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.

  • chuckd@lemmy.worldEnglish
    32·
    1 year ago

    Instead they could get 5$ a month from me for no ads.

    They do this already. It’s called YouTube Premium and they’ve determined it’s worth more than $5 a month. My guess is the amount they decide to charge is not an arbitrary number, but one that covers their expenses based on expected engagement.

    Unpopular opinion: If people either paid monthly, or they didn’t run pihole, blockers, or vanced, the monthly price of YT Premium would probably be closer to your magical $5 cost. Although, honestly, I doubt you’d pay the $5 either.