YouTube? More like NoTube

Privacy
1

I checked my YT for the first time in about 2 years. I have no idea what they were thinking, or if this was even sent to triage before it was pushed to production. I don’t want to call their entire developer team morons, but you decide for yourself:

Homepage with modal:

3
31325×597 24.2 KB

Dismissible?

image
image1654×598 62.2 KB

Homepage without modal (deleted the node using browser console):

image
image1708×983 19.7 KB

So, yeah, No tube for You. This stinks, and I’m going to complain everywhere. before you ask, yes, I downgraded to Medium Mode using uBO to noop the website temporarily - still not good.

1 Like
2

Use a privacy frontend, the official site YouTube.com is very invasive

1 Like
3

So here’s how you “fix” it

  1. Enable watch history
  2. Watch a single video, any would do
  3. Disable watch history again

That should fix it for now

But honestly I’d recommend just migrating to something like newpipe

4 Likes
4

They intentionally no longer want to show you recommendations if you have watch history disabled and have announced as such.

I don’t care for YT’s recommendations, so I welcome it.

5 Likes
5

Their recommendations are garbage anyway. They can’t even develop an useful algorithm. Now I mostly watch YouTube videos through my searches.

On Phone NewPipe is good app if you want to subscribe to channels without an account.

1 Like
6

Youtube algo is by far the best and I myself use newpipe, the more videos like this page under a video is pretty useful.

I have this strategy of finding new channels:

  1. search reddit for recommendations for a particular interest
  2. watch those videos, skim through the more videos like this
  3. add those channels too
  4. backup the subscriptions for safe keeping

just create a “fake” google account with voip number and a proxy and you are golden ngl.

7

Just use LibreTube, you don’t need an account, it’s totaly FOSS, privacy-friendly, use piped api, you can download videos, it has material you and the UI/UX is splendid. Just forget newpipe and use piped !

2 Likes