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Show HN: Firefox add-on to open YouTube videos in alternative front ends (github.com)

333 points by d3vr ↗ HN
YouTube started blocking me because I use an adblocker. So I made this simple Firefox Add-On (haven't made it cross-browser yet, contributions welcome!) to open videos in alternative front-ends (piped.video by default).

Default keybinding: Alt+J to reopen current page in the configured frontend.

Shift+Click to open any video in a new tab in the configured frontend.

You can change the default frontend to something else if you like.

134 comments

[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 195 ms ] thread
aftergibson
What does this do differently to Privacy Redirect? https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/privacy-redir...
ericra
Well, for one, the addon you linked has not been updated for over 2 years. This doesn't speak to the substance of your question really, but ad-blocking is a whack-a-mole game. Resources need to be constantly updated to keep up with companies' efforts to thwart them.

It's always nice to see new efforts in this space.

elashri
This addon seems not to be updated in years. I would like to mention LibRedirect [1] which offers more front ends for more websites and seems more actively developed [2]

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/libredirect

[2] https://github.com/libredirect/browser_extension

username135
+1 for libredirect
ploum
I also use libredirect but it has this annoying bug where the reddit redirect will randomly stop working and the only way to solve it is to completely uninstall the extension (not only disabling) then reinstall.

But I can’t stand anymore to be on Twitter or Medium so it is a must. I also use it for Youtube, stackoverflow.

I’m a bit confused by the current project because there are litteraly tenths of Youtube->invidious/alternative frontend and I don’t understand why this one is different.

rglullis
> reddit redirect will randomly stop working

One of the goals from https://github.com/mushroomlabs/fediverser is to mirror reddit discussions into different Lemmy instances. This coming week I'm planning to work on the part that lets you connect your reddit account to a respective Lemmy instance and migrate your posts. Would you like to try it out?

ploum
I don’t have a reddit account nor a lemmy one but good luck, your project is much needed!
jraph
I've been using Privacy Redirect and some of the other generalist redirector extension with quite some success. Privacy redirect also redirects twitter to nitter, reddit to libreddit or old.reddit, Google Maps to openstreetmap and other stuff. Redirects can be enabled/disabled to ones taste. That's quite neat.

Combined with my private invidious instance so I can subscribe to channels without this data leaving computers I control.

May your own extension succeed too. I guess building it and releasing it are already two successes on their own.

kingTug
Are nitter instances still working? I was under the impression that project died when Elon curtailed api access.
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petemir
They keep working with a workaround, by using guest tokens handed out to the Android application. So, until they change the functioning of the app, it will keep working.
Modified3019
I used the official nitter.net instance successfully just yesterday, at least with the limited functionality I cared about.

It’s likely to come and go as they fight an arms race.

koito17
You're probably thinking of libreddit, which indeed shut down when Reddit's API access was shut off. Now most libreddit instances out there either return a 429 error or simply don't exist anymore.

Nitter on the other hand has been doing fine on my end. Instances with heavy traffic, such as nitter.net, do frequently run into rate limiting errors. But if you use relatively more obscure instances, then almost nothing has changed.

SanjayMehta
nitter.cz is still working complete with RSS support.

nitter.nl/net work, but without RSS.

Many of the other instances have become unreliable.

d3vr
Thanks for sharing your setup, might look into that. In my case, the reason I decided to create the extension is that I didn't want to completely leave YT per se, but rather use the recommendations and browse the homepage and actually watch what I want on an alternative frontend.
TaylorAlexander
Is it able to feed user interactions back to YouTube? I want to like and comment on videos I like.
saxonww
Yeah it's a shame these aren't available for Firefox Mobile. At least one of the redirect plugins would be nice.
jraph
I remember reading that firefox mobile is going to allow all extensions? Or maybe it's the case of the version coming from F-Droid?
gear54rus
While we're on the topic of unfucking youtube, do you know how I can turn shorts crappy player without controls into something that I can rewind? Sound volume controls would be nice too.
jraph
Invidious uses its regular player for shorts.
jellyblade
If you're watching on desktop, you can change the youtube video's url path from /shorts/video to youtube's usual ?watch=video and have it play in youtube's regular player. You can also just have an extension do this for you, which is what I do.
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politelemon
On Android you can try NewPipe which serves as an alternate front end.
Shekelphile
Doesn’t libredirect already do this? Though I don’t use it for YouTube so I can’t say for sure
d3vr
Seems like there's a bit of confusion about what the add-on does exactly. It doesn't automatically redirect all YouTube pages you open.

This however gives you the choice to open the pages you want in an alternative frontend.

My use case is basically I browse the YT homepage and Shift+click the videos I want to watch. Or if someone shares a link to a video, I access that page and Alt+J to redirect to the alternative frontend.

Cilvic
Thanks for explaining, but what is an alternative frontend in this case?
d3vr
I've also just updated the README to make it more obvious what the extension does.

The default alternative frontend I have configured is https://piped.video , but you can use any different instance / service if it supports the same YouTube url scheme ({domain}/watch?v=...).

This is configurable in the add-on's options page, you can also access it by clicking on the add-on's icon

Cilvic
Thanks, I've looked at the docs of newpipe and invidious and neither make it straight forward to understand how they work. Both focus on "this is more private than watching on youtube"

It sounds like there is some kind of instance/server which my client/with a cleaner frontend will talk to.

But how does that work and why can youtube not detect it and block it?

d3vr
I wasn't sure myself either, so I looked it up.

- Piped [1] uses NewPipeExtractor [2] (which is also used by NewPipe) to parse YouTube responses. I assume this is somewhat similar to what yt-dlp [3] does ?

- Invidious states in their FAQ [4]: "By default, the video stream is fetched directly from Google's servers (googlevideo.com)".

[1]: https://github.com/TeamPiped/Piped

[2]: https://github.com/TeamNewPipe/NewPipeExtractor

[3]: https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp

[4]: https://docs.invidious.io/faq/#q-what-data-is-shared-with-yo...

ww520
If you open up the browser's Web Developer Tools on the Youtube page and go to the Network tab, you can see all the requests and responses going between the webpage (client) and the servers. The Youtube video segments are downloaded from the googlevideo.com host. These alternative clients basically go directly to the googlevideo.com to download the video segments to play them back.

Google uses DASH as the manifest file for streaming video. Each video has a corresponding DASH file. You can download the DASH manifest XML file from the Youtube page for the video. Then extract video segment URLs from the file. Those typically go to the googlevideo.com host. Google uses WebM as video container and VP9 for video encoding for the video segment, which most browsers support.

Most streaming players (alternative players) use the MSE API (Media Source Extensions) to feed the downloaded video segment data to the <video> tag to play the video. Most browsers support MSE these days.

KennyBlanken
While we're on the subject of youtube annoyances: are there any extensions that disable "ambient mode?"

This infuriating feature provides nothing useful and absolutely murders Apple Silicon GPUs, draining the battery very, very quickly.

d3vr
I remember there was a toggle in the player settings to disable Ambient Mode, have they removed that option ?
RockRobotRock
I have never seen it turn itself back on after disabling it once.
Krasnol
I'm using ublock Origin and have never seen any of those.

For those with ubO who still see them, cleaning the cache and updating the filters within ubO seems to help.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin...

d3vr
I am using ubO too, I just purged the cache and updated the filters, still experiencing the same issue. Maybe YT is still testing this and haven't rolled out the blocking on everyone just yet?
langsoul-com
Go on the unlock origin reddit, they have clear instructions for getting it working.

Basically disable all current ad blockers, including YouTube enhancer ad blocker, reset filters to default, make sure there's no cosmetic filters either. And it should work L.

PH95VuimJjqBqy
with ubO you can tell it to remove elements from a page permanently (every time it's loaded).

I just used the picker, removed the elements, saved it, and haven't looked back.

I also did this with the stack overflow nag.

OscarTheGrinch
Yeah I did this too, but my use case is ordered playlists of songs, and now every video pauses itself after a few seconds.

Gonna try the ublock reset as outlined above, failing that I'll test uMatrix to turn off / lobotomise specific scripts.

Jach
I've yet to encounter these also. I've assumed it's just been luck with the A/B testing.. But perhaps it could also be that I've never allowed doubleclick.net scripts to run in NoScript, or that my ublock-origin setup has taken care of itself, or that because I've actually participated in youtube's other non-premium monetization schemes (channel memberships) from which they take a 30% cut and they want to upset somewhat paying users last.
SushiHippie
As others mentioned: https://libredirect.github.io/ It redirects so many pages to their privacy friendly frontends. Can't use the internet anymore without this extension.
kiliankoe
It's especially helpful for medium posts imho. The alternatives load several orders of magnitude faster.
ksherlock
I made myself a bookmarklet last week to open the current URL with invidious. Not because of the adblocker prejudice (although there were reports, it hadn't hit me yet) but because YouTube was increasingly unable or unwilling to play videos.

As a side benefit, invidious can block comments and related videos so it's a better experience.

javascript:window.location=%22https://[your favorite invidious implementation]/watch%22+document.location.search

ryandrake
It would be nice if browsers were able to get around all these kinds of shenanigans directly, instead of having to always reach for extensions and addons and endlessly participate in this cat and mouse game. After all, the browser is supposed to be the user's agent. Its job is to do what the user wants and fetch the content that the user asks for.

Somewhere along the path, we've made a terrible turn and allowed the browsers to become agents of the web developers instead, gatekeeping on behalf of web sites, rather than serving the user's interests.

My ideal browser would load up a site like YouTube, and, knowing my already-configured preference for ad-free, minimalist layout, would present it as a Craigslist-style list of links with thumbnails, ignoring the mess of JS and CSS that the site's developer futilely sends.

drdaeman
> Somewhere along the path, we've made a terrible turn

It was a variation of Eternal September that caused it. ;)

The majority of users became non-technical, so the focus had shifted as browser vendors needed to cater to different audiences.

tgv
Not needed, but could. Google simply exploited that possibility, from the start.
paulryanrogers
My ideal getaway car would include an automated drone which flies into the store to exfiltrate the codes from the prepaid cards, and present them as credits in my phone, ignoring the mess of walking inside, paying, and typing into my phone that the retailer futilely demands.
whelp_24
This analogy isn't even close.
Mindwipe
Indeed, it's exact, not just close.
anon_cow1111
I don't think firefox could reasonably do this, just because a significant part of their funding comes directly from google.

And maybe more relevant, having this be default behavior would just cause the cat-and-mouse to get worse, when the majority of users are now blocking it with no effort, and the bean-counters notice the ad impression numbers suddenly dropping.

PH95VuimJjqBqy
this is true from a practical standpoint.

It's like an adult watching a child's idealism and knowing the child is right.

I'm not calling the OP a child, I'm saying the OP is right and the world sucks.

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atleta
Lookig at it source (the page downloaded when you open a YT link pointing to a video), it's almost certain that YT doesn't load without JS. It's not an html page with some extra functionality implemented in JS, it's a web app that builds the web page you see from JS.

So firefox can't do much about it without actively trying to circumvent YT and YT specifically.

I don't think browsers made the turn you mention. It's more like browsers became more and more capable and web developers made use of it. Sometimes it's annoying because most websites are not websites anymore but apps (GUIs) that run in the browser and some of the web sites/apps people use could never work without it. Sure, we could all deploy those apps onto our machines (or have them deploy automatically in a sandbox) and there were actually technologies that did just that (think java web start or whatever the name ended up being) but they lost to what we have now: running these apps in the browser.

Also, you can't have an ad-free experience if the price of using a service is that the ad is delivered to you. On YT you can buy a subscription and you'll see no ads. But sure, most sites don't offer this.

mandmandam
> Also, you can't have an ad-free experience if the price of using a service is that the ad is delivered to you. On YT you can buy a subscription and you'll see no ads.

Just to be very clear, those are not the only two possible options.

YouTube - and Facebook, Google, Whatsapp, etc - are extraordinarily simple concepts. We don't need private corporations running them for profit. In fact, it's turning out really bad for us.

yakshaving_jgt
You're welcome to build an alternative and claim their kingdom.

The reason that hasn't happened yet is because whether or not you find YT an extraordinarily simple concept, the execution is tremendously difficult.

littlestymaar
The execution being nontrivial is not in fact the main reason why you can't just “claim their kingdom”, their biggest most is by far the network effect, not the technological challenges (which also nontrivial, is far more tractable today than it used to be when YouTube was founded, and even then it still only required 67 employees to build from scratch).
yakshaving_jgt
The "execution" I'm referring to isn't limited to the technical implementation.

I'm not sure why you decided to interpret my comment in the least charitable way.

littlestymaar
Unless you think the initial YouTube team that was acquired by Google had 67 engineers and nothing else, I don't get the point you're making here.

The fact that you can in fact execute (whatever you want to put in this) a YouTube alternative with a team of less than 100 is easily demonstrated by the fact that YouTube used to be this small at some point…

Fnoord
It has happened, claiming their kingdom hasn't happened because of network effect. Not because they're objectively better.
mandmandam
The execution isn't actually that difficult for things like Facebook and Twitter. As pointed out, it's a network effect thing; the same reason Bitcoin is dominant despite there being alternatives that are orders of magnitude better on every metric.

The cost per user to run most of those platforms is in the pennies range. Certainly under $4 / year / user.

Compare that to the cost of leaving our vulnerable minds - our parents and grandparents, or angry loners, etc - to the likes of Ben Shapiro or Jordan Peterson, who YouTube is weirdly obsessed with.

YouTube is a bit more expensive to run, sure... But the total cost is still a tiny fraction of the tax take, were we to fund a free and fair alternative ourselves.

Btw, expecting a fully viable alternative from a single person before you ever start exploring criticism or alternatives is wildly silly, imo.

yakshaving_jgt
As I already replied to an adjacent comment, the execution includes designing in those network effects and maintaining/modifying them over time. It also includes the moderation, marketing, operations, etc. It's literally everything beyond just the idea.

Furthermore, in no way have I stated nor implied that I expect an alternative must be implemented by a single person. I think your least charitable interpretation of my comment is wildly silly.

matheusmoreira
> So firefox can't do much about it without actively trying to circumvent YT and YT specifically.

There's no reason why Firefox couldn't do that.

> Also, you can't have an ad-free experience if the price of using a service is that the ad is delivered to you.

Sure I can, uBlock Origin provides exactly that. They are not entitled to my attention. If they have a problem with that, they can return 402 Payment Required.

asmor
That's excessive scope creep. Adding site-specific workarounds for some sites feels uncomfortable. Who decides what websites get "fixed", and how? That's a great bit to move to addons. Maybe recommend them more visibly instead.

Also, remember how Mozilla is funded.

matheusmoreira
> That's excessive scope creep. Adding site-specific workarounds for some sites feels uncomfortable.

Not to Google and its fellow corporations apparently.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29707078

https://github.com/WebKit/WebKit/blob/main/Source/WebCore/pa...

They have site-specific fixes for their own sites. Instead of fixing their stuff, they fixed the browsers instead. We can obviously apply the exact same strategy to dealing with every single website out there. If a website is broken or generally annoying to use, just fix it by providing a site specific version of the browser.

They don't even need to reinvent the wheel. Port yt-dlp to Firefox. That will fix YouTube and literally every other video website out there. What yt-dlp does should be a core feature of every browser out there. It's that good. uBlock Origin too.

> Who decides what websites get "fixed", and how?

Whoever develops the browser or its extensions. Arguably the whole of uBlock Origin and its filter lists are just databases of site specific fixes. If people can maintain an extremely huge list of advertisers and blockers for every website out there, surely they can maintain something like this.

> Also, remember how Mozilla is funded.

I remember Mozilla has about a billion dollars in the bank. Who cares about their Google funding? I doubt they're gonna drop them anyway. I bet they pay them just to ward off risk of antitrust lawsuits.

progval
Firefox has this kind of workaround too: https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/browser/extensi...
matheusmoreira
Every browser does. I'm arguing they should have even more extensive workarounds for website idiocy than they do now. They're our user agents. Their purpose is to make the consumption of data from remote servers as painless as possible. They should totally fix sites in pursuit of that goal. Whether the sites want to be fixed or not.
atleta
There are a lot of reasons why Firefox or other browsers can't do that, but my claim was that FF (or any browser) can't do it without writing code specifically to get around YT. And this was a response to the parent who said that FF should (and could) simply just ignore the CSS.

> Sure I can, uBlock Origin provides exactly that.

Obviously, I meant that it doesn't work financially so there is no point being upset about it. If enough people block the ads then they'll do something about it. Actually it's not hypothetical anymore, I just started to see these warnings a few days ago. (I wasn't deliberately blocking the ads, I've been just using ghostery which, it seems, started blocking YT ads.) So yeah, in the end, as you also say, people in general can't consume ad supported services without paying with their attention. It just doesn't work business wise.

Fnoord
If youtube-dl (or its successor) can do it; so can a browser (extension). Whether the browser should natively allow this I leave up to the browser devs.

> Also, you can't have an ad-free experience if the price of using a service is that the ad is delivered to you. On YT you can buy a subscription and you'll see no ads. But sure, most sites don't offer this.

Websites have various models: non-profit, donation-based, advertising-based, tracked-based. A website like YouTube still has high profit margins as they do tracking as well.

hombre_fatal
What’s the difference between tracking and ad revenue? If you refuse to even let them serve you ads (and won’t pay for premium) what exactly are you contributing to those who create the content that you want? Or is that just the creators’ problem?
Fnoord
Tracking data can be used long-term to profile and manipulative you as well as sell your soul to the devil. Whereas ads are a result of tracking data. If you want to combat ads then you want either no ads or you don't want relevant ads, and you achieve that by avoiding tracking.

One could say: "Google will keep my tracking data secure, because it is in their primary interest to do so in order to be the primary benefactor to their ad revenue." Sure, that holds some merit. Til Google figures a way to circumvent your ad blocker, til Google sells your data to a third party ("partner"), til Google gets hacked (and they were hacked by the NSA).

Data is a toxic asset; I rather give them nothing. But I do understand then they don't want me as customer. Which is why I do have YouTube Premium. But I pay an equivalent to ~2 EUR/month in Indian rupees to keep my family (especially my children; I got NewPipe x SponsorBlock x Return YouTube Dislike [1]) advertising free. And as much tracking free as possible while still using Android TV (too user-friendly to give up on) thanks to Pi-Hole and strict Google account settings [2].

Anyway, yeah, it is the creators problem. All too often creators do have a Patreon or Onlyfans or whatever, or they 'borrowed' the content anyway. Though they do get a hit, so it might be Google's problem. Cause they still get hosting and platform for free.

[1] https://github.com/polymorphicshade/NewPipe

[2] https://myactivity.google.com

tianqi
I'm not sure you can still "do what you want" because without ads Youtube would not exist.
globular-toast
Where does this idea that YouTube couldn't exist without ads? Not with it's current architecture, sure, but do people really lack the imagination to see a web with videos that aren't served by a monopoly? Peer-to-peer sharing has been around for a very long time and works very well. You can share large content right now with essentially no extra cost (you already pay for bandwidth, you already have storage etc).

The trouble is finding said content. There is a huge conflict of interest due to the most popular search engine also owning the most popular centralised content platform. This should never have been allowed to happen, but here we are.

pmontra
How could that work, given that a web site can change its working every day? Each site can have its passionated circumvention developer that maintains an extension like this. Is it reasonable to expect that each browser can do the same for each website? And is it reasonable to expect it for Google's Chrome?
vorticalbox
I guess in an idea world servers would return only data and browsers would style that data to each yours preferred looks.
pbhjpbhj
It is within Mozilla's reach to spend an extra $200k on compatibility [hacks] for each of the top ten websites. Their CEO could easily take a $2M wage cut and still be overpaid.
RockRobotRock
Go ahead, fork Firefox with extensions pre-installed that disable JS and default settings that disable CSS. See if your idealistic world works in reality. :)
butz
What you just described is "User agent stylesheet" and in theory you could build your own styles for any website which your browser will prefer.
petree
You can use NoScript to disable JS and see how well that works.

But more to the point, yes, a browser is a client, but without the economic incentive of either ads or direct monetization from users, many sites, YouTube included, would simply not work. Storage and bandwith costs money. Unless we decided to somehow fund all of this through some sort of additional tax through the ISPs or governments, ads or subscriptions are a necessary evil.

tgv
Storage and bandwidth cost money, but not $14/month. You can get a server for yourself for that kind of money, and I don't think YouTube has a server per user.
marticode
Producing content also cost money, and producers get a cut of the ads or the subscription.
safety1st
This kind of fantasy microeconomics debate is silly at best, disingenuous at worst. We are talking about a company with $280B in revenue per year and one of the highest profit margins in America. How they spend that money is not connected to what is fair or what makes some kind of logical sense in your head. It's connected to whatever will increase their profits further.

All you are doing is laying down cover fire to support further advances by an abusive monopolist. YouTube's financials don't HAVE to add up. Google owns advertising for the entire Internet! The entirety of YT could be a loss leader just to suppress the growth of streaming video businesses outside of their control, and the Google monopoly would carry on.

petree
Having a loss leader like this is exactly monopolistic behavior though. The fact that Google are trying to make money from it is expected and more fair to their competitors than just having it completely free, and not having ads either.
safety1st
No. Trying to make money is something that all businesses do, not just monopolies. Having loss leaders is also something that many businesses do.

Here are behaviors that are fairly unique to monopolies: raising prices while degrading their product. Many businesses try to do these, but monopolies, who have no significant competition, are more likely to succeed. Sure enough this monopolistic behavior is what Google has just exhibited: by banning people who use ad blockers, they have either degraded their product, or raised the price (from $0 to the cost of YouTube Premium for those users), depending on how you look at it.

They can do this because they are a monopoly.

tgv
Produces receive very, very little. And YT doesn't check content (nor content strikes, BTW), so there's a lot of illegal(ish) content which moves money from producer to leecher. It seems active channels get most of their income from 3rd parties as a result. So there's little reason to place ads as far as content production is concerned.
petree
Sure, it is definitely more expensive than I would like. But you still have the option to watch the ads if you don't like paying a sub. Expecting it to be completely free is unrealistic though.
tgv
Sure, but then the logical step would be to charge producers and get them to charge viewers, either directly or via ads. But we all know that will result in the demise of the platform, so that's a no-no for both youtube and producers.

Your subscription money doesn't go to the producers anyway, or only little of it, so the $14/mo is for a large part Google's profit.

iamjackg
I'm not sure I would say your $14 doesn't go to the creators: they get paid per minute watched when the user has Premium. A while ago Lon Seidman published a video discussing his YouTube earnings, and he mentioned that Premium is actually much more remunerative for creators compared to traditional ads.
BiteCode_dev
Now that DRM are part of the web standards, and TPM are generalized, it's game over.

I predict youtube will escalate this way:

- Pump up aggressive anti ad block measures.

- It will fail, so they will enforce DRM so that they have control.

- It will not be enough, so they will ask to only serve DRM to "trusted browsers".

- And it will not suffice, so the trusted browser will have to run on a trusted OS checked by hardware.

That will work since almost nobody will take the risk to jailbreak their expensive device.

And we will all have lost.

JodieBenitez
> And we will all have lost.

Or we will all be gone elsewhere ?

BiteCode_dev
Who? The people paying thousands of dollars for locked down mac devices they never modify, the ones giving all their data to social network and clicking on ads or the ones sending money to the NPC streamers to watch them licking an imaginary icecream?

HN is the opposite of their market.

_Algernon_
Youtube just isn't valueable enough (in my mind), to get away with that.
BiteCode_dev
The new generation knows mostly the web through jailed devices called "smartphones".

They will have no idea, and just assume that's how things are.

HN bubble strikes again.

_Algernon_
I'm well aware that I'm an outlier here which is why I stated "in my mind". Not sure why you feel the need to write "HN bubble strikes again" except for a lack of reading comprehension or an attempt at trolling.
taway1237
I also assumed that by saying "in my mind" you mean "in my opinion". English is not my first lamguare, but I think this is a reasonable reading?

If you wanted to say "youtube is not important enough for me" then your post reads weird - what is youtube going to get away with? Losing you personally? I think they'll get over it.

Tor3
If the day comes when it's impossible to watch Youtube without ads I'll have to leave, despite how important youtube is for me currently. I just can't watch ads. It's impossible. I don't watch a single TV channel with ads, it's too painful. So, advertisement-supported "moving pictures" (or sound, for that matter - I never listen to radio channels serving ads either) is out of the question, with no exceptions for me personally.
BiteCode_dev
Tv says there are plenty of people who will suffer ads.

Spotify free offer is also proof of that.

ta1243
My understanding is you can pay a relatively small amount and get ad-free youtube. At least google ads. You'd still need sponsorblock.

That said I do like a well designed sponsor. Map Men for example, I'd rather not watch them.

matheusmoreira
Yup. Only way we can possibly win is by writing computing freedom into actual law. Make it literally illegal for them to use cryptography to violate our freedoms. Service providers should be required by law to interoperate with our computers, no matter what software we choose to run. If we reverse engineer their little apps and make free software versions, they should have to suck it up. We used to be able to buy whatever phone, modem or router we wanted and hook it up to the network with no issues. Software should work the same way.
doctor_radium
I'm thinking about a corollary to Net Neutrality (which is allegedly coming back thanks to the new Biden-appointed FCC commissioner) which states that public web sites need to be accessible by the public. I've ranted about this a few times on HN. This isn't about working around bugs and quirks in umpteen different versions of umpteen different browsers, but making sure we don't start actively coding hard stops again: "Your browser is too old" messages, endless Captchas, purposely giving one browser a clearly worse or even unusable experience. Incompetence would be embarrassing but not illegal. Whenever I find the time, I really want to send the FCC a registered mail packet with my proposal and lots of examples of why this is already necessary.

And yes, the web sites will need to suck it up. You can't choose your visitors...which may occassionally be a bot or screen scraper.

kzrdude
It's a lot better if the user-agent is extensible. For one thing, so that users can customize it. But also so that it will not be summarily blocked by websites and networks.
pchangr
DuckDuckGo browser does this by default
cyanydeez
Most of these services just don't exist in that timeline.
loveparade
I don't care as much about the privacy as I care about not messing up my Youtube recommendations. Any time I accidentally click on or hover over some BS video my front page is full of clickbait spam and I need to manually clean up my watch history.

I guess (?) it works for monetization, but the UX of YouTube and their pushing of clickbait content has become horrible over the past few years. I just wish they stopped trying to be "smart" about what I want to watch. I'm already paying for Premium, just give me an option to make Youtube stupid.

_Algernon_
The option for making youtube stupid has always been there. It is called the subscription feed: https://youtube.com/feed/subscriptions

You can hide all the other sections using an extension like UnHook: https://unhook.app/

loveparade
Thanks, I wasn't aware of Unhook. I know the I can use the subscriptions feed, but it doesn't solve all problems. When I open YT on my phone, or on my TV, I still get blasted with recommendations and clickbait. When I search for a keyword I get relevant results interspersed with clickbaity content (similar to Google SEO spam), and so on. This problem permeates the whole YT experience because the business model is maximize engagement metrics and ad view time at all costs.

Unhook looks good indeed, I guess I am just a bit frustrated that I need external extensions, many of which are linked in this thread, and hacks to fight against services that try to monetize my attention. Especially when I already pay for them.

zeta0134
I've long since blocked the recommendation content. No sidebar, no end-of-video overlay, no homepage content at all. Just a search box, thanks. (And even that's gotten functionally useless over the years; external search engines are much better at finding that one video I remember seeing but can't seem to convince YT proper to actually show me.)

Then again, I curate my subscriptions. Nobody I follow posts more than once every couple of weeks or so. Most days my subscription page looks the same as it did yesterday, so when I do have a new video to watch it's more like a rare treat.

pbhjpbhj
The algorithm just seems really blunt. You like a video on one category and then your entire feed becomes that category, it's not mixed into the other 100 categories of video you've liked.

Like you said, I'm sure this works for engagement, but it's pretty evil. I know they don't care about being evil anymore; but it's still annoying.

wildrhythms
Certain 'categories' of Youtube videos is like dropping a nuclear bomb in your suggestions. Even accidentally clicking on it and immediately going back will poison the well. I have to go into my watch history and delete, and then spend days clicking 'three dots > Not interested' on the horrific thumbnails until Youtube stops recommending that category. I call it tending the garden.
Krssst
You can disable autoplay of videos on hovering in your YouTube settings. I disabled it and hovered videos stopped being added to my watch history.

https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/130441859/how-to-d...

Edit: not sure if the above page is up-to-date. On my side the setting is in "Settings - Playback and performance - Integrated playback" (setting name could be different, my interface is not in English so I translated the entry names)

marttt
For a few years, I've been using the Redirector add-on [1] to redirect Yotube URLs to various Invidious instances. No ads, and easy to tailor the visual experience to your needs.

Here's my Redirector rule:

  Youtube
  Redirect: https://www.youtube.com/*
  to: https://invidious.protokolla.fi/$1
  Hint: Youtube > Invidious instance redirection
  Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hipBryeDc0E → https://invidious.protokolla.fi/watch?v=hipBryeDc0E
  Applies to: Main window (address bar)
As a parenting control trick, I also use Redirector to direct some of the more immersive gaming sites to about:blank for our 10yo son. Definitely proud of that hack, ha.

1: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/redirector/

redder23
The issue is that Invidious only supports 720p
kaliqt
What's preventing them from going higher? Also I think Invidious sorely needs UX updates to help make it easier to avoid having to go to Youtube.
tuan
Hmm I installed invidious yesterday and was able to watch 1080p. Maybe you need to update to the latest.
gpgn
I saw the popup just once, I updated most of the filters used by uBlockOrigin and I haven't seen it since.
amir734jj
I use YouTube to watch videos of news uploaded on their YouTube channel like CNN and NBC and etc, I'm wondering what's the YouTube alternative for me?
karaterobot
I just use the FreeTube desktop client, because even if you get around the anti ad-blocking stuff on YT, you're still left with the increasingly terrible UX. No doubt they'll block FreeTube and Invidious sooner or later, but until then I don't even need to worry about the Youtube website at all.