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.
Yeah, my favorite YouTube content has been the type that are just random uploads from people who don’t even post frequently or ever again, and just sharing something because they thought it was cool along the vein of reddit and lemmy. So doesn’t have that whole artificial production vibe and intentionally lengthened videos with begs for likes and so on, since there was no monetization motive to begin with.
Crappy thing is that those type of videos are suppressed and hidden by the algorithm that pushes the big channels to the top in searches. YouTube really pushes the personality/influencer driven content for obvious reasons, but it’s why I haven’t really fallen into the YouTube hole of endlessly watching it.