Was trying to watch something about a gun that I was looking at in a forum, and the link led to a youtube video that wouldn’t play.

I was puzzled, but then I noticed that the video said it was for members only. I was perplexed, and I subscribed to the channel, but obviously that’s not what it meant. I needed to be some sort of paid member to view the video.

I guess we’re in the stages of the internet where things that were once free, and a sort of wild west as it were, like youtube, are becoming so monetized that eventually I just won’t have to worry about wasting time watching youtube because there is no way that I’m buying a subscription just to watch short form factor videos.

Anybody else experienced this?

    • Link.wav [he/him]@beehaw.orgEnglish
      5·
      1 year ago

      Sort of. It has some similarities in that there are no ads, but Invidious is more privacy focused. Instead of accessing YouTube’s API directly, it scrapes the content which is hosted on individual Invidious instances. Moreover, you can register an account to save playlists and such, which will be completely unattached from your Google account.

      One thing that some people don’t know is that you can copy/paste a YouTube URL into the searchbar of any Invidious instance, and it will find that video immediately. I do this a lot when I want to watch a video, but I don’t want to contribute views to a particular channel, for whatever reason.