I was pretty excited about the bundle as some YouTubers I like seemed to recommend it heavily. Pop open CuriosityStream to watch something vaguely historical and it’s like 70% liberal, low quality ahistorical bullshit. “Apocalypse Stalin”, “Malcolm X vs MLK” – in the episode of whatever show I was watching (can’t even be bothered to remember) that was about Ghengis fucking Khan of all people, the narrator justifies his actions based on his abusive childhood and then goes on to randomly bring up Stalin as an example of how childhood parental abuse can lead someone to become a bloodthirsty dictator! Just totally random.
Nebula’s also like 50% garbage western pseudo-political scientists discussing stuff they have no idea about, most notably China. I like the stuff about video games and films for the most part… but I still feel like I was ripped off, even though it’s literally $15 for a whole year. I already have YouTube Premium, I was thinking this could replace it but dear god no.
We have a roku, so from my limited understanding of the tech there’s no way to just install an adblocker on it. Roommates and I watch lots of YT videos together and we got sick of the barrage of Burger King ads and what have you. Unfortunate and I hate giving money to Google (especially since they already make so much off of our personal info) but you know.
You can block YouTube ads with a Pi-hole, but while you won’t actually see the ad, while the ad is technically playing your YouTube screen will be black until it finishes. But at least you’ll have the satisfaction knowing that corporations are wasting their money and they aren’t even getting subconscious level shit in you.
Pi-hole is unfortunately no longer effective against YouTube ads. Google now serves them from the same domain as everything else, making any DNS-based approach useless against them.
Oh. Unless it’s possible to play videos from a web browser, the only option I can think of would be to block YouTube’s advertising servers on your wireless router, but I don’t know how feasible that is. Some phones apparently let you mirror the screen to a Roku, so that might be another possibility
They use the same domain for ads as everything else, specifically to stop you from blocking ads. Therefore, any DNS-based approach like Pi-hole is ineffective against YouTube ads.
Yeah, I figured they’d do something like that