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.

  • @[email protected]
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    2 years ago

    ITT: Entitled users think they deserve YouTube without paying for it.

    Be honest with yourself, you are entitled. Stop acting like youtube is fucking you over by enforcing what is a reasonable policy for those who refuse to pay with their money.

    Piracy is also entitlement. I am honest with myself when I pirate and use ad blockers on the internet. Why can’t you be?

    You can downvote me all you want but at the end of the day I am right and you are immature for not being able to handle admitting you’re doing things off the moral high road you want to believe you’re on.

    Stop using YouTube if you can’t get what you want out of the service. A lot of lemmy users did the same with Reddit, it’s within your reach. If you don’t like how YouTube is (and it does suck if you arent a yt premium user) and your ad blocker no longer works, it’s time to find a new platform that preserves your privacy and respects your rights as a user. Just don’t act so goddamn entitled.

  • @[email protected]
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    122 years ago

    Thank you for mentioning the overlay blocker. Never heard of it. I was just on YouTube today and haven’t seen this. Are you in the US? I feared this day would come. Not sure what I’ll do.

  • Keith
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    12 years ago

    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.

    Why are you not using a Piped or Invidious instance?

  • @[email protected]
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    2 years ago

    FYI if you delete your watch history, then watch one video, you can pause it again and get a proper homepage. Just don’t clear that one video. I just clicked on a DJ set from someone I liked three weeks ago as that one video and it hasn’t broken again since.

    I switched to Firefox a few years ago when Chrome started forcing HDCP, my uBlock hasn’t been affected at all in the most recent changes.

  • Xero
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    12 years ago

    I just got this popup today too, but only in Brave, it doesn’t show up in Firefox and LibreWolf at all and I use uBlock Origin for all of them. Looks like it’s just a Chromium thing. I mainly use Firefox anyway, I only use Brave as a music player at work because I have too many FF tabs opened in 3 windows already.

  • @[email protected]
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    112 years ago

    just use frontends like invidious - for mobile there are tons of apps for these frontends, i recommend newpipe if you dont care about shitty recommendations

  • @[email protected]
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    202 years ago

    You WILL watch the Grammarly and Liberty Mutual ads. Just like the movie scene in A Clockwork Orange.

  • @[email protected]
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    212 years ago

    Serving 4k video is not free.

    If you refuse to pay for Premium and refuse to be served ads, what do you expect to happen? You’re a freeloader.

  • @[email protected]
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    72 years ago

    honestly at this point I don’t even understand using the normal youtube front end anymore. I have been using piped as my youtube app on my phone for a while, and I think it’s time I switch frontends. What sucks is video is one of the few things we don’t have a decent way of federating right now just due to the sheer volume of disk space required.