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.

  • jimmydoreisaleftyEnglish
    3•1 year ago

    Use alternative yt front ends? YT Vanced, PipePipe, YMusic, and so on…

    Firefox with exentions or on PC?

    I have not seen any of this on my end, my IP does get blocked though, I just change it.

    I wonder how they are rolling it out.

    • AlimentarEnglish
      5•1 year ago

      I reckon they’re rolling it out bit by bit. So as to not upset everyone at once. Though I feel there’ll be a work around anyway.

      This will just get us to take that one extra step. I know so many people that have never heard of ad block! And this is going to affect those that will stop at ad blocking extensions and give up when that doesn’t work.

    • @RalphFurleyEnglish
      4•1 year ago

      Thanks to this comment I discovered F-Droid and downloaded PipePipe

    • @FadesEnglish
      4•1 year ago

      Exactly. Meanwhile in this post there are people begging others to turn off Adblock and sub to YT premium for creators sake lmao

      As if handing Google your money helps creators, nobody owes anyone a damn ad view let alone multiple unskipables

      • jimmydoreisaleftyEnglish
        2•1 year ago

        True.

        Many will help the people they like with donations and other ways instead of helping Alphabet (google) and the like.

      • Possibly linuxEnglish
        2•1 year ago

        I’d honestly get on board with services like nebula assuming they had support for third party clients.