Well, they need to make sure the right people are watching the right propaganda.
They lobby both parties, people are just talking about the Trump donations now as he is currently in power
If money is speech, what is a company “saying” when it donates to both parties?
It’s just lobbying to get their interests. They aren’t specifically pro rep or pro dem they are pro google
That only covers political donations, not outright payoffs.
They always could, they’re just more confident these days.
It’s time to switch to Newpipe or Invidious, YouTube clients focused on privacy, without adverts and without Google’s clutches.
newpipe won’t work for much longer. Google is mandating android apps be signed by them, and you can sure as shit bet that newpipe, which eats into their profits, ain’t gonna get signed
Oh no! I’ll miss you, Newpipe.
Been trying out Invidious lately. Nice stuff if it is not down for a reason or two.
Oh! Speaking of a devil. It is down right now!
I haven’t used Invidious, but I’ve never had.an issue with PipePipe being down.
I do, Piped for some reason doesn’t load anything for me, even with VPN.
Yeah, i even made a script just to log into its container (proxmox lxc) and pull the latest image when i see videos cant load.
It’s almost always google actively changing things, sometimes directly targeting invidious.
What did also helped was give its container 2 cpu cores rather than just 1. The internally errors and timeouts causes by google changes cause a big strain on it so it often crashed in combination with needing an update (leaving me unable to backup my up to date subscription list)
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.Lol, I guess I wont be watching the latest mr beast mukbang
I’m just going to say it: YouTube really started going to shit when professional, monetized YouTubers started becoming a big thing.
I’d like to see folks do more PeerTube instances in the future or something similar grow but there is cost involved that people don’t have with YouTube.
What kind of content? The ones with fake thumbnails, red/yellow arrows and circles and exaggerated faces that look like the creator is about to suck down the biggest dick they’ve come to know?
💀 Ikr
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.
Only kind of true.
If they did implement all those measures, all you do is launch a puppet browser rendered off screen and scrape the content you want. This could work for any site and it is impossible for anyone to detect.
For ads, as a nuclear option, you can detect when they occur and black the stream out.
I would personally do this if left with no other option.
Cue detection of “realistic” human activity on the UI and preventing streaming if the server determine this activity does not match a human enough pattern.
I’m exaggerating on that one, but… that’s not even that implausible these days.
My point was, dancing this dance with “big website”, whoever it is, will always be an endless uphill battle.
They can’t do that because of accessibility reasons. If they did that, a disabled person has grounds to sue them for proper aria hints & controls.
It doesn’t matter what kind of content it is, either. It must be made accessible.
Uh. I don’t know how it is on the other side of the ocean, but around here, it’s a nice goal, but there’s much more care going into making messes than implementing accessible websites. Even official government services sometimes just barely slaps an “accessibility conformity: partial/none” and keep going on.
I’m not sure having an accessible web is enough to overcome the thirst for ad money and control.
Sometimes I do get YouTube telling me that I need to disable my adblocker to access a video, so they do try to block that stuff (though I suspect that the infrequency with which this happens combined with the fact that not everyone does experience it when some people do report this happening suggests that they’re just testing methods of detection and blocking)
Usually when it happens, I just go into my Ublock settings and update stuff. I can’t remember that ever not working. It feels like a low-key arms race, in a cold-war kind of way
i use vorapis v3 cause they fucked with the video player.
NewPipe
Revanced.
NewPipe.
Honestly, Newpipe gets blocked more often than just using browser. Probably because of they detected API calls or something.
The Newpipe community is pretty big so even if it is blocked it is temporary
I don’t think NewPipe uses yt’s API. yt-dlp certainly doesn’t. It’s kinda the whole point of these alternative frontends.
Try pipepipe, haven’t had it blocked ever for the couple years I’ve used it
I use it, great app but I have seen my VPN blocked every once in a while. I end up changing IP addresses three or four times before it works again.
deleted by creator
Try Tubular, which is NewPipe plus SponsorBlock which makes the video watching experience even better. :)
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.
Many websites now just block a large range of cloud and VPS services in order to reduce DDOS from AI crawlers. For youtube and reddit you can still access if you are logged in though.
Yeah, detecting the VPN isn’t really difficult at all. VPN providers sometimes try to cycle through IP addresses to make it harder, but there’s only so much they can do.
This isn’t really noteworthy, especially when you consider how many services require a sign in when you’re on a VPN anyways. It’s shitty, but not really surprising; They want to be able to tie your traffic to you, not just to a random VPN server. Hell, even without signing in, they probably have your browser fingerprinted. If you’re privacy focused, you probably have a lot of privacy based extensions, in a privacy based browser. And that makes you easy to fingerprint.
Understanding is the first step to fighting draconian policies.
Websites have been able to detect VPN usage for a long time.
youtube sucks ever since googol bought it. I cannot believe people still use it.
Google bought YouTube in like 2006. I liked it before they bought it, sure, but I would be hard pressed to say it’s been all downhill after the first year.
They’ve been able to detect commercial VPNs for a long time. They’re just starting to care enough to take some action now.
I rolled my own VPN, no issues. Won’t say how because I got my ass beat for recommending it last time.
As someone who uses multiple VPNs daily I have a suggestion. Try to locate a different server and connect to it. See if there’s a drop down menu in your VPN app. Sometimes a particular IP on one of those servers flags websites’ fraud detection. Sometimes I can switch servers on my VPN and refresh the page and it loads just fine.
Excellent advice. It’s a game of cat and mouse (or whack-a-mole, whatever metaphor works…).
Sites that want your data for whatever reason hate VPNs, so they identify exit points and blacklist traffic from them. VPN providers know this so they spin up new exit points with different IP.
Just try a different server. Sometimes it’s a regional ’rights’ issue, so pick another server that is in the same jurisdiction, for instance in the case of streaming.
TOR?
Brb, gonna change the circuit 20 times to find that one exit IP that didn’t get blocked.
Also waiting 10 minutes for the video to load, xD
I think you can change some config thing to have the exit node be in a certain country so it may help? (Thought i am not sure if there is, the last time i configurated anything was for using HTTP), also, i have had a good expirience with the speed on TOR, i am in europe, where are you?
