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.
They want the non paid experience to be as awful and painful as possible, because they want people to pay.
It’s the classic business manager 1st quarter profit push, damn the consequences or damage to reputation.
They could offer a sensible 5$ plan and sensible ads, but now, infinite growth demands maximum fuckery.
Not to mention WHAT they are advertising.
Like, blatant bigotry and propaganda disguising itself as actual shows.
Some of them being multiple hours long.
Which isnt a problem on PC running an adblocker, but if you have it running on a device like roku/game console/etc, then you are gonna be stuck with hours of right wing lies until you notice and manually skip the ad.