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YouTube Review

2023-07-29 19:28:23Z (last updated 2023-10-16 08:55:03Z)

This blog post is going to be my review on YouTube.

Warning: I am biased

This is your warning that I am very biased about YouTube, so consider this as my perspective, not the world's.

The user interface

The user interface part on YouTube seems to prioritize on thumbnails, most of them which contain "shock" or "surprise" faces. I would give you a few examples, but I'm not sure how you're supposed to link to only the thumbnail of the video.

Last I checked, the dark theme on YouTube is pretty much black, although it can change with "Ambience mode" which just copies the colors from the video onto the page background.

It's not something I care about, since I use Invidious instead of whatever is on youtube.com. I also sometimes use NewPipe with SponsorBlock and mpv (the latter I blogged about the setup for).

Invidious

NewPipe with SponsorBlock

mpv

Blog post about setup for mpv with YouTube

The videos

Arrows, extremely "shocked" or "surprised" faces, and non-existent things are in thumbnails of many videos on YouTube. Even more, the titles have quite a bit of sensationalism. But that's only the title and thumbnail.

DeArrow tries to reduce all that crap on the titles and thumbnails.

DeArrow

That doesn't solve all of the problems. Because ~~This video is sponsored by SponsorBlock~~ sponsorships are burned into the videos, and they're annoying too. SponsorBlock sounds like what it is: It "blocks" sponsorships from videos. And by "block", I mean skip, because it skips.

SponsorBlock

SponsorBlock also got more things than just skipping sponsors. It has many segment categories, including "Unpaid/Self Promotion", "Interaction Reminder (Subscribe)", Intros, Outros/endcards, and more segment types I didn't include here.

Using the SponsorBlock extension means probably saving a lot of time that would otherwise be wasted on things you don't care about!

Money

It seems like a few "YouTubers" or "Content Creators" (or however you want to call them) rely on YouTube revenue. That's not great, especially when the platform's website is trying to get you to stop using Ad Blockers so you can view videos.

Louis Rossmann on YouTube blocking Ad Blockers.

Ads, a personal experience with them

Before I figured out what Invidious is and what NewPipe is, I was using the YouTube app on my iPhone.

Invidious

NewPipe

I went to the US, and low and behold, it's a scam ad impersonating Mr. Beast.

That was probably the first thing I saw when I arrived to the US and opened up YouTube.

However, I should note that I "went to the US". I don't live in the US (who would've thought). However, I still do get ads, and I don't like the ads either.

Problem for me with ads in my place is that it's in another language. I do not understand the language very well, so take my judgement as a grain of salt.

I think I was getting things like political ads. Yeah, I'm not sure, but I don't think that's great either.

Conclusion

YouTube isn't great, and there's a lot of extensions to make it better (or worse for some, in their opinion).

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