Based on recent reports, YouTube is actively restricting access to Premium accounts created through VPNs and cracking down on users accessing Premium content across different regions. According to user discussions, YouTube now detects and blocks VPN connections when attempting to stream Premium content[1][2].
Some key impacts:
- Users report being unable to play YouTube Music through Sonos speakers when using a VPN, with the service becoming accessible only after bypassing VPN connections[1:1]
- Premium subscribers attempting to access content from different regions than their subscription face connection errors and service disruptions
- The restrictions appear to be part of YouTube’s broader strategy to enforce regional content licensing and subscription terms
The crackdown coincides with YouTube’s increased focus on Premium subscriptions, including showing longer unskippable ads to free users in 2025 to drive Premium adoption[3].
Fuck me if I want to securely access stuff on hotel wifi I guess?
As far as YT & Google et al, I don’t participate. A good while back, I tried to promote some of my music on YT. The experience was… terrible afaic. I used to use YT for tutorials, but there is no way I’m going to jump through all their hoops and endure back to back, un-skippible ads, to find out that the tut is shit. Screw that noise.
Reddit has been silently rejecting accounts that sign up with a VPN for quite some time now. If you make an account using a VPN, an alias email, using a hardened Firefox, and all the blockers, you can expect that your account will be shadow banned almost immediately. So, as long as Reddit front ends work, I’ll still use it as a resource…for now.
I foresee that private forums will become a thing again where people of like minds congregate and exchange info, expertise, ideas, content, etc. They were once quite popular but people gravitated to these multi billion dollar corp owned social media outlets because it was the next best thing, and now the other shoe has dropped.
I feel good, that I have never depended on YT… I don’t pay them, I don’t watch ads, and I use other services too, and own my films and music… It’s nice - especially when reading posts like this.
at this point i’m using invidious almost exclusively now.
youtube keeps insisting that i use an account at all.
Of course, for the same reason streaming services block it. They don’t want to risk account sharing.
This doesn’t seem newsworthy but more along the lines of “yeah that makes sense.”
LOL this is insane we should switch to Rumble and other alternatives other wise we are fucked.
I think rumble is similar. You’re only allowed to use it if trump is your god.
Every time YouTube raises the price of Premium or messes with their ad-model, it raises the value of blocking ads! 😊✨️
I do value my adblockers very highly, and I blocks ads in the browser, via DNS on my home network, and on my rooted phone too. Every time I access the internet on a device that isn’t mine, I’m blown away with how bad it is.
Every time I access the internet on a device that isn’t mine, I’m blown away with how bad it is.
Sometimes my friends will ask if I can take a look at their computers because it’s not working as expected or something is definitely wrong. I am always blown away by all the ads and crap all over the screen. It’s like going to a porn site. I always ask ‘How the fuck do you do this?’ At the very least, install an adblocker. Sometimes I’ll just go ahead and install UBlock, but there’s an issue with doing that. Ublock Origin has a little bit of a learning curve. You actually have to put in a little work before it really works optimally for you. I find that people are not willing to do the work.
I just set my VPN to Albania. No ads and I don’t have to give YouTube any of my money.
Good but at best a temp solution.
YouTube is trash. I was watching a cooking video, and I swear, after 60 seconds of ads, the YouTuber talked for maybe one whole minute before it went to ads again with a 60 second timer.
For the first time ever today I deliberately watched some shorts. It was so much worse than I expected. Thank TFSM for blocking shorts with ubo.
Wait, are you a pastafarian or a satanist?
I am pretty sure the video uploader controls when ads play. So that seems less of a platform issue and more of a “that specific channel” problem.
I’m not sure. There have been times where I thought, this would be the perfect place for an ad break. And lo and behold… ad break. Sometimes they get cut off mid sentence and I think, either it’s automated, or maybe you’re right and they got a say but didn’t specify enough ad breaks so one was inserted semi randomly…
Per their support page, videos over 8 minutes long can have mid roll ads. They can be manual, automatic, or a combination.
If ads were placed that closely together on a video longer than 8 minutes, the creator either did that manually or did not care enough about their audience to check what automatic ads got placed.
Not necessarily: https://x.com/JennyENicholson/status/1933160322048942558
Yeah, YouTube will insert ads but never THAT close to the last one unless they play back-to-back.
Thanks Youtube, once more showing why Peertube is better!
Does anyone actually upload to peertube though? I mean my “recently uploaded” is a few videos from days ago and then from weeks ago
I tried once. For some sites I couldn’t even register, at the rest I couldn’t upload anything.
Checked to confirm, having 22 Peertube instances integrated to Grayjay (platforms aggregator) so not necessarily one communicates with the other, and filtering the contents from the Home tab just by Peertube instances, and indeed most stuff is months old at best.
However, least for tech content creators, it seems to thrive. Also, if lack of contents is a problem but the person sees potential in the technology, I’d invite the given person to also help producing contents for there. Like the saying goes, if you want change, be the change.
And also, the more content a platform has, the more inviting it is to others. Expecting it to be as big as youtube but much quicker and organically is a first step to regret, I think.
I mean, there’s Patreon, but that’s American. It’s in San Francisco in California though, which is at least not Trumpland. But with how things are headed, I’d be cautious.
Liberapay exists, but it uses Paypal, which is even scummier than Visa and Mastercard. Uses Stripe too, which is Irish-American (HQ in both countries).
If there’s a FOSS decentralised* Patreon alternative that would support Wero, cash, and Monero, I could foreseee that having a ton of potential.
* with the HQ of development or whatever being in a country that’s resistant against censorship.
Peertube will take off more when you can make money from it. That’s why people still stuck with YouTube. Money
Well, since Peertube won’t get ads, I don’t see that happening soon. YouTubers will have to get used to asking for donations and setting up donation accounts.
…or another solution is cryptocurrencies but that is not very reliable.
Maybe in the future, until now not a real alternative by content. For users which want to watch music vids of their favorite band or vids from prefered science channels, movies, etc. it’s not an valid alternative, nor for authors which want to monetize their content. Last prefer Bandcamp, Vimeo, Odysee and other.
It won’t become an alternative if we don’t move. I think PeerTube can actually work regarding monetisation - having a decentralised Patreon alternative would help along, for example.
Vimeo is alright, but it’s US-based. I don’t trust far-right censorship to not creep up there.
Odysee is good design-wise, but it’s full of hatred. Also, situated in the US.
Bandcamp, also situated in the US. No thanks.
Yes Odysee is also used by right wings, same as YT or others, In Odysee you find all kind of content and political spectrum. It remain in the same, Bandcamp is for music the best alternative also fair with the creators, it’s a good measure to listen most content for free and a optional paid download of tracks or the whole disk, not given in YT. There you can only legal download an video with an premium account and where the money goes to YT, not to the artist as in Bandcaamp. I only hope that the EU offers more alternatives to YT, but until now there is no other as using the less evil alternative and Bandcamp and Odysee are.
Unfortunately YouTube Premium doesn’t solve any of the horrendous problems YouTube has. Using a third party client is the only thing that does.
YouTube premium provides high bitrate and no ads. It is only worth it for tv set up tho.
I like that it comes with YouTube music. That is the one thing I like about premium.
The problem here is the lack of a current alternative. As others here have mentioned, peertube might be a future alternative, but I can not help but feel that only fairly ideological people like myself would be interested (in the sense of dropping youtube on privacy grounds). I can’t see “normies” moving elsewhere. That said, maybe a good alternative doesn’t require mass uptake. I mean Lemmy seem pretty cool, albeit I haven’t been here very long at all (like a day lol, although I have lurked for sometime).
Nebula seems promising. It’s reasonably priced and because they charge money there are no ads. I can afford it while I can’t afford the amounts people ask for on Patreon. But I don’t know whether it can scale up while paying the creators enough and keeping the price to users low.
Just had a look - $6 a month, based in NYC. Definitely better than giving YouTube money, for now at least. They say they have a 50/50 profit sharing model with creators - profit presumably is after salaries (including bonuses?) have been paid, so it’s not clear exactly how much of your subscription does in fact go to the video creators. Still, a better option than YouTube, if only to support competition.
You’ll come to see this is like the Donald for left wingers.
Constant downvoting of dissenting opinions with no discussion.
Linux shilling will be everywhere too.
I haven’t had that experience at all and I’ve been here for years. Maybe you’re lurking in the wrong subs.
Come on, that’s why we have yt-dlp and yt-dlp GUI. Who even uses YouTube on the website anymore?
That won’t magically work around IP blocking.
Just install uBO/use Brave and you don’t need Premium.
Dont use brave, use uBlock Origin and Firefox.
Or FreeTube on Desktop.
For mobile, NewPipe or one of its forks, e.g. PipePipe for SponsorBlock too.
You’re very brave to make such a suggestion around here.
You don’t need Premium anyway. For the cost of an YT Premium account you can use Netflix, Rakuten or any other paid streaming service with less money, or even for free in PlutoTV, or channels of public TV of every country, where you can watch movies, documentals, Series, etc for free, without ads. The greed and policy of YT will be its end sooner or later. Ads always can be avoided, uBO, even uBO Lite, Adguard and several others are working fine in YT.
I stopped paying for YouTube when they started cracking down on free users, and stopped using them pretty much entirely. It was hard though - even though I have Netflix, I always found it easier to find interesting and informative things to watch on YouTube than Netflix. I’d watch YouTube several times a day, whereas with Netflix I usually spend about 10 or 15 minutes scrolling through their god-awful UI before closing it and finding something else to do.
At least in the EU almost every public TV has an online channel with movies, series, documentals, entertainment, live and/or on demand, all for free and without ads, similar in Pluto TV
Spanish public TV
German public TV
More
You can add arte, too.
Fuck YouTube. Only thing I still like about it is the ability to find how-to videos on it.
I search the Video with Andi and watch it there in the search result.
What is “Andi”?
