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.
Cancelled my Netflix a while ago and I don’t see myself cancelling YouTube premium anytime soon. One thing that annoys me quite a lot is that THESE PEOPLE don’t understand that by using adblockers they’re making the situation worse for everyone, especially those not using one. Why do you think people bake sponsors into their content? Because they have to. Why do you think the frequency of ads increases? Because if they want the same profits, with less people seeing the ads and their infrastructure cost remaining the same, they must increase the frequency of the ads.
Yep, well, I guess we can celebrate this change then, because it won’t affect us, but it will make that free lunch a little harder to get. Though from these comments it doesn’t sound like much harder. I don’t know why YT can’t solve this by fully baking the ad content into the streams. There are even some community driven products out there that amass ad start/end times so that sponsor plugs can be skipped. But YT could make even that toothless with a little randomization.
Their goal never will be to have no people bypassing it. It’s always a balance of “reasonable effort to prevent it” with making it enough of an annoyance to deter everyone from doing it.
Yep. An arms race.