Based on recent reports, YouTube is actively restricting access to Premium accounts created through VPNs and cracking down on users accessing Premium content across different regions. According to user discussions, YouTube now detects and blocks VPN connections when attempting to stream Premium content[1][2].
Some key impacts:
- Users report being unable to play YouTube Music through Sonos speakers when using a VPN, with the service becoming accessible only after bypassing VPN connections[1:1]
- Premium subscribers attempting to access content from different regions than their subscription face connection errors and service disruptions
- The restrictions appear to be part of YouTube’s broader strategy to enforce regional content licensing and subscription terms
The crackdown coincides with YouTube’s increased focus on Premium subscriptions, including showing longer unskippable ads to free users in 2025 to drive Premium adoption[3].
This is why you don’t give them money.
Also other reasons.
On what terms? I have my VPN permanently on. That doesn’t mean I’m trying to cheat.
You know, I was trying to pay for YouTube Premium. I do think that was fair even though I knew I could use ad blockers for free.
The prices are outrageous where I live so i used a VPN to find a more reasonable price. Every so often, YouTube would cancel my account and I’d do it again.
This happened several times, but I finally realized that YouTube doesn’t want any money for my account! They would rather I pay nothing at all! That’s so generous of them.
So, now I use ad blockers and I get the same service for free.
Also fuck Google.
They’re literally taking money out of their own pockets. Idiots!
Fuck me if I want to securely access stuff on hotel wifi I guess?
Stop giving youtube money, use ublock and revanced.
Not OP but for me I’m fine giving them some money in exchange for me not having to watch any ads while using their services. Just not the amount they want to charge me in my home country. 5€ a month feels fair, 15 does not.
That’s fair, but my code of ethics prohibits me giving money to a corporation that engages in mass surveillance and actively radicalizes young men and women into the alt-right rabbit hole.
Also fair.
just buy adguard it supports multiple device, and can block twitch ads too.
Even uBOLite do it
YouTube is already hostile towards vons
Thanks Youtube, once more showing why Peertube is better!
Does anyone actually upload to peertube though? I mean my “recently uploaded” is a few videos from days ago and then from weeks ago
Checked to confirm, having 22 Peertube instances integrated to Grayjay (platforms aggregator) so not necessarily one communicates with the other, and filtering the contents from the Home tab just by Peertube instances, and indeed most stuff is months old at best.
However, least for tech content creators, it seems to thrive. Also, if lack of contents is a problem but the person sees potential in the technology, I’d invite the given person to also help producing contents for there. Like the saying goes, if you want change, be the change.
And also, the more content a platform has, the more inviting it is to others. Expecting it to be as big as youtube but much quicker and organically is a first step to regret, I think.
I mean, there’s Patreon, but that’s American. It’s in San Francisco in California though, which is at least not Trumpland. But with how things are headed, I’d be cautious.
Liberapay exists, but it uses Paypal, which is even scummier than Visa and Mastercard. Uses Stripe too, which is Irish-American (HQ in both countries).
If there’s a FOSS decentralised* Patreon alternative that would support Wero, cash, and Monero, I could foreseee that having a ton of potential.
* with the HQ of development or whatever being in a country that’s resistant against censorship.
Sure you answered to the right comment? I don’t think the topic of this specific comment thread was payment methods.
I tried once. For some sites I couldn’t even register, at the rest I couldn’t upload anything.
Peertube will take off more when you can make money from it. That’s why people still stuck with YouTube. Money
Well, since Peertube won’t get ads, I don’t see that happening soon. YouTubers will have to get used to asking for donations and setting up donation accounts.
…or another solution is cryptocurrencies but that is not very reliable.
Maybe in the future, until now not a real alternative by content. For users which want to watch music vids of their favorite band or vids from prefered science channels, movies, etc. it’s not an valid alternative, nor for authors which want to monetize their content. Last prefer Bandcamp, Vimeo, Odysee and other.
It won’t become an alternative if we don’t move. I think PeerTube can actually work regarding monetisation - having a decentralised Patreon alternative would help along, for example.
Vimeo is alright, but it’s US-based. I don’t trust far-right censorship to not creep up there.
Odysee is good design-wise, but it’s full of hatred. Also, situated in the US.
Bandcamp, also situated in the US. No thanks.
Yes Odysee is also used by right wings, same as YT or others, In Odysee you find all kind of content and political spectrum. It remain in the same, Bandcamp is for music the best alternative also fair with the creators, it’s a good measure to listen most content for free and a optional paid download of tracks or the whole disk, not given in YT. There you can only legal download an video with an premium account and where the money goes to YT, not to the artist as in Bandcaamp. I only hope that the EU offers more alternatives to YT, but until now there is no other as using the less evil alternative and Bandcamp and Odysee are.
YouTube is trash. I was watching a cooking video, and I swear, after 60 seconds of ads, the YouTuber talked for maybe one whole minute before it went to ads again with a 60 second timer.
For the first time ever today I deliberately watched some shorts. It was so much worse than I expected. Thank TFSM for blocking shorts with ubo.
Wait, are you a pastafarian or a satanist?
I am pretty sure the video uploader controls when ads play. So that seems less of a platform issue and more of a “that specific channel” problem.
Yeah, YouTube will insert ads but never THAT close to the last one unless they play back-to-back.
I’m not sure. There have been times where I thought, this would be the perfect place for an ad break. And lo and behold… ad break. Sometimes they get cut off mid sentence and I think, either it’s automated, or maybe you’re right and they got a say but didn’t specify enough ad breaks so one was inserted semi randomly…
Per their support page, videos over 8 minutes long can have mid roll ads. They can be manual, automatic, or a combination.
If ads were placed that closely together on a video longer than 8 minutes, the creator either did that manually or did not care enough about their audience to check what automatic ads got placed.
Not necessarily: https://x.com/JennyENicholson/status/1933160322048942558
Every time YouTube raises the price of Premium or messes with their ad-model, it raises the value of blocking ads! 😊✨️
I do value my adblockers very highly, and I blocks ads in the browser, via DNS on my home network, and on my rooted phone too. Every time I access the internet on a device that isn’t mine, I’m blown away with how bad it is.
Every time I access the internet on a device that isn’t mine, I’m blown away with how bad it is.
Sometimes my friends will ask if I can take a look at their computers because it’s not working as expected or something is definitely wrong. I am always blown away by all the ads and crap all over the screen. It’s like going to a porn site. I always ask ‘How the fuck do you do this?’ At the very least, install an adblocker. Sometimes I’ll just go ahead and install UBlock, but there’s an issue with doing that. Ublock Origin has a little bit of a learning curve. You actually have to put in a little work before it really works optimally for you. I find that people are not willing to do the work.
Not sure what you mean - UBlock Origin works great for me out of the box.
If you don’t have Bypass Paywalls Clean too, some news sites won’t let you read their articles when they detect your browser- or DNS-based ad-blocking. The user might want to know how to turn it off for a particular site (or learn how to switch to reader mode and/or how to use a site like 12ft.io) to get around that. Or if they turn on extra uBlock lists like the “annoyances” ones they might not see certain social media sign-in pop-ups they’re expecting to see, for example.
at this point i’m using invidious almost exclusively now.
youtube keeps insisting that i use an account at all.
As far as YT & Google et al, I don’t participate. A good while back, I tried to promote some of my music on YT. The experience was… terrible afaic. I used to use YT for tutorials, but there is no way I’m going to jump through all their hoops and endure back to back, un-skippible ads, to find out that the tut is shit. Screw that noise.
Reddit has been silently rejecting accounts that sign up with a VPN for quite some time now. If you make an account using a VPN, an alias email, using a hardened Firefox, and all the blockers, you can expect that your account will be shadow banned almost immediately. So, as long as Reddit front ends work, I’ll still use it as a resource…for now.
I foresee that private forums will become a thing again where people of like minds congregate and exchange info, expertise, ideas, content, etc. They were once quite popular but people gravitated to these multi billion dollar corp owned social media outlets because it was the next best thing, and now the other shoe has dropped.
What about platforms like Lemmy and Peertube? Seem like a solid alternatives to Reddit and YT.
Honestly just need to bring back Usenet newsgroup traffic
I feel good, that I have never depended on YT… I don’t pay them, I don’t watch ads, and I use other services too, and own my films and music… It’s nice - especially when reading posts like this.
Unfortunately YouTube Premium doesn’t solve any of the horrendous problems YouTube has. Using a third party client is the only thing that does.
YouTube premium provides high bitrate and no ads. It is only worth it for tv set up tho.
You can install SmartTube on Android TV. It’s the YouTube TV app, but without ads.
I like that it comes with YouTube music. That is the one thing I like about premium.
The problem here is the lack of a current alternative. As others here have mentioned, peertube might be a future alternative, but I can not help but feel that only fairly ideological people like myself would be interested (in the sense of dropping youtube on privacy grounds). I can’t see “normies” moving elsewhere. That said, maybe a good alternative doesn’t require mass uptake. I mean Lemmy seem pretty cool, albeit I haven’t been here very long at all (like a day lol, although I have lurked for sometime).
Nebula seems promising. It’s reasonably priced and because they charge money there are no ads. I can afford it while I can’t afford the amounts people ask for on Patreon. But I don’t know whether it can scale up while paying the creators enough and keeping the price to users low.
Just had a look - $6 a month, based in NYC. Definitely better than giving YouTube money, for now at least. They say they have a 50/50 profit sharing model with creators - profit presumably is after salaries (including bonuses?) have been paid, so it’s not clear exactly how much of your subscription does in fact go to the video creators. Still, a better option than YouTube, if only to support competition.
You’ll come to see this is like the Donald for left wingers.
Constant downvoting of dissenting opinions with no discussion.
Linux shilling will be everywhere too.
I haven’t had that experience at all and I’ve been here for years. Maybe you’re lurking in the wrong subs.
I just set my VPN to Albania. No ads and I don’t have to give YouTube any of my money.
Good but at best a temp solution.
