this post was submitted on 14 Apr 2024
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Privacy
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I would encourage people to watch the video and form a conclusion based on that. The title is quite clickbaity (which you would expect from YouTube) and at least half of the video is solely a critique of NordVPN, often followed up with "but Mullvad is better". He does make some worthwhile points but they are not universally applicable. Every country has different governments and laws; do not blindly trust the word of Americans because they likely do not know shit about your specific situation. For example, nothing in his video addressed Australia's mandatory data collection and retention laws, or the multiple high profile data breaches that have occurred here in recent years.
I don't know how good or bad NordVPN is. I have never used it. But I never will. EVER.
You know why?
Because they paid so many interesting Youtubers to shill their stupid VPN service, ruined so many otherwise interesting Youtube videos and wasted so much of my time that I swore I would never give them a single dollar of my money.
I can't stand advertisement and advertisers, and NordVPN has been truly heavy-handed. They're not the only ones: Brilliant comes to mind too. They can all fuck off. They've achieved the exact opposite of what their ads was supposed to achieve with me: I'll never patronize them.
uBlock Origin + SponsorBlock + third party mobile client is the solution.
Actually I use Freetube with sponsorblock on the desktop and Newpipe with sponsorblock on Android. So I mostly don't see shitty sponsors anymore.
But my Formuler TV box - which runs Android - has some weird crashing problem with the default Newpipe player, so I have to use an external player (MX Player) which doesn't have sponsorblock, sadly.
So whenever I want to watch Youtube videos on my TV, I have to eat some NordVPN shilling - at least a little bit, just time for me to grab the remote and skip it - and I'm too cheap to replace the TV box.
You could try Smart Tube which has built in adblock and sponsorblock and see if that works better on your android tv box
SmartTube works very well. The problem is, it requires a Youtube account to have subscriptions, playlists and the like. That's a hard no for me.
Fair enough, completely understandable
Shout out for Smart Tube, the best YT app on smart boxes/android TVs, never had any issues