Greetings y’all. I’ve been using ways to circumvent YouTube ads for years now. I’d much rather donate to creators directly instead of using Google as a middle man, needing YouTube Premium. If even pay for premium for just a add free version, if the price wouldn’t be so outrageous. I’ve So far used adblockers, Vanced and then Revanced.
Since the recent developments in this matter, I’ve setup Tubearchivist, a self hosted solution to download YouTube videos for later consumption. It mostly works great, with a few minor things that bother me but I highly recommend it. ReVanced also still works, but nobody knows for how long.
The question now is, if I should use a VPN to obscure my identity to Google. I don’t know if I’m being paranoid here but I wouldn’t put it past Google to block my account, if they see YouTube traffic for my IP address and no served ads. Revanced even uses my main Google account, so not that far fetched.
So far, or at least to my knowledge, Google has never done this but I think they just might in the future. So I’m planning on putting tubearchivist behind a VPN via gluetun.
What do you think? I’m eager to hear your opinions on this.
I can also add my docker compose, if there’s interest and when I’m back on my PC.
They might do it, but there could also be a cost to Google if they started banning people’s accounts based on uncertain behavioural metrics. I expect it would at least be a while before they’d go that far. But a VPN can’t hurt.