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.

  • Selkie210
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    41 year ago

    Is there anyway to block ads if you are watching YouTube on consoles/ps5/xbox?

    • @Ut0p1an_dyst0p1a
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      1 year ago

      I use a VPN routed to Albania, they dont seem to show ads there, same with a few other eatern european countries, so its like premium without paying anything lol

    • @Pinecone
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      11 year ago

      For general network wide adblocking you can try setting up a pi-hole

      • Selkie210
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        11 year ago

        Tried that, but the ads are baked in same as the videos so it wouldn’t play the actual videos either