At this point we should just start torrenting YouTube. Like fuck YouTube.

Close the door, turn off the lights, wear earbuds, pull a duvet over your head. Works every time. Might look a bit suspicious, but at least it's private.

Seriously though, it's getting pretty bad. I'm currently shifting my video watching habits away from YT. I have a feeling that sooner rather than later I may have to quit YT completely.

There are several way, honestly. For Android, there's NewPipe. The app itself fetches the YouTube data. For PC, there are similar applications that do the same such FreeTube. Those are the solutions I recommend.

If you're one of those, you can also host your own Invidious and/or Piped instances. But I like NewPipe and FeeTube better.

Just firefox with ublock origin.

I host my own invidious

i just search it on dukdukgo and use their viewer

You can still use yt-dlp with most of the invidious instances that are still up, but not displaying the video for some reason. Just copy the URL and use it with yt-dlp from the command line. All still works, sponsor block and all.

On my android phone I use either invidious with seal(yt-dlp wrapper app) or tubular (fork of newpipe with sponsor block).

Freetube and Grayjay. Grayjay has a desktop app now.

Freetube is a useful project as it allows you to "fallback" on a non-preferred frontend.

https://github.com/FreeTubeApp/FreeTube

This allows you to continue to use Youtube irregardless of which frontend is (potentially not) working.

In 'Settings > General' you'll want to select "Invidious API" as your "Preferred API backend" and specify your favorite invidious instance in the "Current Invidious Instance" field and click "Set Current Instance as Default". This locks FreeTube into the specified instance.

Then, when you notice that FreeTube is issuing notices to you about your favorite Invidious Instance being down, you can wander back to 'Settings > General'; hit the "Clear Default Invidious Instance" Button and wait as FreeTube magically contacts the "https://api.invidious.io/" page for you and selects a new, and hopefully online and working Invidious instance. (You may have to hit this button several times to roll a working instance, Hit the button, check the subs page and see if everything loads, repeat if it falls back on the Local API.)

When you run into instances where you can't roll up a good Invidious instance; the built in Local API is running a NewPipe Extractor like API directly from your FreeTube client. Not the best; but at least it keeps things working while you wait for the Invidious devs to fix things up; and it still reasonably preserves as much of your privacy as it can while doing this to the best effort it can.

...Sadly this doesn't work when Google manages a double combo of breaking both Invidious and NewPipe; but I have found that this is less often the case and the devs of either project are usually fairly quick about getting fixes out. Bless their hard work with a donation sometime maybe, if you can.

yt-dlp

Downside is that you'll have to regularly delete all the videos you've downloaded.

I download the videos I want to watch with yt-dlp. This applies to audio as well. I then add the videos to my Jellyfin server to watch them on the TV.

Hell, I'm having issues using the plain old YouTube website. It tries to make me sign in.

I download it with yt-dlp and watch it with a video player. that way they don't know at what pace do I watch it (when do I rewind and pause, or speed up).

or grayjay when I remember that it exists.
other options for me include FreeTube and NewPipe

New pipe android app. Been using it for years with no issues accessing YouTube.

Grayjay

Grayjay.app

I use https://freetubeapp.io/

I use grayjay as you can use a google account to bypass the "confirm your not a bot" but then have the ability to subscribe, comment, and save video playback without a google account.

I pay a subscription to nebula and most of the creators i want are on there.

I signed up for PeerTube, uploaded all my videos there, and updated my old YT vid descriptions that say "can't watch this video? Click here to view ad-free on PeerTube"

I discovered that I watch enough YouTube to warrant paying for a premium subscription. I've turned off viewing history (after one video, so the homepage renders).

This isn't a solution for everyone, but it works for me.

I feel like most have misunderstood the point of the question, they offer to use newpipe, yt-dlp and the like, but those aren't private, they just allow you to watch without signing in, just as you could through the official website with maybe uBlock origin, you're still exposing your IP.
The only fitting suggestion I saw is that of downloading from invidious through yt-dlp, which sounds pretty neat, I had no idea you could when the web frontend is apparently not working

Tubular on on mobile and trying to find a Non Electron app for pc

Freetube and newpipe for me. However I will say they just don't work sometimes. So then I just am left with my browser.

Downie.app (MacOS) and yt-dlp (multiplatform).

I am not watching YouTube content while these are blocked. I will not watch stupid ads. I will not submit to shitty platforms that suck. Until these work again, there is no YouTube.

I'm finding other ways to fill my free time during the holiday break. I'll have a bevy of new content to watch when they're updated.

YTDLnis

You can watch, download video, download only audio.