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.

  • simonced@lemmy.oneEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    Here is my take on this.

    First, I am with OP on this, but with mild counter points:

    • I block ads because they are intrusive, contain scam and viruses
    • I don’t want to pay YT because I am already the product, and my trust is long gone about them saying they respect my privacy
    • “Hosting is expensive” is what we hear left and right but…
      • letting people upload many hours long is not what YT was supposed to be,
      • 4K vids and up are huge, so is HDR, do we really need such fat video files/streams? I don’t…
      • for those who need 2000inch TV size quality, yeah, they want to charge those.
    • I would be OK to pay, but google will rise the price eventually and it feels like changing a contrcat I signed to begin with and I dan’t agree with that. (price raising reason are the previous points above, I am not concerned by those and I don’t see why I should pay that much)
    • I am a google pixel user, google already got some of my money anyway, which I am happy with.

    In the same vein, I wait Netflix to raise their price again (I bit the bullet twice) but there won’t be a third time.
    Same for Spotify.

    Those services should realize they are not essential, just bare useful, and should be priced as such.

    Just my 2cts.