Alt nominations:
Grayjay (Android)
Freetube (PC)

The problem with money being involved is it's an invitation to spam crap everywhere.

One of my relatives has recently taken up "AI travel videos" and "AI cute videos" as a "hobby". No doubt based on the first thing that came up when I searched for those things, a video titled "make $10,000 a month spamming up YouTube with your AI slop".

Oh, and it needs you to buy the AI slop generating tools that they happen to sell. How convenient!

I mean, this also happened with broadcast TV, where we suddenly went from like 4 channels filled with programs and things competing for space, to 200 channels, where the rush was on to fill the gaps between the adverts as cheaply as possible with reality show tat. And that's all YouTube is now.

The other problem is storage and bandwidth.

There is the PeerTube network, which works like Lemmy.

It's subscription based, but Nebula is creator owned I believe. Sucks though that everything free gets acquired by some extractive company.

Odysee is actually doing amazing. The interface is great and the speed is even better than Youtube at the moment.

They are however swithing their core structure from one blockchain powered storage model to another one, so at the moment it's a bit guesswork and could possibly turn out very bad. (ArWeave bought them...)

Regarding the far right content on the platform; yes, there is a bit of it, but I have only once come across it, and I was actually browsing some categories relating to politics. So in normal usage, following content creators and checking what Odysee is featuring, you'll not come across them. But even if you do, Odysee's block/mute functionality works better than the one on YouTube.

50$ Chinese android phone is faster tho

It really is maddening how slow these expensive ass smart TVs are. Updating the software at all is often enough to make them nearly unusable

Shows you how much of a dent they’re putting in the bottom line.

Or how desperate google execs are to get even the tiniest bump in revenue.

GrayJay is the only one that seems to still work without issue but it's getting updates very regularly.

YouTube and my existing Gmail is the only thing tying me back. And the occasional Google maps. I don't even use the rest of their services anymore

AdBlocking is 100% OK, that part is correct for sure. Ad networks (including Google's) routinely serve up scams and malware: It is foolish not to use a browser with a fully functional ad blocker at this point (i.e. avoid Chrome, use Firefox with uBlock origin).

As for whether Google approves: Fuck Google! They have been serving up malware and scams in their ads. Their opinion should be irrelevant if you have any interest in protecting yourself, they have repeatedly proven they cannot and should not be trusted.

It still lasts because there's no easy way YT can offer their own content without the video being available as a file stream (through CDNs at googlevideos subdomains). If they centralize everything to a single, controlled domain (so to allow things as one-time HTTPS request, better session checking and so on), they'd lost the capability of load balancing allowed by the decentralized nature of CDNs. YouTube downloaders (and, by extension, third-party YT frontends such as Invidious) exploit this CDN aspect to download the videos.

It's common to see Invidious instances momentarily blocked. The blockage can't last forever for two reasons: firstly, IPs (especially IPv4) changes due to how ISPs offer IPv4 addresses through CGNAT, so the instance IPv4 (generally domestic servers) will eventually change (often to a completely different IPv4 range) and YouTube won't know that the new IP is a former "offender". Secondly, as IPv4s works through CGNAT, Google can't keep the bans forever because this IPv4 will be eventually rotated to another client from ISP that's completely unrelated and unaware of how their IPv4 was a former address for a downloader. It's like how Signal/WhatsApp/Telegram/Facebook/phone-required services can't really keep a permanent ban for a specific prepaid number (especially on countries like Brazil, where ANATEL allows for phone number rotation when the mobile plan is cancelled), because the number will be potentially owned by another person with nothing to do with the former owner.

So, in summary, Google can either end with YouTube CDNs (ditching their load balancing), or they can try to implement an innovative way to keep load balancing while serving the request one-time only, or they won't be able to do nothing but to perpetually catch themselves drying ice cubes.

That's because it's all local to your device.