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.
I’ve seen in the news that this is an international small test that YouTube is trying out on the market to see if people will tolerate it. The best advice I can give is to stop using YouTube immediately if you see even a hint of this. Hopefully it will pass. https://www.tomsguide.com/news/youtube-testing-three-strikes-rule-to-block-users-with-ad-blockers
It will only pass if there is a competitor that can eat their lunch. Right now, for some people, it’s hard to leave YouTube because of the lack of equivalents. Hopefully this will either cause another platform to come to challenge them or they lose enough users to cause them to adjust how heavy handed they are against ad blockers. imo, both seem unlikely.
Or society will collapse, making the point moot.
That will make most points moot, I just want a less shit internet while we still have it.
Now that I think of it, if we’re lucky, it’ll be like the French revolution and we can start really making some progress.