Youtube is now unusable without a frontend
I have an extension that can individually disable all the most useless/addicting components of the Youtube site, such as shorts and whatnot. On the search page, I have turned on:
hide Shorts
hide For You
hide Trending
hide 'People Also Searched For'
hide Search Categories
hide Promoted Videos
hide Promoted Websites
hide Suggested Products
Do you know what Youtube has started doing? They are now inserting engagement slop DIRECTLY into the search results, as seen in the image above. It's literally a short, yet it's inserted like a video so you're forced to see it. The only possible way to remove it is by using a privacy frontend, as even on incognito mode, Youtube will look at the three videos you've watched and start inserting shit based off that.
Louis Rossman is right, they all have rapist mentalities... "just let me stick it in"
I’ve noticed that the search results are getting less and less relevant to what I’m actually looking for. I guess one day the search bar will disappear like the headphone jack of the iPhone.
It's the future, year 2025....
Just unplugged from work when I feel a buzz in my forehead and my neuralink pushes new order details straigt into my retinas.
It's another deep dive job. Without hesitation I accept the job since I'm low on prime points. Head back to my office and plug myself back in. Get more details from the job file, seems to be some obscure shit again...
Turn on my cooled chair that prevents my body from overheating during a deep dive. I sit in the chair and start the process.
Thousands and thousands of mind numbing click bait videos speed past me as I weave through them in the metaverse. I'm multiple hours into the dive with no results, and I can feel my body start failing. I should pull out, but the prime points are too tempting, and I'm already so deep, it has to be around here somewhere.
My vision flashes red as my neuralinked dive chair is giving me warnings about my body failing, and just as im about to pass out... There it is, I gotcha... Grab the link and pull out as fast as I can.
Wake up a few hours later after my chair managed to get my heart going again. Scramble through my memories for the link, and there it was. I inform the customer that the matching video has been found and I am awaiting payment... The money is wired to me instantly and I sent them the LINK through neuramail.
Searching YouTube isn't easy these days... But it pays good..
That was some William Gibson shit
that was amazing
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
LINK
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
LOL, brilliant adaptation!
They're so brave.
they are screwing it on purpose to make room for their AI
That sounds familiar. Remember when we used to watch TV?
Oh that thing where in between the ads you can watch low quality reality shows for a few minutes? Yeah, those were the days…
tried watching a stone cold steve austin show once and had to stop because literally every 4 minutes there were ads. unwatchable
And then there are the recaps you get every now and then. People making these shows know that most viewers aren’t even really actively watching. It’s just background noise you put on while cooking or doing household chores. When you go to a movie, there are no recap, because the director expects to have your undivided attention at all times.
4 mins? Is that an hyperbole? Oo
not sure but it felt like it
Goodness gracious ._.
I agree with him on right to repair and other rights issues but I can’t stand the guy. He’s incredibly abrasive and annoying. I’m interested in people who have interesting things to say. Long, angry rants about stuff I already agree with are just a waste of my time.
I feel this, to an extent. I rather like the guy, I like what he stands for (for the most part, I don't agree with his stance on at-will employment), but I don't generally watch his videos for the same reason; angry preaching to the choir. I already agree, it's mostly a waste of my time to watch.
I loved Rossmann, but he made a sharp turn to reactionary politics and selfish ideology about the time he really took off. His views on just about anything outside of right to repair are usually so far from right as to be entirely wrong. He also has this idea that because he’s good at repairing things, he must have great takes on everything, and started making so many ridiculously terrible politics videos it became almost impossible to find actually useful content. He’s a smart dude, but like many smart dudes, he’s an idiot in most ways outside his specialty.
It's not that it's broken by default, it's that it's broken deliberately. They don't want you to just be able to find what you need and then leave, because that's the civilized way of doing things, and they are GREEDY FUCKING BARBARIANS.
Deliberately broken by default?
Broken As Designed is generally broken by default, yes.
Youtube search results have been garbage for a while now :(
YoutubeGoogle search results have been garbage for a while now :(Youtube Googlesearch results have been garbage for a while now :(What I have noticed is that if you add “before:2025” (or any other future date) it doesn’t show the unrelated stuff.
Good trick. Ordering by most recent also tends to cut a lot of trash, but sometimes also removes the good results.
I get nothing. Google is all pissy I turned off history and refuse to use their app. So they refuse to suggest anything.
The upside is no bloat and no ads, just have to know a topic.
positive for me cause I dont want to see their shitty recommendations anyways. I just like/dislike a video to indicate I watched it.
Try piped. Your feed is only what you subscribe to and theres a toggle to hide shorts
Or NewPipe
Or Tubular
Or PipePipe (at the time it was basically Newpipe with comments to me)
The SponsorBlock integration is a major difference from NewPipe
Or FreeTube
Stuck in local
Is it possible to turn recommendations on? I'm fine with those, but I never want to see shorts again.
No I dont think so. Theres a trending page on a feed page
I've tried looking into that but I couldn't get it working. It didn't add any subscriptions to my feed. Going to the site now I don't even seem to be able to click on anything. I just tried disabling my ad blocker and now I can click on stuff, but none of it won't load any videos. Any idea what's up with it? I'd love to be able to switch off YT if I can.
Which instance are you on. I use piped.adminforge.de with uBlock and it works fine. Also the feed shows stuff from my subscriptions (I think I adjusted something in the settings for that).
Piped isn't working for me either anymore. I was using piped.adminforge.de before, but I've tried other instances too without any luck. It won't load play any videos at all. I can search and find stuff without issues, but I can't play anything.
Have you tried to enable only one codec and set the default quality to something like 720p in the preferences?
I used Piped for a while, but it's always broken half the time or incredibly slow, it was giving me an aneurism. Freetube and never looked back
Depends on the instance, it might be down or having work done on it, and also I think there might be some ongoing war with youtube api to keep everything working but im not sure. I just signed up on the kavin rocks one, every couple of days it will be down for a bit but it comes back up.
Is there a YouTube client for iOS? I know, iPhone bad etc, but it’s what I’ve got for now. 95% of the time I’m watching YouTube it’s not on my pc. There’s a Vanced in the App Store but I don’t trust it, especially since Vanced was shut down about 2 years ago if I’m not mistaken…
Ya'll need FreeTube.
Yal'l n'eed t'o lear'n a'bou't apo'str'phe pl'ac'em'en't'.
you can have it too, considering you're on separate instances :P
This boy ain’t right
Rookie numbers! Needs more apostrophes.
It's "y'all" - as in a contraction of "you all."
Holy shit this is incredible. I have wanted a way to permanently hide shorts forever, thanks for sharing. Also it's actually recommended by Mozilla which means it has active security audits on it, impressive.
🦀
1 minute videos aren't put into the shorts interface, so it's not YouTube noticing that you disabled shorts but rather some YouTuber trying to follow the algorithm using a channel they made for shorts and mistakenly (I assume) uploading a video longer than minute on it. All such videos appear as normal videos instead of as shorts.
Google is terrible though, so I understand why you would think that.
My three biggest problems with YouTube are:
It sucks on desktops/laptops with bigger UI scaling enabled, some stuff just doesn't fit.
The search function on YouTube is useless and completely broken. Instead of searching normally it:
Repeats same results multiple times;
Display unrelated Shorts nobody asked for;
Instead of displaying relevant results it shows stuff you have already watched or picked by YouTube algorithm.
You can't skip sponsored segments with YouTube Premium. You need SponsorBlock browser extension for that.
Firefox, uBlock Origin, on a Linux Desktop. I have none of these problems and have filters to hide shorts, endcards, autoplay, ambient mode. And I block all cookies from Youtube/Google. Works perfectly.
I'm working towards a Linux distro instead of windows. Until I get there it's Firefox, unblock on a desktop with mullvad VPN. Set the vpn location to Albania for no ads.
Kubuntu is very friendly, it's my daily. Try Mint if you want easier.
just an fyi it's userstyles.world now. The .org is dead.
This is the way. And I might add, Unix desktop. Let's not start bikeshedding between FOSS Unix distributions out of dogmatic reasons (I'm sure you didn't mean to specifically single out "Linux" here, but I wish we would stop opposing "Linux" and other Unixes like BSD, Illumos, etc).
The point is, voting with your data for software that is defending your interests, and respecting your rights.
Edit: Dang, I didn't expect to get so much slack for "Unix as opposed to Unix-Like". I absolutely meant "Unix-Like", but my point is that it shouldn't matter. Most software is trying to be compatible, these days, and Linux isn't (in spite of all that marketing material) an OS. It is a kernel. So semantics for semantics, can it even be compared to something it is not? I merely tried to be inclusive.
This is a weird response to me.
Sure man, rock on. ✊
Eh.. OP seems to be talking about their own setup. They probably "singled out" Linux because it's what they use.
I oppose none of those things, but Linux isn't Unix.
(Usually the Unix folks are the ones at pains to point that out.)
It’s not so much opposition rather than other BSDs having almost negligible desktop presence… If we really want to get into semantics, too, Linux is technically not UNIX.
Unusable for me with ads as well. Grey loading screen and choppy audio instead of actually loading ads, never gets to the video. If I reopen the video a few times to skip the ad the video loads fine. No problems with online gaming, streaming services, etc so I know it's their shit Roku app and ad network and not me. Ad blockers make it actually usable.
Their incompetence opens room for other platforms
Oh, we've been through this though. Which other platform will ever have the cash to be a real contender here?
DouYin, you know, the Chinese YouTube
That's sarcasm though, as I expect them to be as malicious as YouTube
Things like freetube seems to be basically a simple yt front-end.
I don't know what happens if a significant amount of yt users used freetube. but that probably won't happen.
I find it a lot more pleasant to use than yt.
I use freetube as well, but I have a feeling that it's just a matter of time before google brings the axe down on it too, especially if it increases in popularity.
Well FreeTube never claimed to be a platform, it's a fantastic front-end for browsing YouTube videos without having to deal with Google's crap, but you're still using YouTube.
Look at what happened with Nitter (alternative Twitter frontend). They'll start changing around things so often that alternative frontends break every few days.
Twitch could. Still wild they don’t allow editing vods or uploading videos.
Dan Clancy has already said that Twitch isn't profitable as it is. Right now, they basically only still exist because of existing contracts, otherwise Amazon would've likely pulled the plug a while ago. They can't handle their current user base; they wouldn't be able to handle YouTube refugees en masse.
They currently allow unlimited vods that are hours long that provides zero revenue. They could disable that and instead allow 30 minutes of edited vods or video uploads and have ads on them to make money
Yeah that's true, and I'm honestly surprised that they've had features like that available for free for as long as they have.
I kind of wonder why they haven't attempted such a pivot already, though, as it seems like they could easily take over the gaming video space that YouTube currently dominates. Much of that audience uses Twitch already and would easily transition over to a more curated platform, so it feels like it should've been a pretty obvious move by now.
Video hosting is a money sink, I wouldn't hold my breath that somebody else comes along.
PeerTube isn't too bad if you're willing to host your own videos as a big creator, and smaller creators can pool resources for smaller instances.
soon google will block ALL forms of front ends
I doubt it as that would break all of the embedded videos on the internet
I get usable results for "Boards of Canada". You've got some personal problems happening.
May I ask the name(s) of these extension(s)? Currently having this issue and that’s why I mainly use MPV to load my music playlist on.
Untrap for Youtube
The same dev also makes an extension that lets you block individual elements for facebook, instagram, leddit, etc. Useful to break a habit
Has been for years already sadly. I recommend https://github.com/user234683/youtube-local to watch directly and https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl to download. They both remove the dark patterns trying to abuse the attention of viewers.
also be sure to disable cookies on youtube, it gets rid of weird suggestions and usually only suggests videos related to the current one
i ran into this kind of garbage the other day looking for a Nicholas Jaar video when i couldn't recall the name. like BoC, there's tons and tons of tracks by Jaar, but results gave me one or two of his most popular tracks and a buuuuuunch of other stuff. i couldn't even just keep scrolling, there were a dozen results and then the "related search" garbage.
ugh, i'm so fed up with google, and at the same time not motivated enough to figure out workarounds. i have work and shit to do around my house.
i guess, with me, they won.
edit typo
Piped. Trust me.
as a boards lover myself, i just have to comment on this, for one, impeccable taste in music.
anyway, i tested this myself, seems fine. Have you tried disabling the watch history bullshit? It even lists a sidebar full of album related shit.
So uh, go off queen ig.
Upvoted for BoC
On a similar note, does anybody know of a frontend or add on for Instagram? I do not want the suggested content and reels they shove down everyone's throats because it is very easy to waste hours and get distracted easily with it. Also no ads would be nice. I have to use Instagram to keep in touch with certain people who I have no alternative means of keeping in touch with.
you're looking for "Instander"! I went on a quest for this myself awhile back
Thanks!
I’ve been using beeper for the last 2 months and it has been working perfectly, I can see as video if someone sends a short, I can listen to an audio recording and see all of my messages without ever seeing the instagram feed.
I disabled History and only see my channel subscriptions. None of the options above appear in my Youtube feed.
Yeah i did this until they make the entire homepage blank if you keep history off. Very annoying.
but why would your homepage not be your sub box
Maybe they don't subscribe
May I suggest NewPipe (Android) or FreeTube (Desktop)
i had history disabled for a while until i realized that it then forgets your progress in longer videos… deal-breaker for me
In fairness, I have no idea what I would want from that search query.
Boards of Canada is a very popular IDM artist, and they're the third result down from the top.
It looks like it's a band name, as the third result is from a channel with that exact name. Idk what the first search result is, but that second one seems vaguely related probably because the guy mentioned it in his silly short
It's indeed the name of a band
Verbatim search terms in results title
Hot and sexy nude planks of Canadian Maple plywood.
I’m really surprised at how bad of an experience people are having! I have a bunch of channels I follow and people I interact with. Some big channels but most small. I love channels with only a few hundred to a few thousand viewers. The creators post their videos and then I talk to them through the comments. We have some really interesting conversations.
Lots of other channels I follow I don’t interact with but still really enjoy. A lot of hobby channels are amazing! I generally avoid the news and politics stuff, though I still occasionally watch Ukraine videos or Trump trial stuff. I get sick of those after one video though!
Yeah, tbh, the insane focus on privacy makes YouTube a lot worse, no shit. The algorithm just throws shit at the wall hoping it sticks, what do you expect?
Make a burner account only for YouTube. See how the quality goes up because you can follow people you are actually interested in.
I personally really don't see the privacy risk with that? (then again, I gave up on the idea of true privacy online years ago. Privacy through obscurity is enough. I don't care big companies recognize my habits, as long as they don't know 100% exactly who I am.)
You can subscribe without an account using third party clients like NewPipe or FreeTube
You can subscribe but you can’t comment without an account. I know YouTube has a terrible reputation for the low quality of comments but that’s exclusively a large channel problem. Small, niche channels actually have decent discussions.
Use pipepipe. You can view comments there.
My method for android & desktop. I never sign in to YouTube & never use the app. Using Joplin synced through Nextcloud (any syncable note taking app would do the trick) I keep a list of channels ("subscriptions") & interesting looking videos ("watch later") which I group by length. Obviously, this way the links can be via Piped, YouTube whatever.
I only ever interract through browser which is never signed in. Kiwi browser on Android, Firefox or Brave on desktop. All of them run uBlock + SponsorBlock + DeArrow.
DeArrow is by the same dev/s as SponsorBlock & gives anti clickbait crowd sourced titles & thumbs. Its become an invaluable tool so I'm glad to have paid to offer some support.
All of the browsers have history/cookies etc cleared once closed.
As a Joplin user, I find it interesting. So you have a "subscriptions" folder and a "watch later" folder? What is your routine?
Nothing sophisticated, I just have a note for videos. The note has headings (use the [toc] trick at the top of the note to jump directly to the headings without having to scroll through everything)
You could categorise video links by genre or whatever your preference. I chose to categorise by length, say up 10 minutes, 11 to 20 minutes, 20 to 30 minutes & so on. So i set up appropriate headings.
Thats it. I also set up a heading for "Audio" as some videos are essentially podcasts, audio based talks etc & Kiwi browser allows background play.
Its a few extra steps over tapping "save for later" in YouTube app but it takes seconds to copy title, copy url & paste into a note & it caters for videos from any source. To remove myself from the shitty algorithm it works for me
Thank you for describing your system. I didn't even know that table of contents were available in Joplin.
Man, I wonder if there will be freetube support for DeArrow that looks great
The damn site tries to crash my browser before showing me what I want
Works for me
I also got very relevant results for that query.
I find most searches will give me the first 3 or videos meeting the criteria roughly followed by a bunch of random stuff that has nothing to do with what I searched
Works fine on yt revanced
Fine for me too
Great band though, you've got good taste
Agree
Cool music taste.
hold up... danTDM?
They are in a endless cycle
In using smarttube on my shield and search works perfectly, and revanced still works on mobile. I never use thd Tube on desktop, is there no good solution on that platform?
Uh, yeah. Use , give search term, go to tab or corresponding functionality.
Why would you use youtube's internal search anyway? It's age-old knowledge that such platforms use algorithms to "engage" (manipulate) you.
You guys still using youtube?
* 21 ALTERNATIVES TO YOUTUBE *
The Internet Archive https://archive.org offers over 1.8 million free movies and over 12 million free videos.
Here are more options. Most are browser-based. A couple require an app.
ODYSEE
https://odysee.com
VIDLII
https://www.vidlii.com/
INVIDIOUS
https://invidio.us
TIKTOK
https://tiktok.com
9GAG
https://9gag.com
BITCHUTE
https://www.bitchute.com
BILIBILI
https://www.bilibili.tv/en
RUMBLE
https://rumble.com
PEERTUBE
https://peertube.tv/videos/overview
NEWPIPE
https://newpipe.net
TWITCH
https://www.twitch.tv
TED TALKS
https://www.ted.com/talks
VIMEO
https://vimeo.com/
VEOH
https://veoh.com/
LBRY
https://lbry.com/
DAILYMOTION
https://www.dailymotion.com/us
UTREON / PLAYEUR
https://playeur.com/
THE OPEN VIDEO PROJECT
https://open-video.org/
STORYFIRE
https://storyfire.com/
DLIVE
https://dlive.tv/
#YouTube #Video #Videos
@[email protected]
TikTok as an alternative to YouTube because of ads and intrusive videos? That's just replacing one poison with a stronger poison.
also, i don't really consider tiktok an alternative
There are twenty alternatives in the list. Did you try any of them?
I added No. 21, DLIVE https://dlive.tv/
Lol TikTok
removedute
Thanks, hope peertube takes off
Alternative to using youtube? I bought a bike recently. Maybe try that.
How about autofellatio or no you're already an expert at that too.
It's usable with the default stuff, well, minus the fucking 5 second ads
Pretty sure my Adblocker already does all of this I still use Youtube about 10% of the time to find new channels Piped provides some suggestions while you watch some Video but it can't replaces YT's homefeed
Has been for a long time
I use YouTube with https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/search-fixer-for-youtube/bojdknokkpgboeonegndfcgkaommhleo
You're using Chrome in 2024 while also browsing Lemmy? Dear God, man. I wish I had your determination and\or powers of ignorance.
No need to be insulting, we are all here to make lemmy great.
I'm sorry, I didn't mean to be insulting. I sometimes find it difficult to find the line before it finds me.
I use what works best for me. I use Lemmy because it's better than reddit. The official Reddit app is just unpleasant to use.
Here's your Firefox plugin: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-suite-search-fixer/
People here won't complain about anything until their favourite youtuber tells them why it's bad.
You sparked my interest, in which way YouTube premium is better than newpipe ?( I'm using the sponsor block version) I mean you won't convince me to give my money to such evil company but I'm curious about what convinced you ...
Some people just don't like the hassle. In my opinion, having had premium and used revanced with sponsorblock, revanced is better.
Yeah I understand it's a personal point of view for me setting up my card and remember to pay is way worse hassle, on the other hand also installing newpipe and learning a new interface it's not that easy ...
I was a YouTube premium family account owner. Paid for myself, my partner and three friends accounts (think it was five slots?)
The recent price hike was too much, so I've been using frontends as of late.
The YouTube premium experience is seamless, much faster than the frontends but at the same time your getting shit shoveled down your throat at every chance.
I've had lots of issues with libretube servers as of late. Pipe pipe is better but overall since I dropped my sub I've been watching far less on YouTube as a whole.
Out of those I mentioned, Newpipe was actually my favourite (LibreTube felt too beta, only used it for a week at most) and I've used it for years. Vanced was great too. But there's always something, like what happened to Vanced for example. I don't know, I felt like I was spending way too much time installing third party apps, trying to get them to work properly after Google's endless shenanigans. Paying them is more convenient / less time consuming.
Good for you, but this is the wrong sub for you then.
You're totally right, I wasn't paying attention to the sub, my bad.
Not good for privacy
Same here. I know we're pariahs for admitting something so obvious, but sometimes the easiest way to get good service is to actually pay for it. Youtube Music alone is worth the monthly sub, since it is VASTLY superior to Spotify.
The problem is that YouTube music is vastly inferior to google play music.
I'm not a fan of services that make themselves worse and then charge you for it.
The paid experience is a decent one, but it isn't the same as service that I want. I want to control what I watch and not be fed what they think I want to watch.
But I don't disagree that paying for a good service is worth it.
Aren’t playlists still broken? I remember shuffle not working, repeating some songs and then going off with unrelated videos before the playlist was even over.
It's amazing how hard some of you work to make YouTube enjoyable. Here's a tip: stop watching YouTube.
The problem is no other platform has that much content. Looking for an obscure scene from an old tv show? It's probably on YouTube. Wanna know more about Brigitte Bardot's career? Someone has a nice channel about her. The fact that the platform sucks amd his own by effing google doesn't change that there is just so much great niche content to be discovered. Hopefully we'll have a fully working foss alternative soon enough. I'll gladly pay for that if the money goes back to creators.
"Literally UNUSABLE!"
Meanwhile 99% of the planet uses it just fine.
1.3T visits in 2023. 100M are paying for premium. They are doing just fine.
No one is stopping you from creating your own video streaming service to suit your needs.
this is such a vapid thing to say. In the first place, yes they fucking are, they kill other people's products whenever they can, second, the telcos are there to guard them, go look up the fee structure for corporate bandwidth from any of those assholes, you wouldn't be able to afford one month of it, and NONE OF IT NEEDS TO BE THIS WAY, it's just a cash grab.
Just fuckin clueless.
Dat delusion...
I don't know anyone that watches YouTube regularly. Seems like such a boomer thing
Do you need help lifting the rock you're living under?
Boomers watch broadcast TV. It's what they grew up with.