Is anyone experiencing the "Log in to confirm you're not a bot" gatekeeping from YouTube?

[Tharthan]

All of a sudden, YouTube is denying me the ability to watch videos (even embedded videos through DuckDuckGo) without logging in to a YouTube account (I had a YouTube account back around the time in first started being popular in the latter part of the 2000s, but I haven't had a YouTube account in many years, and I have no interest in making a new one.)

It wasn't doing this before, but it tells fibs about it be necessary to force people to have YouTube accounts in order to prevent "bots."

Is this new? Is anyone else experiencing this?

[Night Wing]

I have a YouTube account since I have a Gmail account. But I am always signed out of YouTube. The oddity is, YouTube will not allow me to sign in using Pale Moon. If I want to sign in to YouTube, I have to use Firefox or Waterfox.

But since I spend lots of time everyday on YouTube searching for various topics, I am never logged in using Pale Moon and I have no problems with being asked to sign in using my YouTube account to view videos.

I did experience what you are seeing (bot gatekeeper) one very late evening (near midnight), but I did not want to sign in using Firefox or Waterfox so I just went to bed. The next morning when I went to YouTube using Pale Moon, I was not asked to sign in.

Could have been a YouTube glitch do to "gremlins" in the hardware/software. Either that or YouTube's engineers fixed the problem. It has not returned for me.

[Kris_88]

Is this new? Is anyone else experiencing this?

Yes, I had this.
The problem is not in the registration, but in some discrepancy in the saved data inside the browser. I suspect the contents of the "storage" subfolder in the browser profile.
In short, try a fresh profile.

[van p]

No problem here.

[Goodydino]

I see that with some videos more than others. It happens with any browser. Once I get cut off, I have to wait several hours before I can use YouTube again. I can delay when the cutoff happens to some degree by clearing private data frequently. With long videos, YouTube is not quite so picky. I guess timing is important as well.

[RealityRipple]

Just wondering, if you use uTube with the "Privacy-Enhanced" feature enabled, does the issue still persist? It uses the youtube-nocookie.com domain for embedding, which I'd assume would be less strict about this kind of thing.

[Falna]

I only get it if I forget to quit my VPN first.