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.

  • Rukmer@lemmy.worldEnglish
    46·
    1 year ago

    Newpipe is still working great, I haven’t used an official interface in like 3 years.

    • Draugr@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      Also highly recommend setting up Invidious. Having a self hosted youtube frontend with built in youtube-dl and 0 ads has been a game changer

    • VitabytesDev@feddit.nlEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      Is there anything like that but instead of showing the trends, it shows what I watch most based on my subscribed channels, kinda like an algorithm or something?

      • Rukmer@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        To my knowledge it doesn’t have that, but the suggested videos are pretty good. Like if I’m watching a science video, it will suggest other science videos. Otherwise I’m just subscribed to a few hundred channels and I mostly use the latest releases tab (not sure what it’s officially called but it shows everything put out by your subscriptions every time you refresh it).