Techmoan or The 8 Bit Guy?
Hah, I had a tradition of Techmoan over my Saturday morning breakfast for a good while there until his uploads slowed (for valid reasons). Video cards is really one of several people. Never watched 8 Bit Guy but seen his stuff on my feed.
One thing YouTube is “good” at is glomming onto a video topic and beating it into the ground. “Hey, you watched that guy talk about ten failed game consoles, so you want these thirty randos to ALSO tell you about the Ouya, right? Right??”
YouTube on Opera is unusable, but if you switch to private mode its fine. So that’s what i do and have no problems.
For some reason Win7 with chrome doesn’t get ads. I recently upgraded to a 1Gb router and now I remote desktop from my main Win10 computer to a Win7 machine to watch youtube ad free.
This might be something you know and quite obvious. Apologies if such is the case.
Subscriptions is your friend for a better YT experience. Over the years I’ve gatherad (and curated) close to 300 channels. When I hit YT, the first thing I do is click subscriptions in the column on the left and the algorithm can go and bother other users.
BTW, The past few weeks main Google has become almost unusable. The return of a search now starts with Gemini trying its best - and failing. Then there are tons of links with pictures, but I didn’t do an image search. Thanks to Tom’s hardware (and I guess others, too), there’s an easy bypass to return Google search to its former glory (?), i.e. just listing what the SEOs managed to get to the top, and nothing else.
It’s blissful. Link.
I use subscriptions for some favorites. I don’t really have 300 people I’m committed to watching though. Probably closer to 20. I use the general feed/suggestions to fill the gaps.
AI free Google search
https://udm14.com/
I switched to duck duck go.
IF you go to https://4get.nadeko.net/ you can try out different search engines from the menu
Also, Invidious has been working more reliably recently
Anyone know how to PERMANENTLY close the annoying little box that just started, this week, offering me a subscription, first two months free? I can hit “dismiss” and close it, but it opens again later in the video.
I’ve been using Firefox for ten years, now; absolutely trouble-free, first on win7 and now on win10. I think there are programmers there who are in a battle with YouTube’s crappy advertising policy. I’ll get YT’s “adblockers are against our policy” screen every few months, usually just a few iterations, and then it will vanish for another few weeks or months - I assume because someone at ublock who hates their greed as much as I do stomps them down. Once upon a time
their old model that was a short ad at the beginning and another at the end, then I could skip both and so were not too onerous, because I expected to pay (for some value of “pay”) for the entertainment I consumed. When they began to drop ads into the middle of the vids at random, it was VERY annoying, esprcially when I had one of the long music videos playing for background, and got multiple drop-ins. At that point I channeled my inner Bugs Bunny: “You know this means war!”
Dan
A slight hijack, but it’s a big, long running thread: deep fake ads on YouTube.
So, I kept getting ads for a clearly scam product – an ill-defined AI investment that will transform my £200 to £14,000 in a week. (I’d be mad not to invest!)
A couple of things stood out for me:
Firstly, it was just a bit weird seeing this stuff with a “YouTube sponsored ad” below it – clearly YT does no due diligence both in allowing these ads in the first place but also not taking it down after weeks of reporting it.
Secondly it was a deep fake, and a pretty good one. It showed three well-known and trusted british celebs talking about how they had invested in the platform. When I tried to google this scam with the name of the celebs, nothing came up, and cGPT informed me that often these scams involve making many versions of the video to make it harder to google and trace.
A pretty interesting development I thought with this kind of scam.
Well, if you asked me to list 100 I couldn’t do it. I just started many years ago because I was tired of trying to find stuff I had checked out before - since YT’s search function clearly doesn’t work. And over time it just accumulated. Not having to suffer ads helps. I can easily watch 1-2 hours of new quality content every day. It’s quite obvious if I have watched two vids by Carwow, because I’m curious about some new models, the algorithm will start spamming me with car related stuff. So I turn to my subscriptions, knowing that if I check out one video by Rick Beato and one by Adam Neely, I’ll get flooded with music stuff.
Which I linked to above, albeit in a more roundabout way.
Emergency over - The little box has vanished, and I’m going to assume it was ditched due to ublocks efforts! Yay!
Dan
It’s still there for me today
Got Firefox? Got ublock?
Dan
Well, now this is appearing, despite updating uBlock lite again.
Not to hammer this too much more, but do you have Firefox? If you prefer whatever your current browser is, you could still keep Ff in the background and turn it on when you want to watch YT.
TBH, I really don’t know how much of my good effect to attribute to Ff, but the combo works for me.
Dan
Dan
Thanks for hammering it some more, I was getting it on my Firefox (which I don’t regularly use) but I reinstalled Firefox and now I don’t get the notice there, while still getting it on Chrome. Here’s hoping it lasts!
Gratefully,
QtM
Between Firefox and UBlock Origin (and to a lesser extent, SponserBlock and a PiHole) this has been a non-issue for me personally. If it wasn’t for this thread, I still even know this has been an issue. Though I do see the ads when I use my phone and TV…which is why I rarely, if ever, watch youtube on my phone or TV.
My pleasure, and thanks for the reply. I neglected to mention that I do reinstall Ff and UB occasionally.
Dan