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.

  • Polar@lemmy.caEnglish
    76·
    1 year ago

    Lmfao, no one is dropping YouTube. You’ll be back one way or another.

    • tyrant@lemmy.worldEnglish
      95·
      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
        76·
        1 year ago

        But replacing Youtube is sadly much harder.

        I bet we’ll just get better ad blockers.

        • luciferofastora@lemmy.zipEnglish
          23·
          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
          7·
          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.

      • Polar@lemmy.caEnglish
        5·
        1 year ago

        See ya when you need a video on how to fix something, a review releases, or you get sent a video from a friend.

        • Keith@lemm.eeEnglish
          1·
          1 year ago

          gets redirected to my preferred piped/invidious instance

          you sure?

    • FranziaEnglish
      17·
      1 year ago

      Use Piped and Invidious. Newpipe with SponsorBlock on my android. LibreTube is also good.

      You’re right, I haven’t dropped Youtube - but I’ve added Nebula. It’s not gonna be long now before either my last youtube-only creator moves to Nebula or I find some way to get an ad-free provider to play on my TV. Then I can finally unsubscribe from YT.

    • ProvableGecko@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      1 year ago

      The actual stuff I want to watch is also on Nebula. I had subscribed to premium because I was watching mostly on my console but instead of renewing I’d rather switch there and actually pay the content creators.