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Comment by o_m | Hacker News Reader

I deleted my youtube/google account and started using RSS feeds instead.

The only sane way to consume YouTube these days.

I also just manage a curated list of channels and consume via RSS, with YT perpetually blocked, short of a few re-review days per year.

Youtube is also basically unwatchable without both adblock and sponsorblock. At this point most videos are are at least 1/3rd clipped by the latter.

I subscribe to YouTube Premium to skip all interstitial ads. It’s absolutely worth it to me. I like to think I’m helping someone at G make the business case for subscription-based, ad-free products and services.

Sponsor segments are easily skippable with a few fast-forward fingertaps, or right-arrow taps on a keyboard.

Why manually scrub through videos when there's a tool to do it automatically for you and re-cut the video into a seamless block of content?

Every browser plug-in is an additional exploit vector. Never know when the plug-in author might sell out or get hacked. When that happens you’re one auto-update away from catastrophe. I also enjoy the more creative sponsor segments, like Internet Historian’s.

If this is a concern it is supported in yt-dlp and mpv.

Has anyone found a reliable way to block the ads on Android TV that isn't "root your TV and install and use this weird App you get from this website here"? Would a Pi-Hole work long-term?

Yes. SmartTubeNext: https://github.com/yuliskov/SmartTubeNext. I use it with a FireTV stick since it's much easier than hacking my Samsung TV. It supports SponsorBlock too. It lacks some YT features but if you just want to browse and watch videos it works wonderfully.

Why not just use the subscriptions tab and ignore the home page?

For what it's worth, can't organize that subscriptions tab by any meaningful way. At least none that I know of.

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