I’m using a stock Samsung Galaxy 8 phone right now (with Android 10) and I disabled the YouTube app. I was basically sick of its s***. Since then, I never sign in to the app/site, and so may aspects of using the site are much better now.

  • Everything is faster, since they don’t know me / aren’t tracking as much.
  • I always open YT in Firefox Focus, which doesn’t ever keep cookies or history each time I close it, so there’s no history for YT to mine each time I visit again.
  • I’m pretty sure I see fewer ads since I don’t have a deep history for YT to mine / target.
  • More random suggestions from YT means I am mostly broken out of the bubble caused by their tracking. I find new, interesting music, for instance, now, from the suggestions.
  • Hitting “back” in the browser means I go back wherever I was before, not to the YT home page (like the app used to do to me)

I still visit the site often, and appreciate all the good music and channels I watch, but now it’s overall a much more positive experience, more like YT was a few years ago versus the horrible mess it’s become recently.

I’d still appreciate any other tips anyone has for making YT visits even more enjoyable.

  • stardust@lemmy.ca
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    1 year ago

    On the other I love that you don’t need an account to be able to “subscribe” for a custom feed, group channels into custom categories, or make playlists. And all being able to get backed up locally.

    • Nithanim@programming.dev
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      1 year ago

      On one hand it’s great that it works that way. On the other hand, I use youtube only sometimes on my tablet so I would like to have my subscriptions carried over. Can’t have it all I guess.