For example, you used to be able to double tap just about anywhere on the screen to fast forward or rewind 10 seconds. Now on the first tap the bottom half of the screen becomes an overlay with a bunch of action buttons, causing the second tap to inadvertently engage one of the buttons.
Thank you for saying this. I thought I was going crazy as I suddenly started to skip to the next video when I just want to forward it. I'm still not sure if this is an intentional change or a bug
I used to use youtube in a browser because it just worked. It had lots of nice features compared to youtube-dl/yt-dlp. But since they've worked so hard to prevent the use of such tools even my browser based youtube is regularly freezing the video for ~5-10 second periods many times during a play now (on multiple computers/firefox, via multiple IPs).
Youtube tightening their grip has made the youtube.com website so bad that yt-dlp is now actually a better experience. Rather than just an awkward way to preserve things.
This should also leave you on a slightly older version of the app, too, which might bypass any recent issues with updates. But, it has a ton of useful builtin features, like bring-back-dislikes and sponsorblock.
They let you follow channels and build playlists without a Google account and play stuff in background.
You can find those apps on F-Droid by adding the relevant repositories.
I do appreciate NewPipe for helping cut down on YT feed scrolling and just focusing on subscriptions. For a while I'd completely migrated to NewPipeSponsorblock but that fork became unmaintained and at the time there didn't seem to be an alternative.
2. There's strength in numbers. Between adblockers, foss clients, and youtube-dl/yt-dlp, there are probably tens to hundreds of millions of people watching youtube this way. If YT banhammers everyone for that they would end up banning a sizable fraction of the earth's population all in one day. Even Google isn't stupid enough to do that.
I guess it is good to keep people aware of the possibility, but I do also want as many people as possible to join in. If they want to ban all of us, that's fine by me. Sincerely.
Further, it's now easier than ever to decouple one's online life from google and so anyone not doing so is taking unnecessary risk.
As far as I know, you can indeed disable Shorts in ReVanced. The defaults in ReVanced may need some tweaking to your liking, but there's quite a lot of options.
There seems to be no way anymore to keep a public instance working.
Piped is an alternative to Invidious which uses the NewPipeExtractor library: https://github.com/TeamPiped/Piped
But instances with high traffic or 'suspicious IP Adresses' can still be banned very quickly.
Google is garbage at this point. Every employee there is simply promotion farming and has no concept of what a backbone is. Everything they do is utter trash and only about feeding their algorithm or collecting your data.
ThSAWistheLAW WC (11/7/24) "I like this app but it is not functioning correctly at the moment. If your video that you're viewing must be interrupted by a message notification or if you simply turn your phone right side up to read the messages or comments the video will stop playing and it will not start no matter how many times you hit the play button. Other than that it's a fine app."
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michael. jacqui (11/8/24) "New update is awful. It no longer saves where you left off on a video. If you swipe down and leave the video going to search for a new one it automatically paused the video. When you go back to play the video it cannot play unless you select a new video and then have to reselect the video you want to watch to get it to play. The app is horrible and extremely frustrating."
