So often I see a YouTube video in my feed that I think is titled as herbole and don’t want to reward the poster for their click bait bullshit, but there’s no way to know without opening the video and checking comments.
You can use Freetube. No connection back to YouTube. There’s an extension that will open YT links in the app rather than the browser. You can watch videos and read comments without an account. You cannot upvote or post comments, of course.
I use it on desktop, I don’t know whether it works on mobile.
I have my browser (Firefox) set to never play videos with:
user_pref("media.autoplay.default", 5); user_pref("media.autoplay.blocking_policy", 2);On mobile, I use “PipePipe” (NewPipe fork) which has a setting to not play videos on load. It’s possible to load just comments I’m sure (API or whatever they do already), I’ve found however just blocking all video from playing without a click across the entire internet leads to a nicer day. These settings should stop your click-to-read-comments from counting as a view or play of the video itself.
