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.
Yes but all this knowledge is from the creators, not Google or YouTube. I don’t mind paying the creators through direct donations or Patreon or whatever, but I will not pay for YouTube.
I consider letting ads play or paying for a subscription ‘paying for YouTube’. So I’m curious as to why you wouldn’t?
We obviously both agree that creators should be paid
I think we can agree that YouTube should be paid something. They host the content, the replication, the back ups, and they provide a single location for viewers to aggregate which helps all creators find new viewers. That is expensive to do and is valuable for creators
Is it the amount of ads they play, the amount they charge for premium, the revenue split doesn’t give enough to creators, or something else?
It’s nothing so complicated. I just don’t want to. I feel like they earn enough money from collecting (and selling) my data. If they don’t, then they wouldn’t keep doing this.
Fair enough