First time this happens to me. With a German protonvpn server.
YouTube doesn’t like VPNs. Harder to track you (and sell/monetize your data) if they can’t tell who you are.
I desperately want a viable alternative to come along. There’s a lot of great content on YouTube, but the platform is increasingly being enshitified.
Pornhub.
They have the technology and many of the features in place.
Now if only you could hide the pornographic stuff to not accidentally see disgusting nudity.
There’s nothing “disgusting” about nudity. You should shake off those preconceived cultural biases, you’ll be a better person.
It’s a gigantic money sink, it’s going to be extremely hard to come up with a profitable (or break even) alternative.
I agree. We just haven’t gotten to the point quite yet. Where the creators revolt. But that stage should appear somewhat shortly.
Third party app without an account maybe? Freetube on the desktop and newpipe on the phone is what I like to use. There’s stuff like grayjay, tubearchivist, and pinchflat as well. Or just go straight yt-dlp.
Youtube does a ton of evil stuff, but this one is more tame. I suspect the VPN was used to bot and got banned, so the sign-in is required to better target where the traffic is allowed to go, instead of blanket banning everybody using the service.
I suspect the VPN was used to bot
There are plenty of sources, including even in this thread, indicating that that this is not the problem. Quit making excuses for them.
uhhh… what?
It’s not just you. I’m tired of the whole team of people who are always standing by to bring out similar excuses any time someone decides that in their quest to stop invidious from existing — or whatever google is actually aiming at — it’s acceptable to just mass-block all the VPN users as collateral damage.
It’s not an excuse though. It’s right there in the error message.
Where are people getting the impression I think google is some kind of saint who can do no wrong? I don’t even see the “proof” that is being used to say I’m coming to google’s defense. Just a few anecdotal theories… just like I provided.
Ah, so it’s not you coming up with the stupid excuse that they have legit reasons to think the user might be a nefarious “bot”, you’re just passing along the stupid excuse as you interpret it from the meaningless message direct from Google. That explains where you got the idea that “viewbots” had anything to do with it, I guess.
So what they can bot with VPN without signing in?
Bot can automate views. It’s why Youtube keeps trying to move towards “engagement”. Comments, likes, etc, all require an account, which is an extra hurdle for bots.
You’re on Android use NewPipe and it’s forks, personally I prefer Tubular and PipePipe.
Periodically YouTube will break, but both of those forks, as well as new pipe prime, update fairly quickly.
GrayJay it’s interesting. It has different feel and feature set than newpipe, but it’s worth using. I will say I get more login errors with GrayJay, but closing the app and reopening it resolves it.
All the piped apps will be in f-droid/droidify, you can download GrayJay directly, or just scan the QR to add the repo to a FOSS repo manager.
This helps protect our
communityrevenue.“Protecting our community” isn’t even a good excuse, you can’t leave comments without an account…
Protecting our
communityprofits
Yea, been having this BIGTIME. Even occurs on grayjay, and pipe apps (newpipe, etc.) Its aggravating. Can’t even download vids either, and the ones u have downloaded are held ransom until u turn it off too 😂 at least in my case. Fuck google.
Try Freetube, it still works well, even with videos that are age limited.
This is the result of them blocking invidious. They targeted large Datacenter nodes and check for the number of requests from those datacenters that aren’t logged in, and block them until that number meets a certain threshold. This also causes people with VPNs to get this message. The solution is to connect to smaller self-hosted invidious instances or using proxies hosted on normal residential ips.
Have you considered trying out NewPipe or its fork Tubular (with SponsorBlocck built in)?
Tubular works like a charm like 98% of the time (which is way more than YouTube apps, LOL).
Try clicking the sign in button, then navigating back to the video without actually signing in. Seems to work every time I’ve tried it so far.
the stupidest thing about this is that I literally am signed into youtube (yeah yeah, I know), and I still get this shit!
Yeah. Our work endpoint is in AWS. YouTube hates that. So does reddit.
Been seeing that a fair bit too lately. Freetube, Grayjay, and Newpipe seem so sometimes get around it, even if the error is in the browser the video will sometimes load in those apps from the same IP. If you get lucky and find a working invidious/piped instance that might work too.
Otherwise, turning on a VPN and switching between servers will usually eventually lead to a working one. That, and if you’re up for it, check to see if your favorite creators are on places like Peertube, Odysee, or Rumble that don’t block IPs like YouTube does.
As much as it isn’t preferred, I can usually bypass the sign in shenanigans by going directly to the website to watch something without signing in. I usually only get the login prompt when going through my browser or a search engine.
I get it on reddit :/
Redlib is a handy accountless frontend for reddit that still works
That’s what I mean though, trying to watch any YT video embedded anywhere without being signed in will yield that error, but I usually don’t have that problem on YT’s direct website, even without login. Still ridiculous, but so is Google
You’re on Android use NewPipe and it’s forks, personally I prefer Tubular and PipePipe.
Periodically YouTube will break, but both of those forks, as well as new pipe prime, update fairly quickly.
GrayJay is interesting… It has different feel and feature set than newpipe, but it’s worth using. I will say I get more login errors with GrayJay, but closing the app and reopening it resolves them immediately.
All the piped apps will be in f-droid/droidify, you can download GrayJay directly, or just scan the QR to add the repo to a FOSS repo manager.
You will have the same issue with NewPipe.
I use both of them everyday. I’m using one of them right now.
Haven’t had that issue.