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.

  • tyrant@lemmy.worldEnglish
    927·
    1 year ago

    Many are on lemmy because they dropped Reddit. Myself included. I was an active user on Reddit for well over a decade. This guy seems pretty serious

    • ours@lemmy.filmEnglish
      752·
      1 year ago

      But replacing Youtube is sadly much harder.

      I bet we’ll just get better ad blockers.

      • luciferofastora@lemmy.zipEnglish
        21·
        1 year ago

        An eternal arms race: Ads vs. Adblockers. Just like malware vs anti-malware protections. System penetration vs. system hardening. It iust entered another stage of technological development, but that doesn’t mean it’s over or that we need to throw the towel.

      • OsrsNeedsF2P@lemmy.mlEnglish
        61·
        1 year ago

        While it’s true there’s no good Lemmy for YouTube (Odysse is the closest…), I feel like a lot of people could drop YouTube without need for any replacement

      • tyrant@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        Google will probably just move to strictly subscription based eventually. Just like you need a subscription to turn on a cars seat heaters now. Everything is going subscription. It’s maddening.