Are comments no longer visible for anyone else using the youtube frontends? I can no longer see comments with either invidious, piped, or viewtube, and I’ve tried several instances of each. With invidious there’s just nothing there below the video description. With viewtube I get an error message. And with piped I see placeholder text “Avatar, null, -1 replies” in place of every comment. The last one is kind of funny actually, and better than most comments anyway.
I’m assuming youtube/google did something fucky again to try to dissuade people from doing what they can to escape their bullshit and hopefully viewing the comments on videos will be back to normal when the frontend devs make it work again in a couple days. But I figured it would be worth checking here to make sure it’s not just on my end. Then again, it will probably be better for my sanity and my struggle not to descend into sheer misanthropic hatred if I just never read youtube comments again.
I hope you’re wrong. I guess that should go without saying. But I don’t know, it seems like they’ve been trying to crack down and been consistently failing at it, which is hopeful. Like youtube’s attempt to make adblockers not work anymore ending up just strengthening uBlock Origin and making it work even better than it did before. lol.
Obviously, google et al have all the power, but even so, they mostly keep losing battles, which is both hilarious and hopeful. I agree that we’re seeing the further enshitification of all the big social media giants and they’re corralling and enclosing the commons more all the time. But I haven’t given up on all the little things that spring up to address that enshitification, like the frontends, like searx, and hell, even lemmy. You were 100% right, we need to evolve, but I would say these things are good mutations that are part of the process of that necessary evolution.
I don’t know, I’m too high rn not to go off on tangents.