I’ve taken it one step further. YouTube as a front end is awful, and I’ve had enough. Tons of little dark patterns made to keep you on the site, annoying algorithms taking you places you never want to go, shitty ai slop, the whole nine yards. But I still like certain channels. As a result I’m doing everything self hosted now - not just YouTube but literally every single piece of digital media I consume. For YouTube I had to create a rotating pool of 5 residential ISP proxies - replaced as soon as YouTube download bot restrictions kick in - and rotated weekly either way.

With this I am able to get all my favorite subs onto my actual hard drive, with some extra awesome features as a result: I vibe coded a little helper app that lets me query the transcript of the video and ask questions about what they say, using cheap haiku queries. I can also get my subs onto my jellyfin server and be able to view it in there on any device. Even comments get downloaded.

All these streamers have gone too far trying to maximize engagement and have broken the social contract, so I see this as totally fair game.