Privacy

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Youtube is now unusable without a frontend (lemmy.world)

submitted 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) by DanTDM@lemmy.world to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

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I have an extension that can individually disable all the most useless/addicting components of the Youtube site, such as shorts and whatnot. On the search page, I have turned on:

hide Shorts

hide For You

hide Trending

hide 'People Also Searched For'

hide Search Categories

hide Promoted Videos

hide Promoted Websites

hide Suggested Products

Do you know what Youtube has started doing? They are now inserting engagement slop DIRECTLY into the search results, as seen in the image above. It's literally a short, yet it's inserted like a video so you're forced to see it. The only possible way to remove it is by using a privacy frontend, as even on incognito mode, Youtube will look at the three videos you've watched and start inserting shit based off that.

Louis Rossman is right, they all have rapist mentalities... "just let me stick it in"

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[–] darthelmet@lemmy.world 5 points 6 months ago (3 children)

I've tried looking into that but I couldn't get it working. It didn't add any subscriptions to my feed. Going to the site now I don't even seem to be able to click on anything. I just tried disabling my ad blocker and now I can click on stuff, but none of it won't load any videos. Any idea what's up with it? I'd love to be able to switch off YT if I can.

[–] BlueKey@kbin.run 6 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

Which instance are you on. I use piped.adminforge.de with uBlock and it works fine. Also the feed shows stuff from my subscriptions (I think I adjusted something in the settings for that).

[–] DreadPotato@sopuli.xyz 4 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

Piped isn't working for me either anymore. I was using piped.adminforge.de before, but I've tried other instances too without any luck. It won't load play any videos at all. I can search and find stuff without issues, but I can't play anything.

[–] BlueKey@kbin.run 2 points 6 months ago

Have you tried to enable only one codec and set the default quality to something like 720p in the preferences?

[–] Scolding0513@sh.itjust.works 3 points 6 months ago

I used Piped for a while, but it's always broken half the time or incredibly slow, it was giving me an aneurism. Freetube and never looked back

[–] retrolasered@lemmy.zip 2 points 6 months ago

Depends on the instance, it might be down or having work done on it, and also I think there might be some ongoing war with youtube api to keep everything working but im not sure. I just signed up on the kavin rocks one, every couple of days it will be down for a bit but it comes back up.