FIX your YOUTUBE EXPERIENCE: no ads, offline video, no algorithm, and more!

hey everyone this is Nick and today I'm going to shoot myself in the foot and hurt my YouTube business just to tell you how you can fix every annoying thing that YouTube does because let's be honest YouTube is the biggest video platform out there but they have abused that power again and again and done some very controversial ux decisions that have annoyed a lot of you so it's only fair that I start talking about how you can fix all of this and of course there isn't enough time in the world to mention every extension every tweak or every alternative website that you can use to make YouTube better so if you have recommendations let me know and let everyone else know down in the comments thanks to tuare for sponsoring this video if you've ever worked on a project using PHP you know how frustrating it is to know that the version you're using is going end of life and that you're going to have to upgrade to it quickly with a bunch of refactoring and code rewrites well scare can now help you to plan that transition thanks to their PHP extended life cycle support with that new service you can keep your existing code base and still receive security updates and patches to PHP even if it's no longer officially supported this means that if your codebase still meets your operational requirements it can also still meet your security requirements and you get some more time to plan the transition if you want to learn more about tux scares PHP extended life cycle support you can click on the link in the description below so why would you want to improve or fix your YouTube experience well first there are all the things YouTube does in terms of ux that are kind of user hostile the removal of the dislike button made it harder to identify bad or harmful videos they're locking good quality 4K videos behind YouTube premium and they're experimenting with putting more unskippable ads at the beginning of videos and look add revenue on YouTube is a third of my total revenue from running this YouTube channel so it's not in my interest to tell you to block ads or remove some of YouTube's features but honestly I've been criticizing Google for a lot of things and it would be kind of an ethical of me to not criticize YouTube for the same things so yes ethics won't feed me but at least I'll be able to sleep at night so then there's the YouTube algorithm which has a tendency to put people into a nice bubble of syy content to reinforce their already existing beliefs and while that is comfortable it's not super open-minded and it clearly leads to some big societal issues especially when you talking about conspiracy theories or political bias it is always better to try and find things you want to watch instead of being told what you should watch next and if you only listen to ASMR or if you only watch anime posts it doesn't make a lot of difference but if you're watching more serious topics it can be really harmful to stick to the same bubble and finally there's the Privacy issue because using YouTube means giving Google a ton of information about what you like and what you think whether you're logged in or not yeah if you thought not using a Google account protects you from being tracked you greatly underestimate Google's new powers so with all of this apart from the traditional ad blockers and tracker blockers what what can we do the first obvious solution is to not use YouTube and move to another website you have multiple alternatives to watch content but they unfortunately all have issues in the free of charge Department you have odys and P tube these platforms are basically like YouTube but not controlled by a big company they don't track you they don't serve you ads and they let you watch your videos in peace with all the basic features you would expect like subscribing to a channel Chang ching The Resolution commenting and more and of course their major issue is that they're not exhaustive you're not going to find every content creator you like on there unless you're really lucky and that's myself included assuming you like my content I'm on odys and all my videos are there but on peer tube only a select few videos make it there thanks to the manager of the peer tube instance which actually uploads those videos himself although this might change as peer tube now lets content creators stink their entire channel from YouTube to peer tube which means that you might finally be able to watch everything I make on peer tube if you want now that's the main issue while you can find some of your favorite creators there you will still have to use YouTube for a lot of others chances are everyone you follow isn't there yet then you have paid Alternatives like nebula or float plan these offer high quality content from big channels and creators and while you have to pay to view your videos it helps supports creators a lot more than depending on ad Revenue but these also suffer from the same problem they don't have everything both these platforms only add creators on a per Channel basis and generally only invite people who are already big enough that they will generate some revenue and won't waste bandwidth my channel isn't huge by any means but at 220 ,000 subscribers and 1.2 million views per month I've been denied access to float plane for a while and nebula never invited me either so I guess the threshold is at about 500,000 Subs which is totally understandable but it still means that these platforms while they're cool will not have everything which means you still need YouTube so let's see how you can improve your YouTube experience the first way would be to use alternative websites and applications that access YouTube content but don't belong to Google as such they can let you watch videos offline remove ads sometimes even sponsored segments and more for mobile you have applications like newpipe tubem or mybe and a lot of others they all offer a lot of things including some YouTube premium features like letting you download videos for offline viewing watching in picture in picture mode better privacy and more and if you're wondering why I'm not focusing more on the spefic specific features of every one of these apps it's because some of these features might be against YouTube terms of service which means that if I bring too much attention to them they might get a nice cease and desist letter which I wouldn't want to be responsible for this actually happened to YouTube VC for example which was a very popular alternative client and it had to shut down after it became too popular for its own good so I will just let you know that these Alternatives exist and I will let you look that up for yourself and decide if you like them or not not that my channel is big enough to attract enough attention to these apps that they would have to shut down but you can never be too careful and also I will let you know that the same person already recognized me three times in the streets of the city where I live so you could say I'm pretty famous now now if you mostly watch YouTube on your laptop or desktop though you're pretty much stuck with the YouTube website some Alternatives exist but they're either super slow don't work at all or don't have all the videos you might want now fortunately we have browser extensions a big one will be YouTube unhook this one is meant to let you watch what you want and just what you want it's on Chrome and Firefox and it lets you hide the related videos YouTube displays next to the one you're watching you can remove the comments if these annoy you or you don't want to be tempted to engage in yet another flamework the suggestions will also vanish just like the homepage recommendations the trending Tab and more basically it gives you a pure YouTube experience where you get to pick what you want to watch without all the annoying commenting nagging and suggesting that YouTube does to try and hook you into watching more then there's the very famous return YouTube dislike button if you want to see this Almighty ratio for the videos you watch this one does exactly what it says it makes the dislike button useful again and shows the number of dislikes under a video it won't be perfectly exact because it is based on archive data from the previous YouTube dislike API and extrapolated user data but it will be close enough to the real numbers to let you assess whether something is worth your time or not it's available for Chrome and Firefox I guess most of you who really wanted the dislike button back already know about this extension but if you didn't you're welcome and of course you can also use use any ad blocker or tracker blocker to stay as private as possible and remove all the annoying ads that you'll View at the beginning of a video including on mine and there's also something called sponsor block which I really should not tell you about because it also hurts my business but basically it crowdsources the timestamps for sponsored mentions inside of videos and it Autos skips them so you're not going to watch me talk about Leno or anything else ever again oh no but what if you really do not want to use the YouTube website well you have a simpler way a way that transcends the ages and lets you get to your new videos in any client of your choice through the magic of RSS feeds every channel URL that has an ID in it is also an RSS feed which means you can add it to any RSS client like feedle or a desktop client like news flash for Gnome or Thunderbird and if you don't know about RSS because let's face it it's kind of old Tech it's basically an aggregation system in an aggregator you just add the RSS feeds of everything you want to follow and then when you open your RSS client you see all the new articles that have been published and you can click on them to open them or sometimes even just read them in the client now all YouTube channels have an RSS feed which is just their URL so you can basically rebuild your own subscription feed away from YouTube and only get the things you actually want to watch it's pretty neat and you can also add other feeds that aren't YouTube videos so you can also Escape other algorithms for the news you read RSS might be old but it's very much alive and it's in my opinion the best way to actually only get the news that you're interested about it's a way better system than using Twitter Google or Facebook to get your news and if you like watching YouTu yoube videos on your TV but you don't want to use the YouTube app there's a convoluted way but that will work nicely once it's set up now be warned it involves downloading YouTube videos which is against YouTube's terms of service proceed at your own risk basically what you can do is write a script that pulls each new video from your subscription feed that you recreated using RSS it downloads them with YouTube download and then stores them in a directory that's used by your Plex server or local media center with that script running as a crown task regularly you can do that in the background of your home server and have access to all your videos when you come home waiting for you it requires a little bit of elbow grease but if you're technically inclined it's not that hard to set up I left a link to something that does quite the same thing in the description now all these methods will undoubtedly harm your favorite creators a bit like it or not when you don't have ads enabled when you skip sponsors when you don't like or comment or when you watch offline you're not contributing to the success of a video or to the financial well-being of a Creator and of course that's entirely up to you because I believe that your computer is your computer and you should use it in the exact way that you want to use it so if you want to skip ads skip sponsors and download videos go ahead but it's still important to keep that in mind it's going to hurt the creators you watch now if you have the finances and you're willing remember to help your favorite video creators when you decide to use these methods we mostly all have patreons or equivalents or onetime donation links in our video descriptions and if you want to help us make these videos it's always appreciated optional of course but appreciated so that's about it there are plenty of ways to escape the YouTube algorithm suggestions ads and more some of them might not exactly be authorized by YouTube some are but all of them should improve your watching experience if you're tired of the YouTube website but still want to see what we create and of course there's always the easy way to support your creators just by watching them which is called YouTube premium but I'm no shell so I'm not going to talk more about it here so hopefully this video is allowed to exist on YouTube isn't demonetized then doesn't generate a strike on my channel because you never know and hopefully it helped you make an informed decision regarding your YouTube experience just like you can make an informed decision when you buy your next computer from today's sponsor tuxedo is a company based in Germany and they make laptops and desktops that they ship worldwide and that run Linux out of the box and if you're wondering why you would want that well it's because when you buy any generic laptop or desktop of the internet there's a lot of work needed to ensure that it's really well compatible with Linux and when you buy from tuxedo that work is not necessary because you know that the hardware supports Linux you can just slap any dis r on it and it's going to run well and if there are a few things that need to be tweaked tuxedo has ppas and repos that you can add to the drro to support the various small knickknacks that might not work out of the box yet tuxedo has a huge range of devices from Ultra Book KN giant gaming Towers or gaming laptops or workstations you name it they have something for each price point and each need and and they have tons of customization option not only for the specs but also you can have your own custom keyboard layout that they're going to etch on the keys with a laser or you can have your own logo on the lid of your laptop so if you need a new device and you want to make sure that it runs Linux don't go and buy any old ThinkPad of the internet just get to the link in the description below and buy your device from tuxedo they're really good so thanks everyone for watching the video I hope you enjoyed it if you did don't hesitate to like to subscribe to turn on notifications or to write a comment and if you didn't like it there's a dislike button as well that you can restore with the dislike button extension and if you want to help support the channel there's a PayPal Link in the description a super thanks button underneath the video there are links to my patreon page and YouTube memberships and both of them get access to a weekly podcast on every Monday where I talk about Linux open source how the channel is going and some personal stuff and you also get to vote on the next topics that I'll cover on the channel so thanks everyone for watching and I guess you'll see me in the next one bye [Music] [Music]

Channel: The Linux Experiment

Views: 347,668

Keywords: linux, elementary os, open source, distribution, linux distro, linux help, linux tutorial, linux 2022, opensource, free software, linux tips, ubuntu, distro, remove ads youtube iphone, remove ads youtube android, remove ads youtube ios, remove ads youtube tv, remove ads youtube pc, remove ads youtube app, remove ads youtube chrome, download youtube videos to computer, download youtube videos iphone, download youtube videos to gallery, download youtube videos on android

Id: t_vmXq_TbQ4

Length: 16min 9sec (969 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 25 2022