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].
just buy adguard it supports multiple device, and can block twitch ads too.
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.
Honestly just need to bring back Usenet newsgroup traffic
Fuck me if I want to securely access stuff on hotel wifi I guess?
Stop giving youtube money, use ublock and revanced.
Not OP but for me I’m fine giving them some money in exchange for me not having to watch any ads while using their services. Just not the amount they want to charge me in my home country. 5€ a month feels fair, 15 does not.
That’s fair, but my code of ethics prohibits me giving money to a corporation that engages in mass surveillance and actively radicalizes young men and women into the alt-right rabbit hole.
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.”
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.
LOL this is insane we should switch to Rumble and other alternatives other wise we are fucked.
There is no fucking way I’m joining rumble.
PeerTube is what he should have said.
I think rumble is similar. You’re only allowed to use it if trump is your god.
Come on, that’s why we have yt-dlp and yt-dlp GUI. Who even uses YouTube on the website anymore?
I just set my VPN to Albania. No ads and I don’t have to give YouTube any of my money.
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.
Not sure what you mean - UBlock Origin works great for me out of the box.
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”?
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.
For me.
This is how we all give Boatracecrook the cold shoulder and leave. The more people they block the better.
Boat race, is cockney rhyming slang for face.
At the very minimum, to protect future generations and our grand children and their children from; the banal, brainless, brain dead, manipulative surveillance.
I have never used Boatracecrook.
I must admit that as a new user on Lemmy, I do take umbrage at all the links to Boatracecrook videos that people feel they need to share and promote.
I trust people to watch the video and give a short written description, not add a poxy link in the avatar image.
I have got caught out more than once clicking on an user supplied avatar and I have been taken to poxy Boatracecrook.
To be honest, I was under the impression that lemmy was different and did not engage in the anti-human practices of Boatracecrook.
I cannot understand why anyone watching a Boatracecrook video, then suddenly decides to add a link for Lemmy users.
Then manipulatively hides the link in the avatar of the post, when the link could be added to the main text body for all to see, and give people a choice if they click on it.
I can only assume this is about self promotion and not about supporting the Lemmy community.
This is a really confusing comment and “boatracecrook” is an incredibly lame insult lol
Thank you glimse
I Know. Lame duck.
I completely messed up my post. I got severely distracted ranting on and on.
Thats the main trouble with getting old.
Forgetting starts slowly, then all of a sudden you are rushed to hospital unable to remember your name.
I was talking about haventgotsacluetube (youtube) and not boatracecrook.
I do hope people will see through my obvious error
You can call it Facebook or YouTube. No evil entity wins if you do, you just make it much easier for fellow community members to understand what you’re trying to say. Your two comments are impossible to track and understand.
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.
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.
Yeah, YouTube will insert ads but never THAT close to the last one unless they play back-to-back.
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).
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.
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.
