Ever since around 2017, I have not visited (or even seen) the contemporary Youtube site.

I had been using a combination of Invidious and yt-dlp (youtube-dl).

Just within the last year or two, Google has been making efforts to obstruct these tools. This can most clearly be seen with Invidious, currently suffering from a generic "This helps protect our community" error message.

It has got me thinking that Google might eventually succeed in extinguishing these islands of safety that I've so enjoyed.

People who still use raw, unmitigated Youtube today; how much of a hellscape has it become?

Is it good employer strategy to pay my employees just enough so that they can't save money, so that they can never walk away from the job?

Like, there is a threshold where if they are able to save X per month, they will eventually use that against you and quit at an inopportune time?

And if that threshold falls below state mandated minimum wage, what steps can be taken to mitigate this?

I've amassed a sizeable hoard, nearly all encoded h264 or h265.

The space savings made by AV1 are attractive, but I don't want to move on it until after I've acquired hardware capable of AV1 GPU accelerated decode.

Even then, the cost of reacquiring some works has to be weighed. Storage space gets freed; but how often do I actually revisit some cherished items?

Anybody else having to make similar evaluations?

Roughly ~1/3 requests yields a loading issue. In case you were wondering why Invidious instances reliability seems to have been in decline very recently.

According to open issue

Additional context
This seems to be a global update, done before 22:23 UTC. (10:23 PM.) From my brief testing, this is present throughout all instances, and regardless of IPv6 address.

I was recently held up in absolute dead stop traffic. We were sitting on the tarmac with no movement for well over an hour, in the 80 degree sun, before I felt obliged to leave my car and go see if it was because of roadwork or an accident or what.

I joined a small crowd of onlookers after reaching the head, spectating a row of sit-in protesters. One driver had tried to get around but a few protesters moved tactically so that he couldn't go any further without injuring somebody.

I didn't wait around, although there were people phoning the police and some tempers beginning to flare. So I head back to my car. The dairy groceries that I picked up on the way back from work had begun to spoil.

I was late home by nearly three hours, so no time to unwind. Just enough to pack away some old leftovers before heading off to sleep and restart cycle all over, -1 hour or so of sleep.

Previously, I had no opinion whatsoever on whether cars=good or cars=bad. But after being held up in traffic, wasting money, wasting gas, losing sleep and perhaps a bit of my sanity I am now totally on board with the Fuck Cars movement. I couldn't imagine a more convincing strategy to bring people over to your perspective. Excellent thinking. Good job.