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.

    • stardust@lemmy.caEnglish
      1·
      2 years ago

      It really is quite something seeing people so concerned on behalf Google’s revenue streams, and dedicating such passionate advocacy for them.

  • Duchess of Waves@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    2 years ago

    Just to let you know, if you use uBlock you can expect it to adapt to this new shenanigan pretty quickly. Also I think €120/year are ridiciously overpriced. Ask me about €30/year and I might consider it for a second.

    To be honest, I wouldn’t mind ads on Youtube if they were less per hour and less obnoxious. But no, every 12 second video now has an ad leading to it.

    Not to mention, if I would pay for every single Video service the usual 8-15€ I would pay like €1000 per year and THAT IS NOT GOING TO HAPPEN.

    Give me “pretty much everything” for €100 per year and we can talk. My offer stands.

  • Jordan117@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    2 years ago

    Tbh, I block ads when I can but have a hard time getting angry about this. YouTube is both incredibly useful and incredibly expensive to operate – seriously, what other service lets you upload hours of HD video which anyone in the world can access instantly, indefinitely, for free, and at the same scale YT does? It’s a peerless engineering marvel and it would be a tragedy if it were to shut down. If seeing some short skippable ads is what it takes to keep that resource viable, that’s honestly pretty fair.

  • AlexisFR@jlai.luEnglish
    0·
    2 years ago

    You don’t have a choice.

    Also Ublock Origin on Firefox already bypass this.

    • Happenchance@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      2 years ago

      Yes. In the same way that “Master” and “Slave” have been replaced for racist engineering terminology, “Whitelist” and “Blacklist” are replaced with “Allowlist” and “Blocklist”.

      • coffeeaddict@lemm.eeEnglish
        0·
        2 years ago

        Do these terms actually come from racist backgrounds, or did they come up as a coincidence?
        It just feels weird someone would think of a way to degrade black people then decide to use blacklist for things they don’t want, then engineers decide to use master and slave to piss off black people whatever. Is that literally the history behind it?

        • Omega_Haxors@lemmy.mlEnglish
          0·
          2 years ago

          Blacklist was specifically used to refer to the refusal of entry as if they were a black person, so yes there is a racist history. Master and Slave is pretty obvious why especially considering everyone uses Parent/Child and Primary/Secondary these days anyway. Like maybe 10% of the change was because of “je-I-mean-sjws being offended” and like 90% just practicality because they’re outdated terms that aren’t really used.

          • chakan2@lemmy.worldEnglish
            01·
            2 years ago

            Lol…omg. lol.

            Phew.

            I’m sure Americans used blacklist like that at one time or another, but the origins are a list of enemies and had nothing to do with skin color.

            Master and Slave is also not something exclusive to black people, they’re generic terms that were appropriated.