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.
Firefox + ublock origin is the way forward.
However, as a teacher, my school IT system default browser is chrome, and adverts on YT videos when you’re trying to teach a lesson can really suck all the momentum and attention from the class.
Chrome allows you to save javascript as a bookmark URL called bookmarklets. I’m not so clued up on java, but I found this code that zips through the adverts super quickly. Someone can probably improve on this;
for future reference, this is javascript, not java. totally different language
Ah thanks, like I said, I don’t really know what I’m talking about! Good to know.
And here’s the improved version!
javascript:void(document.querySelector("video").playbackRate=16)Champ, I knew someone here would be able to improve on it!