You OP are a saint

You at least have a reason to start considering deleting your account.

Use a VPN with an exit node in Albania. Youtube cannot force a signin or ads due to Albanian laws.

I use it daily. Try it. It works

Can't you use something like Freetube? Yeah you can't comment on videos, but haven't signed into my account in years

Rather than bitching about it, I did something and made Smarttube work without a google account. If that floats your boat, have at it.

To those of you advocating VPN...eat while the eating is good. .

There's a way to solve this, just look for "delete my account"

People just need to stop using American Big Tech bullshit & go with better alternatives.

It's not YouTube it's your government. Rage at the correct thing.

Also just use VPN and set the location to Switzerland or smth.

"Ahí no se nos perdió nada" --Puerto Rican saying Nothing of value was lost there. -- rough translation.

Switch to NewPipe/WizeStream or FreeTube. Freetube allows for better subscription organization.

Buy frankly, I'm interested in moving to Peertube altogether

Yes let's send our id cards to an american big tech corporation, what could possibly go wrong there.

I’m pretty sure my original Google account is over 18 years old. How is that not considered proof of age?

Here it's not that bad but it started to ask me to prove I'm not a bot by signing-in. Usually it was passable by when the IP changes by retstarting the modem but it's not for a couple days now.

Edit: This means embedded videos are not public anymore. They finally did it. Great news for many sites! /s

A static image doesn't bypass this. Vendors want a real-time selfie--access to a internet-connected camera responding to prompts in real-time, such as "turn your head to the right," or "open and close your mouth". It would be trivial on a libre-system to send it a simulated-feed of a puppet-ed prop in such a way that would be indistinguishable from a real human head--if you had capable hardware. This is what intelligence agencies do now, but it's possible on high-end consumer hardware too. For the modest computer user it would be viable to feed it a simplified--but still meeting the criteria of a "face" as deemed by the computer--puppet, akin to what vtubers use. That's on a libre-system. A system that obeys the user and that can not be tolerated, because users lie.

They give you a QR code to scan with a mobile-computer, because mobile-computers are the least free of all computers. The majority of mobile-computers are Google's Android mobile-computer. Google redirects you to a computer that is entirely controlled by... Google. Surprise!

The boot-licking continues. This isn't something forced on Google by authoritarian, nanny-state governments. This is Google's will. Google is an authoritarian corporation that profits via surveillance-capitalism. Keep licking their boots and defending them. How dumb can you be?

Google wants to verify your ID.

Google redirects you to a Google Android slave-computer via a QR code, precisely because there's too much freedom on traditional desktop-computers and outputs can be trivially simulated.

Oh, poor Google for...

...what? Collecting even more data about internet users? This is their bread and butter: surveillance-capitalism.

The unique thing about the Australian-context is that the liberal party began a project: to create a facial-recognition system that would underpin a virtual market of "identity providers". From my perspective this is fraud, because underneath each identity provider was this governmental-department that would send a "yes" or "no" in response to a query: does this face belong to Johe Bloe. Their system doesn't even deserve a critique because it's from the party of blatant grifters and looters, but it's now what we have and things don't just disappear, especially when it's a system that's been in the works for decades and with bipartisan 'support'.

Google is an upstanding corporate-citizen providing identity services in a free-market. It's just capitalism, folks.

Like usual the morons will loudly blame Labor when the fruits of the liberal party turn rotten. The wider, global context is rising fascism which creates an environment where obeying remote prompts to wiggle your tongue and open and close your mouth is deemed 'expected' behaviour when all you want to do is watch cat videos on the internet.

Liberate your computers. Hack your mobile-computers and send dummie feeds. It only gets harder from here on. Push back now. It's rather easy too: don't use Google. Actively avoid it.

choose how to verify your age

use your credit card

huh? why credit card?

So we got to torrent our YouTube videos soon? EU is pushing for this too