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'll play devil's advocate here... Ads pay revenue. Revenue pays for the service. The service pays content creators. I'm not saying Youtube is perfect, but adblocking, or using alternate front ends, hurts the content creators first. Youtube Premium gets rid of the ads, pays the content creators more, and gets you a spotify-type music streaming service as well. I'm not trying to shill, but the deal is pretty fair, it's only $3 more than spotify, and you get 0 ads on youtube as a bonus. If you really don't want to see and you don't want to pay for it, then please, don't use the service. Youtube still gets data from you, even if you block ads. You want to hurt them, then do it the right way. Blocking ads hurts the creators more than anyone else.
Edit: Every day I am reminded of how many people believe they are owed everything for free.
Its not free. They harvest your data and sell that. Ad revenue is secondary. And all of this is ran by the most powerful company in history. Adblock doesnt even put a dent in Google's profits. And content creators? Ad revenue is basically dead now that YT is pushing for child friendly content. And they make millions in corporate deals and have patreons and direct donations in addition to being able to work a stable job in addition to making videos.
This isnt being "owed" anything. Im already paying with my privacy.
And even if I wasnt already paying, fuck Google. Evil company that more than deserves loosing the $0.02 my ad viewership would have earned.