There's already a workaround (found, again, here), but I figured I would use this opportunity to tell people that projects like Piped and Invidious exist, which both allow you to watch YouTube without loading their ads, with improved Privacy and (in the case of Piped) even Geoblocking-Circumvention and SponsorBlock out of the box.

They're both great tools, and using something like LibRedirect you can even automatically go to Piped or Invidious when clicking/opening a YouTube link (and more).

Both don't load ads, but unless changed in the settings Individous may still make connections to Google/YouTube to load the video(s) themselves.

Bit of a shameless plug for these projects, but I figured this is a really good time to show these projects as I often see people asking what they are in threads on here

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[–] forensic_potato@lemmy.world 173 points 1 year ago (9 children)

I'd like to add to the sentiment of this post by saying that if you ever used any of those amazing websites, I'm sure the developers will highly appreciate it if those with the means could consider contributing to their projects.

We all know how greedy and shameless YouTube can be, and yet those developers give us incredible products for free. And if you ever saw the entitled requests of some users on their projects' pages whenever YouTube implements some changes, and they have to rush to fix their code, I'm sure you would appreciate them even more. I've personally seen quite a few projects being abandoned because of the sometimes thankless job of being a developer, and I would hate it for any of these to suffer a similar fate.

So if you can and are willing, feel free to join me in contributing to:

[–] porksoda@lemmy.world 107 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I was about to say add uBlock Origin to that list but apparently they don't accept donations per the bottom of their homepage.

I will not accept donations or sponsorships of any kind.

That's some fuck you energy right there.

[–] forensic_potato@lemmy.world 63 points 1 year ago

Lmao serious 'fuck you' energy.

Out of curiosity I went to the project's page and saw more info on why they don't take donations:

Free. Open-source. For users by users. No donations sought. If you ever want to contribute something, think about the people working hard to maintain the filter lists you are using, which are available to use by all for free.

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