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 enjoy watching YouTube with no ads so I bought premium. I actually bought the family one and share it with 4 others. Personally, I find it to be a great deal.
I also pay for extra storage (even tho I have a nas) because it’s convenient to have.
I’m a pirate at heart, have a 3k movie library on Plex and use nefarious to queue download, and I’m a long time crypto nut so I understand privacy and sticking it to the man.
But I also find great quality of life improvements by simply paying fair prices for good content 🤷♂️
It’s a fun hobby to try and dodge ads and steal and stick it to these companies. But really can be time consuming and gets old (it did at least for me when I got old).
I'm in the same boat and state of thought here. I've got a monster Plex collection on an unnecessarily large NAS... But; I pay for Spotify, YouTube and Proton. I use them all, I see value and still use a piHole, uBlock and all that stuff like nothing changed. More power to you.