Ever since around 2017, I have not visited (or even seen) the contemporary Youtube site.
I had been using a combination of Invidious and yt-dlp (youtube-dl).
Just within the last year or two, Google has been making efforts to obstruct these tools. This can most clearly be seen with Invidious, currently suffering from a generic “This helps protect our community” error message.
It has got me thinking that Google might eventually succeed in extinguishing these islands of safety that I’ve so enjoyed.
People who still use raw, unmitigated Youtube today; how much of a hellscape has it become?
That’s odd. Haven’t seen that much of a problem. Not saying you aren’t having the problem.
Although most videos I watch are about 4 minutes. The only exception would be critical role. Haven’t really noticed a big problem when they are doing their live stream.
Ah, no idea about live streams as I don’t watch those. I would imagine they have a different format for those as two ads every 2 to 5 minutes wouldn’t work for those.