If you’re using Safari on macOS or iOS, download Vinegar for YouTube (and Baking Soda for other websites). It switches videos to the native player and skips ads (and autoplay). It also sets the quality to whatever you prefer (Best, in my case). Makes mobile YouTube so much better.
There are solutions for all of these issues. You can use alternative frontends like Invidious or Piped, dedicated desktop apps like FreeTube or NewPipe and Libretube on Android to access YouTube without ads or tracking. You can also use throwaway email addresses to access websites that demand your email and there are privacy frontends for most social media sites (e.g. Libreddit for the site that shouldn’t be named, Nitter for the other site that shouldn’t be named, Proxitok for Tiktok, Proxigram for Instagram, etc.)
I’ve seen you a bit on a few of these posts, always defending these companies’ behavior. I tend to disagree with your stance. While I do understand that the infrastructure behind the sites I use is not free (trust me, I run some sites myself and my pitiful little things are expensive), I also do not think punishing users for adblock is justified. Neither is scraping as much data as can be gathered for further sale. Advertising can be very intrusive anymore and data collection from sites is no different. It’s not that the sites want to make money; it’s their insistence that the user is the product. Just pay walling the service would be much less scummy and unjustifiable than this nonsense.
And you know what would fix it? Building your own website that doesn’t do those things and making the people around you engage with it instead of you capitulating to them, but why put effort into anything when you can sit around and complain about it and do nothing about it?
I hate it too and don’t deny it’s happening but I hate that phrase. It’s so crass and juvenile and seeing it repeated ad nauseam has shed any critical meaning it had.
No such problems, I don’t use pages which need an account to see the content, or I skip the account Popup, YT without ads and trackers, with extensions or front-ends, fast page loading because blocking all this crap. But yes, free internet is becoming more and more distant since large corporations dominate it with their conditions, if they continue like this, soon you will only be browsing the internet with your ID and credit card and the webcam on.
Add comment