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.
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
But replacing Youtube is sadly much harder.
I bet we’ll just get better ad blockers.
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.
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.