this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2025
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Youtube recently (as in last week) has been fuckin around with stuff to try and kill adblockers again, which means basically anyone using nonstandard browsers, VPNs, pihole/adguard dns, etc are having issues. Even some people who are using legit clients but just have an old oauth token (like phone users who logged in 2 years ago)
google will inconvenience 70% of their user base to kill adblockers (temporarily, bc I’ve already gotten ytplus working again without even needing a new build ha)
I actually used to pay for YouTube Premium for quite a while. It was $7/month and I split it with someone so it cost me $3/month to eliminate the very slightly annoying ads, which was well worth it.
Since then, they've taken a hard right turn down Shitty On Purpose Lane, I've long since stopped paying them, and after the most recent round of making the ads ten times worse a few months ago, I pretty much only use Librewolf unless I am for some reason watching it on my phone.
I feel like Google has completely forgotten the concept that made them the only successful search engine, all those ancient years ago. It's okay. The world doesn't mind teaching lessons again, in my experience.
I could have written that. I was fine with paying for YT, even though they asked too much to my taste I paid for years, but I decided their attitude was way too hostile (and too dumb) and decided to cancel my Premium membership.
I watch a lot less YT nowadays, like a lot, and I do it on Waterfox with those extensions: uBO + SponsorBlock (and YT Enhancer). So far, beside a few slow downs and the occasional refusal to play a video, it seems to be working fine.