For web access, in Firefox I've been using the "SocialFocus" add-on, that allows you to remove certain blocks in "social" websites (for example, blocking Shorts or comments in YT), put a color filter to make it "black and white", or even blocking the whole site. I had to access Facebook a couple times some months ago, and the quantity of trash you can filter with this add-on is astounding. This developer has also a YouTube specific add-on I haven't tested yet, named "UnTrap for YouTube" that has almost 200 different options for blocking very specific stuff there. Their add-ons in [0]

For Android there's an App called Revanced that let's you apply patches on certain commercial apps like YouTube or Twitter modifying their behavior, and for example block shorts. See the patches available for YouTube in [1]. I'm still pending to test it, but if you do, go to their official site [2], or even better, to their GitHub releases [3] as it seems like there are a good bunch of scammy sites using their name.

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  0: https://addons.mozilla.org/ru/firefox/user/17777732/
  1: https://revanced.app/patches?pkg=com.google.android.youtube
  2: https://revanced.app/
  3: https://github.com/ReVanced/revanced-manager/releases

Wouldn't risk trying to extract from IG too much, I used to yt-dlp from it a lot and use scripts to extract the images because I like to archive references, nothing on a massive scale we're talking <20 times a month and I got a warning that I could lose my username if I "use automated scraping tools".

Oh! Were you using your user cookie? I use yt-dlp a couple times a month, but I think I'm always unauthenticated (although I guess they could match my IP address in their logs)

I think the urls might be specific to your session in some cases. I’ve noticed some old IG posts I’ve put in bookmarking services say they’re expired.

So passing to yt-dlp would be traceable back to me in that case.

Definitely wasn’t cookies that’s what surprised me.

Ah OK, I was thinking about youtube, I re-read it and saw noticed you were talking IG. Yeah, I've noticed some IG URLs are suspicious: different from other users or opening related info that it shouldn't be there.

Why would you use an account to do that?

I didn’t that’s what surprised me. I think some urls are unique to your session.

Not that it should matter I don’t think I’m the one at fault here.

AFAIK you need a username to be able to extract anything from instagram at all.

You don't, I don't have an IG account but my wife occasionally sends me links to reels that I use yt-dlp to download.

It's 11 years old, I'm impressed that it even works.