you can use it for free but they do ask you pay for the product (In good trust, so if you do not want to pay you don't need to). This app is only available on android.

https://futo.org/projects/
https://grayjay.app/

I hope these recommendations have been of help to my brothers and sisters! If you find something is missing please share your findings

 

[Voice of Enki [SG]]

Those are great suggestions, however I'd also like to mention UBlock origin works perfectly fine and has stayed ahead of youtube in this "anti-Adblock" campaign of theirs the whole time.

For instructions on how exactly to effectively use UBlock Origin, they have a Reddit thread that you'll find with a search as one of the first search results.

 

[Ol argedco luciftias]

Youtube does not see that Brave browser is blocking it. I was using the Ublock Origin before together with ad block plus, but youtube eventually noticed both of these.

 

[Ol argedco luciftias]

.....

I tried turning all the other ones off and only using the Ublock, and it still didn't work. It worked for a few more days, then not anymore. I wasn't getting advertisements but youtube was aware that it was being blocked.

Youtube is targeting different people about this at different times. They started months ago with some people, and only started a couple weeks ago for many more people.

 

[SSinHeartandSoul]

.....

Youtube is targeting different people about this at different times. They started months ago with some people, and only started a couple weeks ago for many more people.

Exactly, i got blocked from youtube quite recently, but when i started to dig i came to see that they started this months ago. I forgot about u block when i wrote this post, but i don't know how much u block or any ad-blocker is going to help when youtube decides to become even more aggressive.

For this reason i found it more helpful to come with alternative solutions to ad-block, hopefully for lasting results instead of a temporary fix.

 

[shkelbergstein]

https://yewtu.be
https://redirect.invidious.io/

 

[Gearshift]

Is youtube's buffering system broken or on purpose?

When listening to music it used to load the entire song. But now you have to keep your smartphone's internet on for the wi-fi.

Am I the only one who hasn't noticed this since about early-mid August of 2023.

The few videos I watch on Rumble preload chunk by chunk so I can disable my phone wi-fi and turn it back on after a bit to load the other chunk. Youtube has done a complete 180 when it comes to pre-loading music.

I wonder if this is a way of wasting people's bandwidth and having youtube with less bandwidth issues.

Surely pre-loading a video and spending time watching/listening as in my case with music, with the internet off is good. Less stress on their servers rather than loading chunk by chunk. Also even chunk by chunk is bit by bit it's not like Rumble's large chunks which you can enable your internet 2-3 times on a several minutes long video.

Is youtube different now or am I the only one noticed this?

I tell you youtube has gone downhill. It's no surprise other tube sites have popped up to compete. Remember Rumble's attack a few weeks ago trying to tear down the image of Rumble, muh nazim muh hate.

Anyways anyone noticed this?

 

[Bluecollarbutch666]

I am getting the same shit. I tried an anti adblock killer and it did not work.

 

[AFODO]

I find odysee to be the best.

Use uMatrix and NoScript. If these broke a website, you'll need to disable them, but these two together offers a lot of security and privacy too.

If you have to disable them, as a fallback, use uBlock, as this hardly broke any website, but still has privacy/security features.

Besides them, I use WebRTC Leak Shield. This is another very important add-on.


Brave has some nice features but isn't worth using it. It's just a spyware software.


uMatrix is better than uBlock.

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https://ancient-forums.com/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=87264

 

[Niko_is_666]

Youtube does not see that Brave browser is blocking it. I was using the Ublock Origin before together with ad block plus, but youtube eventually noticed both of these.

Ublock Origin still works well, you just have to update the filters.

If you want to continue to use Ublock Origin, then you have to do the following once Youtube detects it's filters:

Click on the Ublock Origin's icon and open it's Dashboard/Settings >>> select the tab "Filters lists" >>> Click on "Purge all caches" >>> Click on "Update now" and let it update(takes 3-5 seconds).
Once done, you can close the dashboard and open Youtube again.

 

[Voice of Enki [SG]]

For UBlock to work, you need to follow the instructions exactly as they are shown here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/17j6ygs/youtube_antiadblock_and_ads_october_29_2023_mega/

Follow them to the letter, don't skip any steps, don't add anything else for content blocking until you have completed the first install, and keep any other content blockers disabled as per the instructions, and this works flawlessly.

If you see the message again, this means there has been an update by youtube, which they usually do a few times a day, UBlock origin has people working on updates themselves all day long to beat youtubes anti-Adblock measures, so you need to manually go to the extension and update the "quick fixes" list, as per the instructions given by them on the thread I linked as well.

Doing all this, it works perfectly and the past few weeks the longest downtime I have had was a few hours, for which I used Freetube if I couldn't wait a while to use youtube.

The most important thing in those instructions is to clear your cache's, as youtube and Google both have implemented cookies that track your Adblock activity and will give you that message even if you properly install UBlock.

This is explained better in the instructions by UBlock themselves in the link above.

Doing all that, it is foolproof, if it doesn't work, you have missed something, or you need to manually update the extension.

 

[Voice of Enki [SG]]

Ublock Origin still works well, you just have to update the filters.

If you want to continue to use Ublock Origin, then you have to do the following once Youtube detects it's filters:

Click on the Ublock Origin's icon and open it's Dashboard/Settings >>> select the tab "Filters lists" >>> Click on "Purge all caches" >>> Click on "Update now" and let it update(takes 3-5 seconds).
Once done, you can close the dashboard and open Youtube again.

You don't have to purge all cashes, if you have done the install properly, you just need to manually force update the "quick fixes" list.

This is something uBO has implemented to make updating it to pass youtube anti-Adblock as easy as possible.

 

[SSinHeartandSoul]

Use uMatrix and NoScript. If these broke a website, you'll need to disable them, but these two together offers a lot of security and privacy too.

I have downloaded and tried uMatrix together with noscript, I found that those 2 do exactly the same thing, only difference is that uMatrix give more options. uMatrix together with noscript caused issues so i disabled noscript, i am very much liking uMatrix even though its a bit fiddly to work with on certain sites.

 

[Niko_is_666]

Ublock Origin still works well, you just have to update the filters.

If you want to continue to use Ublock Origin, then you have to do the following once Youtube detects it's filters:

Click on the Ublock Origin's icon and open it's Dashboard/Settings >>> select the tab "Filters lists" >>> Click on "Purge all caches" >>> Click on "Update now" and let it update(takes 3-5 seconds).
Once done, you can close the dashboard and open Youtube again.

You don't have to purge all cashes, if you have done the install properly, you just need to manually force update the "quick fixes" list.

This is something uBO has implemented to make updating it to pass youtube anti-Adblock as easy as possible.

I see, but sometimes it doesn't work for me, so I just go with the extra step of purging the cache. But I think I will reinstall ublock origin and follow the official guide. Thanks for the info and links.

 

[Gearshift]

BTW for you smartphone users do not out-tab your youtube video. Because one thing I like to do is let the video load then turn off my wi-fi and watch the video before turning wi-fi a bit later and loading the rest, this is good on Rumble. Rumble has a cool loading buffer system only negative is it doesn't show a load up if it showed a load up you can turn on wi-fi load the video and turn off wi-fi and continue until the video is over. In simplest terms the opaque loading sequence buffer that came in.

Apparently if you turn off wi-fi leave the tab to another tab or any action involving not being on THAT video with wi-fi turned off. The video enters perma loading mode and stops you from watching the video.

It can be annoying and make you be careful with your viewing cause you gotta remember the numbers of the time and then reload and move the scrubber to the location.

I don't know why but it's been this way since as far back as watching videos late-June, August area. I don't know if it's me or my phone, am I the only one?

 

[SSinHeartandSoul]

I hope my response isn’t unduly lengthy, maybe I should consider writing a seperate post about this topic

No not all, thank you for the response. What i wrote above is not the end to all things, so it is good to see other options and opinions.

About privacy and anonymity, this is something that is extremely hard to get nowadays. Tor won't fix it all for you (Simply because its impossible), tough there are layers upon layers of protection that you can choose from, that said it was not my intention to go full on on the privacy /anonymity route.