Why do this? Because surveillance capitalism wants you to be less free. It wants you to be glued to the screen. It wants you to buy whatever advertisers want you to buy. But you can fight back by deliberately poisoning your data.
Why do this? Because surveillance capitalism wants you to be less free. It wants you to be glued to the screen. It wants you to buy whatever advertisers want you to buy. But you can fight back by deliberately poisoning your data.
What’s the tl;dr for people that don’t want to navigate to YouTube?
Don’t engage with algorithms, especially ones trying to sell things, like major corporate social media.
Pretend to be something you’re not, especially vulnerable targeted populations. This lowers their ability easily target minorities.
In my life, I was Noel Gruber who worked at Taco Bell in Uranium City, Saskatchewan. But in my dreams I played a different role. I was Monique Gibeau in post-war France! A hooker, with a heart of black charcoal.
So the fact that I occasionally get ads in Spanish, despite being a native English speaker in a mainly English-speaking country, means I’m doing something right?
I would say so. You can also intermittently make a new profile, and seed it initially with wildly different personal info and interests.
It is a good practice to restart independent accounts and not reuse them on multiple devices.
You can also silo types of information, like location, personal stats, email, browsing history, web searches, chat services, calls, etc.
deleted by creator
If you’re on android, you can use an app like NewPipe to view YouTube content without actually going to YouTube. https://f-droid.org/packages/org.schabi.newpipe
On a browser, you can use an invidious instance like https://yewtu.be. That also lets you view YouTube content ad free without signing in.
Doesn’t work when using a vpn
I read “if you’re An android”, and was very confused for a second.
Pipepipe supersedes newpipe doesn’t it? That’s what I’m using anyhow.
Never heard of it. I’ll check it out though!
invidious instances never work for me, but with this one i could get further than ever, but when trying to play a video i get this error: “The media could not be loaded, either because the server or network failed or because the format is not supported.”
what could this be?
YouTube is actively blocking Invidious and other proxies and bots for the past couple years or so. Additionally, for some reason some Invidious instances consistently don’t work for me, while other ones consistently do, which probably indicates connectivity issues between me and them.
Frankly, if YouTube works for you directly, I’m gonna advise using it via NewPipe and various desktop apps, as Invidious instances could be easily overwhelmed, what with them being hosted by individual volunteers. Video traffic is heavy.
thank you object and slempt for your feedback. so investigating yewtu.be does work on desktop without any problems, but on my iphone it depends on which browser and dns blocker i use. can anyone recommend a good newpipe substitute for iOS?
Try looking through those listed on Alternative To. Not all of them are really YouTube players, though.
I get that sometimes too. Here are some other instances to try if you haven’t already:
https://invidious.nerdvpn.de/
https://inv.nadeko.net/feed/popular
This firefox extension will automatically redirect you to alternative frontends for a few different services:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/libredirect/
I second this. If you get a response can you please let me know?
A response is in! :)
Thanks OP.
Best I can do is AI generated transcript: https://pastes.io/if-i-told-