There's already a workaround (found, again, here), but I figured I would use this opportunity to tell people that projects like Piped and Invidious exist, which both allow you to watch YouTube without loading their ads, with improved Privacy and (in the case of Piped) even Geoblocking-Circumvention and SponsorBlock out of the box.

They're both great tools, and using something like LibRedirect you can even automatically go to Piped or Invidious when clicking/opening a YouTube link (and more).

Both don't load ads, but unless changed in the settings Individous may still make connections to Google/YouTube to load the video(s) themselves.

Bit of a shameless plug for these projects, but I figured this is a really good time to show these projects as I often see people asking what they are in threads on here

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[–] flop_leash_973@lemmy.world 60 points 2 years ago (1 children)

In my opinion anything that is just a frontend for Youtube is just a bandaid, and if they get to much attention Google will make using them increasingly untenable.

The real answer is moving to competing platforms outside of Googles control.

[–] rush@lemm.ee 1 points 2 years ago

Currently that is quite hard, because despite YouTube being an utterly insane business model it has prevailed so far.

I would love for an alternative, I personally really like PeerTube and the Fediverse in general, but mass adoption ain't there yet :(