this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2024
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Pro tip: open YouTube in Chrome, signed into your YouTube account. Allow the algorithm and your subs to continue recommending videos. Find one you wanna see. Copy link address. Paste it into Firefox with adblock, not signed into Google/YouTube. Prosper.
Just watched a YouTube video on my PS5 earlier today while cooking a food and saw for the first time that they will shoot an ad with a "next" button that skips to another ad, and then there's a "skip" button countdown. Ridiculous. I wouldn't bother with adblock if the ads were reasonable.
Here's a free idea, YouTube: build in the ability to add videos to a simple temporary queue and then only put ads in at the very start or very end of videos so they aren't intrusive.
That free idea reduces (potential) ad watch time which reduces money, so there's no chance they'll implement it.
If they thought they could get away with serving an ad every 15 seconds, they'd do it.
Presumably the algorithm feed will stagnate or even deteriorate if it sees you ain't watching what it's suggesting.
what I do is open a containerized tab on firefox so that youtube has no history enabled and doesnt fill the page with obnoxious content then I search for what I went there for then I close the tab so everything is purged. for my subscriptions I use a container on my server that downloads their videos and ads them to my plex server so I can watch them there when I have time to watch stuff its all in one place
If you have Plasma Integration (KDE), you can create a task for sending the link directly to Firefox without copying and pasting. Plasma Integration shows as a context menu item inside chrome, if you use KDE.
Watch time affects your recommendations, so this isn't a great solution
After watching, click do not recommend and say that it's because you've already watched it. Problem solved.
And now YouTube thinks you hate that video, so your recommendations are less relevant unless you're willing to do the survey every time.
It's barely more work than just clicking "Not interested." though. Just click "tell us why" and "I've already watched this video" and it knows that you didn't dislike it. Trust me, I've been doing this for a while now and it still properly recommends videos. It just cleans up your recommended queue because it knows that you've already watched those ones in particular. I've watched a lot of music deep dive content this way because the ads stupidly will interrupt at the worst moments and ruin the flow, but that kind of content still shows up on my feed all the time.
SmartTube on the shield. Prosper.
You can have that by paying for youtube premium, they want you to sign up.
I'm not tempted to sign up for something if I don't even know what the features are. Maybe some of their dumbass ads should be for their own fucking product lol. I assumed that it was free from ads, and I think you can download videos and play with your screen off on your phone? Idk, Vanced has been great for me on my phone. And I wouldn't have bothered to get that set up in the first place if the ads and lack of features weren't so disruptively intrusive. If they find a way to shut down every way of getting around their overreaching bullshit, I'll opt to fund a few respectable creators directly rather than pay for the platform.
And I wouldn't want to bother building a queue in the first place unless it were in order to manage ad breaks. Putting that behind a paywall defeats the purpose of what I'm proposing. You can already build playlists all day long.
The best feature is that it auto-downloads recommended videos, but I hate how finnicky it is, and I hate how it's capped at 1080p.