this post was submitted on 26 May 2025
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Sort of hard to exist without interacting with Google at all (lots of the material I'm given in courses is hosted on YouTube).
Your best bet is to use separate isolated/siloed accounts for their different services, never let your GCS account be attached to Gmail or one of their consumer facing products for example, lest it get nuked because some automated system went haywire and now you're scrambling to get the account back.
I explicitely did not claim that.
And as the other guy said, you don't need a G account to watch youtube.
You can use YouTube without an account. And without even using their website, bypassing their ads and their tracking.
Android has Grayjay, Newpipe, Pipepipe, Vanced. Windows has Grayjay, Newpipe, Freetube, yt-dl and others. Linux has Red, Utube, Freetube.. You get the point.
You do still need a login for age-locked videos, but those are a small subset of YouTube.
For now. Google is clearly experimenting with baking ads into the delivered video streams, YT Premium members get served different endpoints already in preparation.
that's a problem too, but the discussion was about interacting with google. fuck them for showing ads down our throats, but at least they don't know who watches the video (when using a proxy like invidious), and so they can't build a profile of you, and they can't bombard you with tailored manipulative ads either, just something possibly totally irrelevant.
also. if you want to watch youtube on teevee on normal hardware, you are pretty much paying for premium...
Enshittification is guaranteed even for the paid tier.
Maybe there'll be silver, gold and platinum memberships next. How long til you realize you've been had?
All the content i watch gets age locked because youtube is run by prudes.