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.
That’s a feature to improve your mental health.
the first thing i do with any yT frontend is disabling comments. When i was on linux desktop i used to zap them with uBlock. Why would anybody want to read them?🤷
sethMeyers started torturing himself with yT comments during covid lockdowns in Corrections. It’s fun to see somebody ridiculously engaging with that cesspool 🤣
There are channels that have good, constructive comments
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
True that. Google are starting the big crack down.
I personally feel these are the end days of what’s left of the freedom internet.
Until platforms like Lemmy and mastadon and tools like blender, godot, etc etc, take over every aspect of the commercial systems, then we’re beholden to the corporates.
We need to evolve, and move on.
I personally feel these are the end days of what’s left of the freedom internet.
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.
Yeah, doesn’t work on NewPipe for like a week.
I use Firefox + ublock and noticed the youtube comments dissappearing as well.
Im not knowledgeable enough to really understand what I’m actually doing when i use this “fix” but - i noticed if i disable cosmetic filtering in Ublock, comments reappear, but they dissappear again when enabling cosmetic filtering again.
Not sure if that’ll apply to you but that’s about all i know.
And with piped I see placeholder text “Avatar, null, -1 replies” in place of every comment.
Yes. Seen that with some videos since weeks with Piped.video.
Evem on the youtube site with just sponsorblock and strict UBlockOrigin the comments don’t work
Yep, I’ve noticed that too.
I’ve seen that happen, too, and sure enough, on my LibreTube app, which pulls from piped, I can’t see any comments right now. For whatever reason, videos aren’t actually playing, either, but there might just be something weird going on with the app.
What an incredibly good opportunity to switch to polycentric comments.
Working fine for me on Revanced
Revanced is the stock YouTube client, it doesn’t use an alternative backend
The thread stated frontends, though 🤔
Bro said The last one is kind of funny actually, and better than most comments anyway. 💀
Removed by mod
Still working for me on Freetube.
my comments work on freetube, but not immediately. I gotta ask it to load comments a couple of times before it stops spazzin and shows them.
Not for me anymore :/
Still works on Clipious in my experience. Clipious is invidious on mobile and has a clean UI.
Libretube works sometimes, but I often have to press load several times.
