They always could. What appears to be happening is that channels now have the option to turn on "a switch" so that content wont play if a VPN is detected. Most VPN ip addresses are well known, because they arent a secret. Everyone who uses the VPN goes through it.

If you come across the above message, its because the content creator turned it on. I had it come up with "stick to football". Its the only thing that it comes up with. I just unsubbed and wont watch anymore. Im not turning off my VPN for anyone or anything. Id rather just go with out. I encourage all of you to do the same.

VPNs aren't hard to detect, especially if you're using a major service.

My ISP has started throttling YouTube to ~2mbps when viewed from desktop. Using a VPN gets around this and lets me watch in HD. Luckily I've not encountered this error yet, but if I do I guess it's no more YouTube for me, 480p is just way too blurry to put up with.

When I see content blocks like that anymore, I just leave the content behind and go elsewhere. Malicious companies will not get my clicks. They can fuck right off.

Good sign though, means they are getting desperate. It is our duty to starve them of traffic.

Listen at this point, we either re-upload our favorite creator's content to other platforms. Convince them to join alternatives or help out *their replacements" on those alternative platforms to grow.

Either way I do not respect content-creators that do not support alternative platforms (& decentralization) on principle

This isnt new. Its been happening for years. There is a post about this on lemmy every few weeks. It just doesnt happen consistently, so people always think that they "discovered" this for the first time.

Dude, I seem to find more sites that break when using my VPN than those that allow it. The bastards are winning

The real highlight is the contradictory text.

To continue, turn off your VPN/Proxy. This will allow YouTube to locate the best content".

"We refuse to serve you anything other than the best 'located content'."

A fat lie. Combining refusal with the completely unrelated supposed service improvement of location-based content. To disingenuously sound like they're doing you a service.

Well, they need to make sure the right people are watching the right propaganda.

The "best content" being ip-located ads, probably.

"This will allow Youtube to locate the best content" 🤡

I mean... detecting (some) VPNs is as trivial as

fetch('https://github.com/NazgulCoder/IPLists/raw/refs/heads/main/output/vpn-ipv4.txt').then( res => res.text() ).then( res => console.log( res.includes( "1.2.3.4" ) ) )

thanks to https://github.com/NazgulCoder/IPLists/

FWIW though I did try, connected via a random VPN from ProtonVPN from Argentina... and it wasn't in that list. So it's not perfect. Also ProtonVPN has apparently today 13K servers according to https://protonvpn.com/vpn-servers

That being said I can imagine that Google, which is literally built on crawling the Web, has all the infrastructure and expertise needed to have such lists and up to date ones.

I'm not justifying blocking VPN here, only trying to clarify that unless you self-host in a rather specific setup (i.e. not relying a popular cloud provider but truly self hosting) it's technically not hard to block VPNs.

I encounter VPN blocks everywhere frequently. I usually just reroll my selected server until the block goes away

locate the best content

Hell nah, please dont

Proxies still have an IP address.

This happens via simple lists of IP addresses, no? I.e. the VPN has a limited number of exit IPs and once it's known who they belong to, they're easy to block?

It's time to switch to Newpipe or Invidious, YouTube clients focused on privacy, without adverts and without Google's clutches.

This will allow Youtube to locate ~~the best content~~ and spy on you more easily

FTFY

I watched youtube religously 10-15 years ago. Now when I try to enjoy some content, I struggle to find anything of quality that's in my feed. Sometimes I'm scrolling for 10 minutes and give up. Their algorithm for what might interest me was so much better back then.