Ever since around 2017, I have not visited (or even seen) the contemporary Youtube site.
I had been using a combination of Invidious and yt-dlp (youtube-dl).
Just within the last year or two, Google has been making efforts to obstruct these tools. This can most clearly be seen with Invidious, currently suffering from a generic “This helps protect our community” error message.
It has got me thinking that Google might eventually succeed in extinguishing these islands of safety that I’ve so enjoyed.
People who still use raw, unmitigated Youtube today; how much of a hellscape has it become?
Ah, no idea about live streams as I don’t watch those. I would imagine they have a different format for those as two ads every 2 to 5 minutes wouldn’t work for those.
Now that I think about it, it may be because I don’t have an account so maybe google has less data to harvest and sell and so I get more ads. Unfortunately they might think that this would make me think “I should make an account” or “I should buy youtube premium”. Instead, I just think I need to avoid that place as much as possible.