LMAO at the irony of YouTube taking a stand against bot scraping as if that isn't Google's entire business model.

This helps protect our community.

I hate when companies lie to my face. Watching a video anonymously is not harming anyone except maybe a fraction of a cent of cost to Google. If I was posting a comment or something maybe, but oh, you already need to be logged in for that.

They want to track you, and if you don't let them (VPN, 3rd party client, VM, etc) then they pull this shit.

Google is on an enshittification speed-run. Close-source Android, combine with ChromeOS. Advertise the crap out of YouTube, draconian login requirements. Wherever their income is coming from now, it isn't from making products users want. Probably the military "AI" overseas contracts.

I've been de-Googling the last few years casually as functional replacements came along and I'm down to threads now, but the icing on the cake was their injecting an ad into a funeral ceremony stream from a church on YouTube. Sure, software-side, we all know why it happened, but just. No.

Yes. It's been this way for about a year now.

Fucking sucks. I used to enjoy looking at YouTube while signed out so that I could see new content that my algorithm refuses to show me. Now I can't.

Baffling

Nobody here has suggested switching to Invidious, we’re suppose to be promoting open source alternatives!

invidious skips this pesky bullshit

oh hey, that's me! And the video is also on fedi! https://pawb.fun/@slyka/113028002924181756

Switch the VPN server helps for me sometimes

You're probably using revanced or vanced ... there was a recent patch, you have to update it.

Use the libredirect extension to redirect links automatically to an open alternative

This is why I use things like Newpipe on my phone or FreeTube on my desktop/laptop. Why deal with a massive headache when I can bypass the agitator?

Oh they have videos now? Last time i was there it was mostly just ads

If you are lucky you get ads before a paid review of a product that was donated by the manufacturer and then ads in between

Happened to me, too.

It's a automated test to see if you will log in to Google or if you walk away.

This is why it's so inconsistent... It's only sometimes, it changes if you change browsers or vpn endpoints. They make money from logged out users, so they are testing to see if they can push users into logging in without losing money.

Music on CDs

only we are allowed to steal these peoples content

I guess beware the danger of ToS that grants the platform unilateral rights to use your content they host; just because you don't care what they can do with it now doesn't mean some new tech won't come along that lets them use your content in ways that horrify you

Our community is so delicate. It could die if they see a bot watching a video.

Use pipepipe wooooooo

If you set VPN to some random country that isn't the US it will let you in just fine lmao

or at least that worked the last time I had this issue, I use an account for recommendations so I only get this if I'm looking up something sketchy.

@frittoBee@lemmy.world !mildlyinfuriating@lemmy.world
IMHO, it's better to boycott and abandon Youtube (and other mainstream platforms) altogether, either prioritizing open alternatives (PeerTube) and/or prioritizing the consumption (and production) of static content (text and images).

Regarding the open alternatives, it baffles me how Fediverse users often can recall of Invidious (and other workarounds) but can't recall of a Fediverse platform, even when there are many PeerTube instances available out there, both general-purpose and niche instances.

Alongside the adoption of PeerTube and other open alternatives, the abandonment or de-prioritization of video formats is also interesting as a mentally-healthy option because video can't help but deceive our brains into perceiving "something" that isn't there (to better understand this, I recommend the René Magritte's art "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" a.k.a. "The Treachery of Images", as well as the René Descartes's philosophy on the human senses). To make matters worse, YT and other corp video platforms are dopaminergic casinos, trapping users inside an ouroboric addiction of video feeds while creating the illusion of parasocial relationships (i.e. as if the gazillion-subscribers "influencer" were a personal friend/colleague/lover, when they're not: each user is just another bitstream they both think they "see" amidst an unstoppable digital rain generated by a grid of three LEDs tailored to deceive our trio of retinal cones... but, well, this is a very bleak and digressing statement of mine).

Personally, It's been a long while since I stopped accessing YouTube/TikTok videos. I used to publish my own videos, I used to be subscribed to hundreds of "channels" and I was even a paid "member" to specific YT channels. I abandoned it all and I rarely put myself into watching videos.

Yes, there's a myriad of knowledge and content available only in motion picture format, and there is also the kind of knowledge that cannot be written as text or represented as a static image, and this is where open video platforms can thrive, but people, especially us Fediverse users, should advocate more for these alternatives such as PeerTube.

Of course, even PeerTube doesn't solve the fact of how video unfortunately are perfect smoke-and-mirrors deceiving our naïve biological senses and making us overly used to fast and/or shallow content as we lose our own ability to read and write deep and lengthy texts such as this one. At the end of the day, humans are gradually ceding the ability to write, once extremely valued and valuable among humans, to Markov chain algorithms (a.k.a. LLMs), in part due to us getting more and more used to media formats. But, at least, PeerTube doesn't try to trap us into an endless feed and doesn't try to extort us or sell our personal data to countless partners/sponsors, so it's way better than YouTube or any workarounds to continue accessing the Google's dopaminergic casino.

This has been happening to me in embeds for ages, and I am logged in. It doesn't even give any option to sign in or watch on YouTube, I just don't get to watch embeds anymore.

AI bots that are not google's. They want exclusive ownership of juicy training data.