I use Firefox and uBlock Origin. Not sure what kind of experience anyone else is having with YouTube, but recently my home page has been empty because I “don’t have watch history turned on”. Okay, fine. I won’t be able to browse suggested videos, and I’ll spend less time on their platform.
Then I began to get warnings about using an adblocker. Okay, fine. I know they need to make money, so I turned off the adblocker. Now when I’m having my time wasted by ads, I have to ask myself, how bad do I really want to watch this video? Not badly enough? I close the tab and spend less time on their platform.
Finally, I began experiencing glitches when playing videos. The video stops, but the audio continues. This never happened before. Perhaps mistakenly, I attribute this to YouTube, which is owned by Google, trying to force me off Firefox and on to Chrome. That was the last straw.
Now I use YouTube to simply follow the channels I’m subscribed to. When I want to watch something, I copy the URL, paste it into YT-DLP, download the video and spend zero time on their platform at all.
To summarize; Now I’m watching zero commercials, and YouTube is streaming the entire video to me, even if I only watch a small portion of it, and they’re collecting less information about my watching habits than ever before.
Nice job, YouTube. Nice job.
The site is more for illustrative purposes, since they don’t have nearly close the same amount of users as large sites like YouTube, and there is no way to know which data points exactly does some website take into account at any given moment or to what level… but you can export the results and compare them between devices, places, over time, or try to mess with them, like you said.