Youtube General thread (formerly Youtube Censorship discussion thread)

[Bob Barbas]

Yeah, Brave got it back in control.

I wonder how long until Google legit tries a move against Brave but then again, they have bigger fish to fry like the monopoly legal case.

That's pretty much what I'm expecting. I 100% doubt they're going to ignore Brave forever.

 

[jray4559]

Is anyone else getting just tons and tons of recommendations for Minecraft videos despite not watching anything Minecraft at all? For the past two weeks almost every single time in the recommends bar there's 3-8 or so Minecraft videos, I don't click on them, they're not in my watch history, I think the last Minecraft thing I watched was either an explanation on the 20 second TAS or some video related to Dream cheating forever ago... but they just keep coming. Doesn't matter if I hit "Don't recommend channel" they just never ever stop. Wish their recoomend system would actually get better and not recommend the same shit I mostly don't even want to click on like I'm some hypnotized toddler...

 

[The handsome tard]

Okay, so now to have pinned comments you must either have a shit load of videos or legit share a 20 second video of your face taken from your phone or share your fucking I.D.

All to fight "scammers and spammers"

This platform is sick.

Is anyone else getting just tons and tons of recommendations for Minecraft videos despite not watching anything Minecraft at all? For the past two weeks almost every single time in the recommends bar there's 3-8 or so Minecraft videos, I don't click on them, they're not in my watch history, I think the last Minecraft thing I watched was either an explanation on the 20 second TAS or some video related to Dream cheating forever ago... but they just keep coming. Doesn't matter if I hit "Don't recommend channel" they just never ever stop. Wish their recoomend system would actually get better and not recommend the same shit I mostly don't even want to click on like I'm some hypnotized toddler...

Almost no one uses Youtube Kids (nor should they for obvious reasons) so it doesnt surprise me they have these recommendations in the algorithem even tho it doesnt make sense for most non kid users.

Youtube is just a very aimless site

 

[UncleTusky]

Is anyone else getting just tons and tons of recommendations for Minecraft videos despite not watching anything Minecraft at all? For the past two weeks almost every single time in the recommends bar there's 3-8 or so Minecraft videos, I don't click on them, they're not in my watch history, I think the last Minecraft thing I watched was either an explanation on the 20 second TAS or some video related to Dream cheating forever ago... but they just keep coming. Doesn't matter if I hit "Don't recommend channel" they just never ever stop. Wish their recoomend system would actually get better and not recommend the same shit I mostly don't even want to click on like I'm some hypnotized toddler...

I suspect it is because there is a Minecraft movie scheduled to release next April. Before you say "that's four months from now", there are already trailers for the thing running - I saw one the last time I went to a movie theater (not sure if different movies have different trailer reels associated with them, but the movie I saw was PG13 so the logic wasn't just "advertise a kids' movie to an audience of mostly kids"). If the publicity campaign is starting now it is likely to be unbearable by mid-March.

 

[Gravityqueen4life]

Ads starts playing again but atleast its only at the start of the video and they short.

 

[HeyRosalina]

Is anyone else getting just tons and tons of recommendations for Minecraft videos despite not watching anything Minecraft at all? For the past two weeks almost every single time in the recommends bar there's 3-8 or so Minecraft videos, I don't click on them, they're not in my watch history, I think the last Minecraft thing I watched was either an explanation on the 20 second TAS or some video related to Dream cheating forever ago... but they just keep coming. Doesn't matter if I hit "Don't recommend channel" they just never ever stop. Wish their recoomend system would actually get better and not recommend the same shit I mostly don't even want to click on like I'm some hypnotized toddler...

It knows you're autistic.

 

[Bob Barbas]

Youtube REALLY wants me to watch Vtubers for some reason. It constantly recommends me fucking Vtuber shit and no matter how many times I click "Not interested" or "Don't recommend channel" it keeps doing it.

No youtube, I will not watch an E-Girl 2.0 channel, for the last fucking time.

Also it's probably pretty simple but it took me until now to figure out why this probably is.
Because to my knowledge Vtubers are just extra autistic Let's Players and I watch a lot of game related shit on Youtube so the retarded algorithm just makes an assumption of OH VTUBERS ARE GAME RELATED SO THAT MEANS YOU MUST WANT TO WATCH THEM TOO RIGHT?! No, no I fucking don't.

 

[jray4559]

It knows you're autistic.

Okay yeah I am, you got me, but not *that* kind of autistic. Honestly I thought minecraft was more in the Gen Alpha skibidi brainrot direction of Autism than the don't-wanna-grow-up CS degree autistic adult part of the spectrum. Youtube may think it has me down but it doesn't, it hasn't really been that good at recommending me anything interesting that I haven't either already watched or have no interest in, and that's when it doesn't go schizo and recommend me random Muslim prayer shit or what have you.

 

[HeyRosalina]

Okay yeah I am, you got me, but not *that* kind of autistic. Honestly I thought minecraft was more in the Gen Alpha skibidi brainrot direction of Autism than the don't-wanna-grow-up CS degree autistic adult part of the spectrum. Youtube may think it has me down but it doesn't, it hasn't really been that good at recommending me anything interesting that I haven't either already watched or have no interest in, and that's when it doesn't go schizo and recommend me random Muslim prayer shit or what have you.

Minecraft blew up in 2010 and is really popular with gen z troons. It probably knows your exact age. In fact, lots of coders started with Minecraft (and we all know what happens to coders...) Sorry man.

 

[Angry Lurker]

We're owned by Google, the ultimate data-mining overlords, yet we’ll still beg for more money like we're one bad day from bankruptcy.

We're desperately trying to be TikTok with shorts, even though nobody asked for this war and we'll reward some of the worst content you've ever seen with hundreds of millions of views.


We got more ads for you. Two unskippable? Let’s make it five. Don’t like it? Let's make them 5 times longer.


We'd like you to pay us $15 a month for YouTube Premium, but you'll see ads on the mobile app too and huge sponsored blocks of ads taking half of your screen. And we will keep increasing the price.


And to continue the greed party, we might as well release a Lite version, to rip you off even more.


We're going to do the same shit to embeds everywhere and force you to login to watch videos and add ads on top of them and make them unskippable too.


We will track your browser crack down on adblockers and all of your extensions too while we can, we will force you to toggle your history on to use our website.


We’ll remove features you loved, like public dislikes to make sure the advertisers cannot fight back with your voice, and tear our community so much the only inclusivity we'll have left is not being diverse.


We let advertisers shill you malware, scams and softcore porn, impersonate our own creators, but you can't swear within the first 15 seconds of a video.


We let pedophiles and violent people running wild on kids’ content and let them destroy children's brains.

We let bots infesting comments and AI-generated flooding the platform.


We cant hear you complain! We're too busy training your content to AI without your permission.


Break the law? Not us. We just pay to bypass it. Using your money.. And we'll do it again.


We like you yelling into the void. Complaints, issues, concerns? We’re here to ignore them all.

We like to see you watch us wave flags for Black Pride Month while actively discriminating against Black creators in our algorithm.

We like to also take a peace of pie of your sponsorship deals now. Hope you weren’t too attached. Your hustle is now our hustle.


And the best part? You’ll stay. Why? Because there’s no viable alternative. We’ve crushed the competition, monopolized the space, and built a gilded cage you’ll never escape.


"Muhahahaha. Feels gud too bee a billioner anda rrrunnin' shit for money!"

 

[The Spoils of War]

snip

There hasn't been any point in watching YouTube since 2015. It needs three extensions to be usable, and two of those—SponsorBlock and DeArrow—are necessary only because most people there are grifters.

 

[UncleTusky]

Sorry if this was posted upthread, but starting last week the videos I use for background noise started randomly pausing. When I alt-tabbed over to SusanTube there was a message saying 'are you still watching?', and the only way to make the video keep playing was to click a button saying something like 'I'm still here' on the message. It's not enough for the ads to play anymore, Google is starting to make us prove we sat through them.

This is starting to feel a lot like the patent MS filed to track the # of people watching a movie around the time of the XB1 reveal.

ETA:

Yeah, Brave got it back in control.

I wonder how long until Google legit tries a move against Brave but then again, they have bigger fish to fry like the monopoly legal case.

If (huge if) Google is broken up there is a good chance Youtube in its current form is dead.

The economic justification for keeping Youtube around isn't that Youtube is profitable, it's that running Youtube at a narrow margin or even a loss is acceptable because of the added value it provides to Google's ad business. If Google Ads is spun off, split up, or even just told to stop some of its monopolistic practices the rest of Google's data mining operations become less valuable. If that happens Youtube would need to lean even more into other revenue streams (subscriptions, making up for lack of ad targeting with sheer volume of ads, probably more) to remain solvent.

ETA x2: I disagree that litigation against Brave is going to wait until the antitrust case is over. Google has the money to go after Brave today and any suit over adblockers would be easier to coordinate while the data mining + advertising segments are owned by the same company. Maybe it's a lack of creativity on my end but I don't see how Google filing that suit today would undermine its antitrust defense, in my mind the argument would resolve around ToS/site functionality/advertiser relations and those would hold up whether the case is brought by one company or multiple companies.

 

[Aib Ld]

Any youtube downloaders for age marked videos? The API changes mean Freetube was kill from watching them, Invidious got hit with the 'This video may be inappropriate for some users.'/'connection timed out', and bunch of other downloaders go 'download our program!'.
I haven't used YT in five years and I don't plan to come back just to save a typical action movie scene of some hero killing people brutally or a music video where the lyrics have no-no words.

I haven't used any other -tube programs, but I presume this is affecting everything else.

 

[⠠⠠⠅⠑⠋⠋⠁⠇⠎ ⠠⠠⠊⠎ ⠠⠠⠁ ⠠⠠⠋⠁⠛]

Any youtube downloaders for age marked videos? The API changes mean Freetube was kill from watching them, Invidious got hit with the 'This video may be inappropriate for some users.'/'connection timed out', and bunch of other downloaders go 'download our program!'.
I haven't used YT in five years and I don't plan to come back just to save a typical action movie scene of some hero killing people brutally or a music video where the lyrics have no-no words.

I haven't used any other -tube programs, but I presume this is affecting everything else.

yt-dlp still works just fine with the '--cookies-from-browser' flag. I.e. '--cookies-from-browser firefox'

 

[Bob Barbas]

yt-dlp still works just fine with the '--cookies-from-browser' flag. I.e. '--cookies-from-browser firefox'

The only problem with that is the obvious security risks.
My idea was to create a dummy account to use the cookies from. I just haven't gotten around to it yet but it's probably the safest bet.

Yeah, obviously kids don't use the cookies from your main unless you're a retard.

 

[⠠⠠⠅⠑⠋⠋⠁⠇⠎ ⠠⠠⠊⠎ ⠠⠠⠁ ⠠⠠⠋⠁⠛]

The only problem with that is the obvious security risks.
My idea was to create a dummy account to use the cookies from. I just haven't gotten around to it yet but it's probably the safest bet.

Yeah, obviously kids don't use the cookies from your main unless you're a retard.

I'll let you know when my account gets disabled. Just kidding, I don't download rap music videos.

 

[Bob Barbas]

I'll let you know when my account gets disabled. Just kidding, I don't download rap music videos.

You can't even use a dummy account? I fucking hate Google. So if you want to download age restricted videos you're just fucked proper then?
Great.

Oh well. If there's no other option.

 

[Brabbit Narp]

You can't even use a dummy account? I fucking hate Google. So if you want to download age restricted videos you're just fucked proper then?
Great.

Oh well. If there's no other option.

My understanding is that Google will ban accounts associated with mass downloads, such as if you use cookies for instance. It might not be a problem if you are selective about it, but it's something to keep in mind going forward. It might be worth getting a VPN and only using that account when it's active so you aren't IP tagged on top of that.

In other news, I have zeroed in on some peculiar behavior regarding Youtube's efforts to block my adblocker. I make extensive use of container tabs, and I have a specific extension dedicated to containing Google related products. Staring a month and a half back, YouTube's latest efforts blocked my primary browser container from watching more than a minute. I resorted to just watching on Freetube, which turned out to be a blessing in disguise. Eventually though, I did figure out via some reddit posts that you need to filter out jnn-pa.googleapis.com in the adblocker. It did work on my Steam Deck, which contains less addons dedicated to the effort, so watching there is good. But for whatever reason, videos won't even start when I have that filtered out. If I had to guess, there are other addons that YouTube is watching out for when it comes to blocking their telemetry. I'll have to do some more testing to be sure, but it wouldn't be the first time I have run into an issue on a website where it was being fussy with one of my addons.

Funny thing is, it seems that whatever funky thing is happening for my current YouTube container tabs do not extend out to the other ones on the same browser. YouTube videos on Kiwi Farms work just fine. Seeing as that is the case, I'll need to do a little more sleuthing to find out the issue. Besides the adblock issue, I encounter no playback issues otherwise that others report when using Firefox. Then again, I do use Librewolf and another addon to report that I am watching from Chrome, so... Librewolf is the way to go if you want to still use a Firefox derivative without the bull I suppose.

With regards to continued video downloads or updating subscriptions, I advise you hide your IP by some means. As long as you keep the IP shown rotated, it seems YouTube is fine with it as long as isn't absued too often. The occassional video download does not seem to trigger anything, so proceed at your own discretion.

 

[Outer Space Traveller]

My understanding is that Google will ban accounts associated with mass downloads, such as if you use cookies for instance. It might not be a problem if you are selective about it, but it's something to keep in mind going forward. It might be worth getting a VPN and only using that account when it's active so you aren't IP tagged on top of that.

Yes, they will do it. It has happened with a mobile phone account of mine, that I haven't done much with it - yet I couldn't do anything else with it. Youtube being a bunch of kikes.

The advice is sound: be very careful and "frugal", so to speak, with using cookies.

 

[Aib Ld]

I'm honestly surprised that even the coders are stumped on making a workaround on YT's age-restricted videos without either getting your account(s) blocked or the security risk that comes with it.
Never thought age-restricted vids would be like this since I had the mindset of "I'll get this later" on archiving everything else when YT went down the shitter earlier, that is on me.