Youtube can detect VPNs now... the fuck?
Youtube can detect VPNs now... the fuck?
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This isnt new. Its been happening for years. There is a post about this on lemmy every few weeks. It just doesnt happen consistently, so people always think that they "discovered" this for the first time.
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But this is even dumber than before, you can't even login to bypass. What about people living in a country where youtube is blocked. I guess Google just says "fuck 'em"?
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What about people living in a country where youtube is blocked. I guess Google just says “fuck 'em”?
Yyep.
If you're using a VPN, you're likely anonymized and not directly making YouTube any money. Those are leeches, as far as a Google accountant is concerned.
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I guess Google just says “fuck 'em”?
Yes, 100%, absokutely correct.
Google is a company.
Companies do not care about you. You are not a person, you are a number.
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I see. I havent had a Google account for like 8 years, so i didnt notice the difference.
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A few days ago I gotta message from google saying they "can't verify my age" (meaning they want gov ID I'm sure) so I'm forced to use safe search and other stuff too.
Fuck. That!
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Why is YouTube blocked?
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Probably part of the age verification bullshit
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The real highlight is the contradictory text.
To continue, turn off your VPN/Proxy. This will allow YouTube to locate the best content".
"We refuse to serve you anything other than the best 'located content'."
A fat lie. Combining refusal with the completely unrelated supposed service improvement of location-based content. To disingenuously sound like they're doing you a service.
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disingenuously sound like they're doing you a service
That's the Google guarantee!
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This happens via simple lists of IP addresses, no? I.e. the VPN has a limited number of exit IPs and once it's known who they belong to, they're easy to block?
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Yeah, it's pretty trivial to do, and it's honestly surprising it took YT so long to do it.
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They always could. What appears to be happening is that channels now have the option to turn on "a switch" so that content wont play if a VPN is detected. Most VPN ip addresses are well known, because they arent a secret. Everyone who uses the VPN goes through it.
If you come across the above message, its because the content creator turned it on. I had it come up with "stick to football". Its the only thing that it comes up with. I just unsubbed and wont watch anymore. Im not turning off my VPN for anyone or anything. Id rather just go with out. I encourage all of you to do the same.
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You could probably just record the users ID and it's IP address. IP addresses that see a lot of different user IDs are either VPNs, companies or universities.
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Or they are just home users behind a CGNAT, which more and more ISPs use.
And even if they aren't, home users usually have dynamic IPs, meaning it can change.
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Another thing that only very large companies can do is see the response time and compare packet size from different servers to narrow down your location, effectively defeating the VPN in a lot of cases.
Hypothetically, a specific amount of bytes gets sent to server B, response time indicates it was received 300 miles away which matches the response time of going from Server B to Server A where the user lives.
Of course it's still important to use a VPN, if only because those big companies don't want us to.
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When I see content blocks like that anymore, I just leave the content behind and go elsewhere. Malicious companies will not get my clicks. They can fuck right off.
Good sign though, means they are getting desperate. It is our duty to starve them of traffic.
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Sure, but there are also lots of other ways around it. Non-chrome browsers (or Chromium-based browsers) still allow for good extensions that can block YouTube ads.
Firefox + uBlock Origin still works great, even when all the front-ends are broken.
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I encounter VPN blocks everywhere frequently. I usually just reroll my selected server until the block goes away
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The "best content" being ip-located ads, probably.
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probably-
TIL ads are content!
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"This will allow Youtube to locate the best content" 🤡
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It's so insulting they add flavour text like this as if to call you a fucking moron to your face
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“We know what’s best for you”
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But I don't want the best content.
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As someone who uses multiple VPNs daily I have a suggestion. Try to locate a different server and connect to it. See if there’s a drop down menu in your VPN app. Sometimes a particular IP on one of those servers flags websites’ fraud detection. Sometimes I can switch servers on my VPN and refresh the page and it loads just fine.
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Excellent advice. It’s a game of cat and mouse (or whack-a-mole, whatever metaphor works…).
Sites that want your data for whatever reason hate VPNs, so they identify exit points and blacklist traffic from them. VPN providers know this so they spin up new exit points with different IP.
Just try a different server. Sometimes it’s a regional ’rights’ issue, so pick another server that is in the same jurisdiction, for instance in the case of streaming.
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Well, they need to make sure the right people are watching the right propaganda.
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VPN ads seriously need to stop promising that you can get around content restrictions.
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People should educate others on how to get content not available in their area for free without the hassle.
If media isn't available in your area, then the company is telling you they don't want your money. There is a $0.00 loss to them if you pirate it.
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Or they need to do a better job at getting around content restrictions
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Yeah they need to start rotating egress ips regularly. It's a cat and mouse game
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If only you don't serve ads containing literal porn to my face with my VPN off 😡😡
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Huh? I don't use a VPN unless I want to watch geoblocked content, and adblocking works just fine without.
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Couldn't you just use uBlock and/or NextDNS/PiHole to avoid porn ads rather than use a VPN?
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This is for the mobile app. I already use uBO on all my browsers.
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My ISP has started throttling YouTube to ~2mbps when viewed from desktop. Using a VPN gets around this and lets me watch in HD. Luckily I've not encountered this error yet, but if I do I guess it's no more YouTube for me, 480p is just way too blurry to put up with.
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I wonder if there’s any workaround besides VPNs like changing DNS or something?
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Phone->revanced
Smart tv->smart tube next
I don't ever watch YouTube on my laptop but I'm sure there are utilities available.
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I use 1.1.1.1 so I don't think it's easily ignored by changing DNS. But interestingly while using Revanced and NewPipe on my phone I don't have any of the same problems. Maybe my computer is ignoring my router's DNS? Maybe mobile YouTube is delivered from a different server? I wish I knew but ultimately using a VPN still works for me and is a very low effort fix.
What I don't get is why it's only YouTube they choose to throttle. I've never noticed any issues on other streaming websites and fast.com which literally uses Netflix servers is also full speed.
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I'm surprised it took so long, I've not been able to watch Channel 5 for years.
Anyhow, I love Revanced.
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Every time I see people talk YouTube alternatives they complain that Revanced is bad and Newpipe is good.
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ReVanced will work almost flawlessly 90% of the time. Newpipe, Freetube, Pipepipe, Invidious, etc. will frequently break and require so much VPN hopping that I barely bother with them. Watching YT on my laptop is a pain in the ass compared to my phone.
Honestly, until late summer ReVanced hadn't done me wrong at all and I had been using it for about a year, but YT managed to patch whatever loophole they found for YT Music, so I suffered for a month and listened on the regular YT app. It works now, although sometimes I have to VPN hop because it'll play a song only up to a minute, and then hang.
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I've never heard anyone say newpipe is good
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Revanced doesn't just flawlessly patch YouTube (and gives you additional options like skipping promos), you can use it to patch all sorts of other apps too.
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Oh, so what they’re really saying is that a platform owned by GOOGLE has trouble FINDING the best content?
Everyone knows.
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If you find what you're looking for the first time, they can't serve you as many ads.
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Can’t argue with that, there goes my oneliner 🤣
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Sure, there's big lists of them right here.
Hardly a secret.
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See, there is the problem, if you use a VPN you dont allow Google to locate the best content! Nothing to see here, YouTube is only trying to be helpful here, Google is absolutely not trying to use you as a data nugget to get rich from
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I mean... detecting (some) VPNs is as trivial as
fetch('https://github.com/NazgulCoder/IPLists/raw/refs/heads/main/output/vpn-ipv4.txt').then( res => res.text() ).then( res => console.log( res.includes( "1.2.3.4" ) ) )thanks to https://github.com/NazgulCoder/IPLists/
FWIW though I did try, connected via a random VPN from ProtonVPN from Argentina... and it wasn't in that list. So it's not perfect. Also ProtonVPN has apparently today 13K servers according to https://protonvpn.com/vpn-servers
That being said I can imagine that Google, which is literally built on crawling the Web, has all the infrastructure and expertise needed to have such lists and up to date ones.
I'm not justifying blocking VPN here, only trying to clarify that unless you self-host in a rather specific setup (i.e. not relying a popular cloud provider but truly self hosting) it's technically not hard to block VPNs.
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Understanding is the first step to fighting draconian policies.
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Yeah, detecting the VPN isn’t really difficult at all. VPN providers sometimes try to cycle through IP addresses to make it harder, but there’s only so much they can do.
This isn’t really noteworthy, especially when you consider how many services require a sign in when you’re on a VPN anyways. It’s shitty, but not really surprising; They want to be able to tie your traffic to you, not just to a random VPN server. Hell, even without signing in, they probably have your browser fingerprinted. If you’re privacy focused, you probably have a lot of privacy based extensions, in a privacy based browser. And that makes you easy to fingerprint.
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Many websites now just block a large range of cloud and VPS services in order to reduce DDOS from AI crawlers. For youtube and reddit you can still access if you are logged in though.
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It's time to switch to Newpipe or Invidious, YouTube clients focused on privacy, without adverts and without Google's clutches.
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Been trying out Invidious lately. Nice stuff if it is not down for a reason or two.
Oh! Speaking of a devil. It is down right now!
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Yeah, i even made a script just to log into its container (proxmox lxc) and pull the latest image when i see videos cant load.
It’s almost always google actively changing things, sometimes directly targeting invidious.
What did also helped was give its container 2 cpu cores rather than just 1. The internally errors and timeouts causes by google changes cause a big strain on it so it often crashed in combination with needing an update (leaving me unable to backup my up to date subscription list)
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I haven't used Invidious, but I've never had.an issue with PipePipe being down.
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Dude, I seem to find more sites that break when using my VPN than those that allow it. The bastards are winning
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I'll change servers a couple times, and if it still doesn't work, I'll just move on
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At this point no corpo site is worth the hassle.
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"This will allow YouTube to locate the best content"
They mean slop? Another reason why I still use Newpipe on mobile.
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People don't realize how much shit youtube/google ignores over time, for whatever reasons (but mostly because it's cheaper to ignoer I'd guess). With most major consumer VPN providers, this is very easy to detect. Adblockers are easy to detect. Tampering with the website structure? Believe it or not, quite easy to detect when someone hide a component or change a title or a button.
If they decided to seriously get after people that circumvent geofencing, people that block ads, people that change the interface to their liking, or people that plainly use alternative websites, they could easily. And it would require far less effort on their end to keep things complicated than it would require on our end to keep things working at an acceptable level.
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Only kind of true.
If they did implement all those measures, all you do is launch a puppet browser rendered off screen and scrape the content you want. This could work for any site and it is impossible for anyone to detect.
For ads, as a nuclear option, you can detect when they occur and black the stream out.
I would personally do this if left with no other option.
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Cue detection of "realistic" human activity on the UI and preventing streaming if the server determine this activity does not match a human enough pattern.
I'm exaggerating on that one, but… that's not even that implausible these days.
My point was, dancing this dance with "big website", whoever it is, will always be an endless uphill battle.
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Sometimes I do get YouTube telling me that I need to disable my adblocker to access a video, so they do try to block that stuff (though I suspect that the infrequency with which this happens combined with the fact that not everyone does experience it when some people do report this happening suggests that they're just testing methods of detection and blocking)
Usually when it happens, I just go into my Ublock settings and update stuff. I can't remember that ever not working. It feels like a low-key arms race, in a cold-war kind of way
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i use vorapis v3 cause they fucked with the video player.
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I've been getting a "You must sign on to see this content" from YouTube (refusing to play the video if I don't) for ages when I'm behind a VPN, but if I disconnect the VPN and try again I don't get it.
Curiously, sometimes it doesn't happen.
I guess YouTube has a list of IP addresses of VPN exit points and will do that if it detects a connection coming from one of those, but at least for my VPN provider some exit points are not in the list.
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locate the best content
Hell nah, please dont
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youtube sucks ever since googol bought it. I cannot believe people still use it.
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Google bought YouTube in like 2006. I liked it before they bought it, sure, but I would be hard pressed to say it’s been all downhill after the first year.
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Just install Revanced
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How on iOS?
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Really, if you've kept using apple all the way up until now, it's kinda on you.
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Pipepipe has been more reliable for me, lately.
But who knows how long these alternative front-ends will last? It's a constant cat and mouse game between volunteers and Google.
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How does this app survive economically?
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Apps don't need finances to survive. The creator of the app could be working on it entirely because they want to, and not because they get paid. As far as I know, NewPipe is just a front-end. It doesn't host anything, and just runs as a client to essentially give a new interfwce to YouTube.
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Labor of love, I suspect
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Most open source projects are not financially driven. The bigger projects, such as this, usually function like non-profit organizations.
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Tip: Peertube Companion is a good extension for directing you to duplicates of the video you're trying to watch if it can be found elsewhere.
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Websites have been able to detect VPN usage for a long time.
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Lately while on VPN I’m able to watch videos and sometime have to solve a captcha to prove I’m not a bot, but if I’m using nothing (at home on WiFi) it’ll ask me to sign in to make sure I’m not a bot 🤷🏻♂️🤷🏻♂️.. Like wtf
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Everything detects VPNs. Reddit has an error screen I've never seen before about network activity when I use a VPN and I'm not logged in. YouTube refuses to let me watch embedded videos when I'm on my VPN. Many pages simply refuse to load.
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Reddit?! Okay, that's pretty terrible. It's one thing to have region-locked copyright for stuff, but disallowing VPNs for a web forum? While we don't need more evidence that they've turned heel, that's an awful big red flag.
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Oh no, I guess I'll just have to not use YouTube. How tragic?
Pretty confident you could get around this but is it even worth clicking the button to switch addresses or use a different VPN? Eh...
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Not worth it
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They've been able to detect commercial VPNs for a long time. They're just starting to care enough to take some action now.
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I rolled my own VPN, no issues. Won't say how because I got my ass beat for recommending it last time.
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I have a Tridactyl rule to rewrite YouTube URL to
youtube-local(repository https://github.com/user234683/youtube-local/ ) e.g. https://www.youtube.com/ becomes http://localhost:9999/https://www.youtube.com but as others have suggested, I do my bet to avoid YouTube entirely, because Google is bad, Big Tech is bad. -
Me: Leave that to me. I know what I want.
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I watched youtube religously 10-15 years ago. Now when I try to enjoy some content, I struggle to find anything of quality that's in my feed. Sometimes I'm scrolling for 10 minutes and give up. Their algorithm for what might interest me was so much better back then.
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Proxies still have an IP address.
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Lol, I guess I wont be watching the latest mr beast mukbang
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I'm just going to say it: YouTube really started going to shit when professional, monetized YouTubers started becoming a big thing.
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I'd like to see folks do more PeerTube instances in the future or something similar grow but there is cost involved that people don't have with YouTube.
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NewPipe
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Honestly, Newpipe gets blocked more often than just using browser. Probably because of they detected API calls or something.
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Try Tubular, which is NewPipe plus SponsorBlock which makes the video watching experience even better. :)
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Revanced.
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NewPipe.
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VPN still does this on my revanced
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Revanced ftw.
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TOR?
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Brb, gonna change the circuit 20 times to find that one exit IP that didn't get blocked.
Also waiting 10 minutes for the video to load, xD
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I think you can change some config thing to have the exit node be in a certain country so it may help? (Thought i am not sure if there is, the last time i configurated anything was for using HTTP), also, i have had a good expirience with the speed on TOR, i am in europe, where are you?
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Welp.
At least nord has some protcol thing that should be able to avoid it
(edit: it's called NordWhisper)
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I love that this complaint is posted to Lemmy: a platform that forces me to pause my VPN to make a comment.
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Using Tor right now, no idea what you are talking about... oh right you use that instance.
.world =/= "Lemmy" 😉
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Yeah, world is kinda shitty for that
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I needed to fiddle around with YouTube a lot, so it won't try to shove mediocre Pewdiepie clones but Hungarian (or more recently, Hungarian chud slop) down my throat.
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Why do people still use YouTube if they hate it so much?
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There aren't really any alternatives.
I'm ok with YouTube due to using strong ad-blockers, browser extensions, and I don't log in. Seems that these 3 things cut most of the bullshit.
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Don't like YouTube, do like the content creators on YouTube.
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There are literally 0 good alternatives now, my only hope is fairplay (which is now in development)
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A lack of alternatives is not an excuse to continue using something you don’t like. I honestly don’t get the culture around all the YouTube hate.
I don’t use shit that I don’t like. I don’t support things that I don’t agree with the practices of. YouTube treats its users and creators like shit. Know what?
They’ll continue to do so as long as people keep using their platform. That’s how it goes. It’s not going to change. And every workaround that is created, will get squashed.
People that are always complaining about it, and then continuing to use it just blows my mind. I’ll never understand it- even when people try and justify it. And that there are no alternatives basically just says that you’re willing to eat whatever shit they serve you, so long as you get your fix.
It’s an addiction at this point. You’re willfully enduring shit you hate so you can have moments of shit you enjoy.
(Not directed at you personally, just those that don’t see what’s going on)
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Why do people still use YouTube if they hate it so much?
VPNs aren't hard to detect, especially if you're using a major service.
100% this, I work in cyber sec and it's very easy these days for services to detect this.
What about TOR browser?
Feel sorry for the guy in the datacenter using Netflix on his brake.
Offering Xzibit some new ideas
Must be hard to see all the way down in the foot well.