I do like YouTube, but won't embed it anymore
I really like YouTube, and I first remember using it back in 2008 or so. It’s a fantastic platform for getting to new content, even though it’s run in a way that goes against a lot of my personal preferences (lots of tracking, lots of advertising, some questionable policies).
For non-paying users, Free YouTube is absolutely invested with ads. It’s basically unusable. Unfortunately I was forced to switch to YouTube premium a while ago because there are several content creators I really like, where their content isn’t posted elsewhere.
On the OliveTin homepage however, there’s been a YouTube demo video hosted for several years. I was appauled when I saw just how much javascript was being loaded, how many cookies were being set, and how much junk was being loaded onto the page. So, today I switched to just the standard element that is now in HTML for many years, serving a simple .webm video straight from GitHub Pages.
I do intend to actually create more of my own YouTube tech videos at some point, but I figure that’s fine, if your viewers are already on YouTube, they’ve made a concious choice to accept the rules of that platform. However, embedding YouTube on unsuspecting visitors to your site is something I’m going to stop doing.
So, I do like YouTube, but I won’t force it on others by embedding it on sites anymore.
James is a "full stack" Open Source enthusiast, who enjoys creating no-nonsense open source software.