Mildly Infuriating

VPNs aren't hard to detect, especially if you're using a major service.

This isnt new. Its been happening for years. There is a post about this on lemmy every few weeks. It just doesnt happen consistently, so people always think that they "discovered" this for the first time.

The real highlight is the contradictory text.

To continue, turn off your VPN/Proxy. This will allow YouTube to locate the best content".

"We refuse to serve you anything other than the best 'located content'."

A fat lie. Combining refusal with the completely unrelated supposed service improvement of location-based content. To disingenuously sound like they're doing you a service.

"This will allow Youtube to locate the best content" 🤡

This happens via simple lists of IP addresses, no? I.e. the VPN has a limited number of exit IPs and once it's known who they belong to, they're easy to block?

They always could. What appears to be happening is that channels now have the option to turn on "a switch" so that content wont play if a VPN is detected. Most VPN ip addresses are well known, because they arent a secret. Everyone who uses the VPN goes through it.

If you come across the above message, its because the content creator turned it on. I had it come up with "stick to football". Its the only thing that it comes up with. I just unsubbed and wont watch anymore. Im not turning off my VPN for anyone or anything. Id rather just go with out. I encourage all of you to do the same.

When I see content blocks like that anymore, I just leave the content behind and go elsewhere. Malicious companies will not get my clicks. They can fuck right off.

Good sign though, means they are getting desperate. It is our duty to starve them of traffic.

I encounter VPN blocks everywhere frequently. I usually just reroll my selected server until the block goes away

The "best content" being ip-located ads, probably.

VPN ads seriously need to stop promising that you can get around content restrictions.

As someone who uses multiple VPNs daily I have a suggestion. Try to locate a different server and connect to it. See if there’s a drop down menu in your VPN app. Sometimes a particular IP on one of those servers flags websites’ fraud detection. Sometimes I can switch servers on my VPN and refresh the page and it loads just fine.

If only you don't serve ads containing literal porn to my face with my VPN off 😡😡

Well, they need to make sure the right people are watching the right propaganda.

I mean... detecting (some) VPNs is as trivial as

fetch('https://github.com/NazgulCoder/IPLists/raw/refs/heads/main/output/vpn-ipv4.txt').then( res => res.text() ).then( res => console.log( res.includes( "1.2.3.4" ) ) )

thanks to https://github.com/NazgulCoder/IPLists/

FWIW though I did try, connected via a random VPN from ProtonVPN from Argentina... and it wasn't in that list. So it's not perfect. Also ProtonVPN has apparently today 13K servers according to https://protonvpn.com/vpn-servers

That being said I can imagine that Google, which is literally built on crawling the Web, has all the infrastructure and expertise needed to have such lists and up to date ones.

I'm not justifying blocking VPN here, only trying to clarify that unless you self-host in a rather specific setup (i.e. not relying a popular cloud provider but truly self hosting) it's technically not hard to block VPNs.

I'm surprised it took so long, I've not been able to watch Channel 5 for years.

Anyhow, I love Revanced.

Listen at this point, we either re-upload our favorite creator's content to other platforms. Convince them to join alternatives or help out *their replacements" on those alternative platforms to grow.

Either way I do not respect content-creators that do not support alternative platforms (& decentralization) on principle

Oh, so what they’re really saying is that a platform owned by GOOGLE has trouble FINDING the best content?

Everyone knows.

See, there is the problem, if you use a VPN you dont allow Google to locate the best content! Nothing to see here, YouTube is only trying to be helpful here, Google is absolutely not trying to use you as a data nugget to get rich from

It's time to switch to Newpipe or Invidious, YouTube clients focused on privacy, without adverts and without Google's clutches.

Sure, there's big lists of them right here.

https://github.com/az0/vpn_ip

Hardly a secret.

Dude, I seem to find more sites that break when using my VPN than those that allow it. The bastards are winning

People don't realize how much shit youtube/google ignores over time, for whatever reasons (but mostly because it's cheaper to ignoer I'd guess). With most major consumer VPN providers, this is very easy to detect. Adblockers are easy to detect. Tampering with the website structure? Believe it or not, quite easy to detect when someone hide a component or change a title or a button.

If they decided to seriously get after people that circumvent geofencing, people that block ads, people that change the interface to their liking, or people that plainly use alternative websites, they could easily. And it would require far less effort on their end to keep things complicated than it would require on our end to keep things working at an acceptable level.

"This will allow YouTube to locate the best content"

They mean slop? Another reason why I still use Newpipe on mobile.

locate the best content

Hell nah, please dont