Youtube let the other shoe drop in their end-stage enshittification this week. Last month, they required you to turn on Youtube History to view the feed of youtube videos recommendations. That seems reasonable, so I did it. But I delete my history every 1 week instead of every 3 months. So they don’t get much from my choices. It still did a pretty good job of showing me stuff I was interested in watching.

Then on Oct 1, they threw up a “You’re using an Ad Blocker” overlay on videos. I’d use my trusty Overlay Remover plugin to remove the annoying javascript graphic and watch what I wanted. I didn’t have to click the X to dismiss the obnoxious page.

Last week, they started placing a timer with the X so you had to wait 5 seconds for the X to appear so you could dismiss blocking graphic.

Today, there was a new graphic. It allowed you to view three videos before you had to turn off your Ad Blocker. I viewed a video 3 times just to see what happens.

Now all I see is this.

Google has out and out made it a violation of their ToS to have an ad blocker to view Youtube. Or you can pay them $$$.

I ban such sites from my systems by replacing their DNS name in my hosts file routed to 127.0.0.1 which means I can’t view the site. I have quite a few banned sites now.

  • Prethoryn Overmind@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3117·
    9 months ago

    I either pay to use the app or I get ads that pay for the platform to continue being used but I don’t want to see the ads so my ad blocker blocks the ads.

    A company is going to continue making revenue. I don’t know why anyone is shocked by a company that makes ads changing a site to ask you to view more ads. Genuinely baffled that users waste their time complaining about something a big trillion dollar company owns and actively runs changing their platform to continue making them trillions of dollars then getting on here and going, “take that Google I am fed up.”

    Meanwhile, I have just been paying for YouTube premium with no ads supporting the content creators I love and moving on with my life.

    EDIT: These comments are why Lemmy isn’t growing.

    • Ann Archy@lemmy.worldEnglish
      101·
      9 months ago

      I don’t know why anyone is shocked that people don’t want to be brainwashed by advertising on internet services so staple they should be considered utilities.

    • Hello Hotel@lemmy.worldEnglish
      5·
      9 months ago

      The big problem is it also (accedentially or not) harms interoperability. (Nothing is as safe as saving a video to your local storage media. Because they beleave access to youtube is earned not owed, even if you paid them real money for access. Soo many fairly and unfairly deleted yt videos.) There are many tools for youtube that scrape the site for metadata or the video/audio itself but because their 3rd parties too small to even pay atention to, they have not been blessed by Alphabet inc. (discord music bot, yt-dlp, the wayback machine equivlant for youtube videos, DIY TV streaming boxes like Kodi, nicer FOSS android apps like Newpipe, socialblade, etc…) I fear these could be broken by a change like this. Its secretly just the twitter/reddit API debate again.

    • Cringe2793@lemmy.worldEnglish
      61·
      9 months ago

      I contribute to the content creators I like directly through Patreon. They benefit more from that.

      Google doesn’t really do anything deserving of my money, so I use adblockers on yt. Simple as that.

    • Fades@lemmy.worldEnglish
      73·
      9 months ago

      You can support creators without supporting a horrible corp but go off I guess

    • 38fhh2f8th5819c7@lemm.eeEnglish
      52·
      9 months ago

      It won’t be long before they either jack up their prices or squeeze some ads into your paid subscription. Or both. Fuck em I say.

    • witx@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
      42·
      9 months ago

      Nop what you’ve been doing is paying a billion dollar company to keep making their, once free product, worse so people can pay to make the bad parts go away.

    • bort@feddit.deEnglish
      42·
      9 months ago

      I generally agree with subscriptions. “if you’re not paying for the product, you are the product”.

      But there are better platforms to support with your money. Youtubes main selling point was that it was free. Now that it is not, it’s a good time to look into paid alternatives. For music I am already using bandcamp and spotify. For general documentaries I plan to switch to Nebula/CuriosityStream (I planned this for some time now, but I this may be the nail in the coffin)