Ad-Free YouTube With a Custom Player

As enshittification marches on, more ads, more dark patterns, more UI designed to serve the platform instead of the user, I've found myself writing more and more userscripts to just take back control of my own browser. The web is full of it these days. Search results that bury the actual answer under AI summaries and SEO slop, cookie banners engineered to trick you into opting in, UI patterns designed to get you to click something you never intended to. I've just started writing small scripts to deal with it, nothing fancy, just enough JS to sand off the rough edges of whatever site is annoying me that week. YouTube has been one of the worst offenders. Pre-roll ads, mid-roll interruptions, recommended video overlays hijacking your screen the second a video ends. But it turns out YouTube's own embed URL has a lesser-known cousin that makes most of this go away: youtube-nocookie.com. It's their own domain, built for privacy-respecting embeds and as a side effect, it serves no ads. 🎉 The