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.

  • TheOakTreeEnglish
    1·
    9 months ago

    Lol, piracy is entitlement? You should say that to all the people who pirate because they literally can’t afford to spend money on luxuries, or those who are archiving old/abandoned media, or those who prefer to test a game’s performance before buying it.

    You’re making some really big blanket statements and standing on those statements to talk down on people. I don’t even disagree with your main point; people who have more than enough resources to pay for their content are entitled for thinking it should all be free.

    However I also don’t think that the average person enjoys watching a 30 second ad on a 7 second video, and then another ad at the end to listen to while searching for the next video. That’s not entitlement, that’s just being reasonable.

    But sure, do your thing where you call people entitled while simultaneously carrying a superiority complex, I’m sure that helps you convince people to think the way you do.

    You can downvote me all you want but at the end of the day I am right and you are immature

    This reads like a toxic middle schooler wrote it lmao