WIN10 Firefox, how to get around scammy/scummy youtube tax?

December 19, 2023 2:22 PM

What I've been doing thus far is using a Firefox add-on which allows downloading the vid, then play it locally on my machine. How are you dodging this jive? What I'm doing is mostly working fine but wondering what the community here is doing to get around it.

Also have found that r/fullmoviesonyoutube does not hassle at all, at least not yet. (Just an fyi that's a pretty good thread on Reddit, and has TONS of movies show up if/when you do a search on them, and works no problem with the Firefox add-on I use to download.)

posted by dancestoblue to Computers & Internet (13 answers total)

I'm not entirely sure what you mean by "scammy/scummy youtube tax." If you mean ads, well:

1) It's an ad-supported site, that's how it works. It's not a "scam" it's the basic business model, just like TV was/is.
2) They're getting extremely aggressive with the whack-a-mole game they play with ad-blocking extensions and other things. There certainly are still workarounds - like what you're doing - but those options are increasingly non-functional.
3) Youtube Premium is a really good value if you watch a lot of things there. I, for one, really like being a paying customer instead of viewing ads, as a way of supporting creators. The folks I know who are trying to avoid ads... pay instead.

As a wise person once said, "If you're not paying for the product, you are the product." If you find value in Youtube, I encourage you to pay for it, as other members of this community do.
posted by Tomorrowful at 2:37 PM on December 19, 2023 [24 favorites]

On the other hand, if you balk at giving money to the platform that supports Joe Rogan and PewDiePie and shoves white nationalist content into the "recommended" feeds of its users:

Install uBlock Origin and keep it updated. They're pretty good at keeping one step ahead of YouTube's bullshit. If it hangs, chances are there'll be an update soon that will fix it. Also, make sure you're running the latest version of FireFox.
posted by Pallas Athena at 3:17 PM on December 19, 2023 [17 favorites]

I use AdBlocker Ultimate in Firefox, and I haven't seen any ads in YouTube.
posted by mrphancy at 3:42 PM on December 19, 2023

What are you talking about, specifically? uBlock Origin successfully nukes all ads and delays on Youtube without any issues. If something doesn't work, refresh the filter list.
posted by Rhomboid at 3:56 PM on December 19, 2023 [3 favorites]

I'll also add that YouTube premium includes YouTube music, which would potentially allow you to ditch Spotify.
posted by noloveforned at 4:37 PM on December 19, 2023

I'm not clear what you mean by "Youtube tax," or what it is you're trying to "get around," but if you're having trouble downloading videos for one or another reason, yt-dlp is always the answer to downloading media.

If instead, you're having some kind of adblocking problem, it's likely because you're using something other than uBlock Origin (which is distinct from everything else that has "uBlock" in the name, and vastly superior to pretty much anything else you can use which claims to block ads) as your adblocker.
posted by majick at 4:47 PM on December 19, 2023 [5 favorites]

I'm on Mac, and up until recently Safari + 1Blocker worked pretty well, until it didn't. Then I started allowing ads on YouTube, because I don't watch YouTube that often and sitting through five seconds of ad is OK by me. Then it stopped working at all...even if I allows ads, it pretends I'm don't.

I recently switched to Orion (a new WebKit-based browser from the people do the Kagi search engine) and don't do any ad blocking beyond what is provided by the browser, and it seems to work fine. We'll see if it lasts.
posted by lhauser at 4:49 PM on December 19, 2023

I loathed youtube premium's intrusive ads but have never looked back since I got it. It's very good value for money, and is as noted above a completely satisfactory substitute for spotify, at least for my purposes.
posted by Sebmojo at 6:39 PM on December 19, 2023

Ads suck, their intrusion into every sphere of online life doesn't need to be accepted or embraced. I use ublock origin on firefox and have a lot of success with that. On mobile I was until recently using the 'Brave' adblocking browser (some privacy concerns with that one so look into it for yourself before downloading).

I also use a firefox extension called 'Youtube Algorithm Killer' which cleans up the clutter on youtube and just shows me recent videos from accounts I follow. Mentioning as I think the algorithm can often itself be an insidious form of advertising and my experience is a lot better since I opted out of seeing videos that way.
posted by chives at 2:57 AM on December 20, 2023

On mobile I was until recently using the 'Brave' adblocking browser

uBlock Origin is available for mobile Firefox.
posted by flabdablet at 3:09 AM on December 20, 2023 [3 favorites]

Mod note: Two removed, please stick to answering the question. Thanks!
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane (staff) at 4:02 AM on December 20, 2023

Google and uBlock Origin are in an arms race that Google hasn't been having much luck at winning. This site tells you explicitly whether or not the latest available uBlock Origin ruleset makes YouTube work ad-free.

If it's showing a big green Yes and it's been more than the displayed number of "latest solution" days since you applied a uBlock Origin update either manually or automatically, simply doing that manually will immediately restore your unsullied YouTube experience.
posted by flabdablet at 7:25 AM on December 20, 2023 [2 favorites]

For the few hours in any given week where Google is temporarily winning, simply replacing www.youtube.com with piped.video inside any YouTube URL will take you to a page that displays the same video ad-free even without an ad blocker installed.

I use the Redirector extension for Firefox to do this, with the following redirection rule:

Description: YouTube to Piped
Example URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhDfmUnN1vY
Include pattern: *www.youtube.com*
Redirect to: $1piped.video$2
Pattern type: 🞊 Wildcard 🞅 Regular Expression
Pattern Description: Replace www.youtube.com with piped.video
Example result: https://piped.video/watch?v=fhDfmUnN1vY

I prefer Piped to YouTube because Piped allows me to set up subscriptions that Google doesn't need to know about: my Piped subscriptions are kept in local browser storage, can be shipped between browsers in the form of an exported JSON file, and I don't need to log into a Google account to make them work.
posted by flabdablet at 7:36 AM on December 20, 2023 [1 favorite]