this post was submitted on 10 Oct 2023
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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.

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (3 children)
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[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago

It should be "So long YouTube and thanks for all the fish." Goddammit!

If you're going to borrow from Douglas Adams, at least get it right.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago

The enshitification of youtube is complete. Nothing stopping them from just upping the rate and duration of ads to the stratosphere.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (11 children)

Sometimes I forget people like watch YouTube on purpose. I pretty much exclusively use it for music that's not on Bandcamp, short clips of old shows, and the occasional guide for something that's too visual to be described well in words.

Old man out of the loop, yells at clouds.

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I dual boot and in Windows they are blocking me now. In Linux, I am not seeing the message. So it's not IP based. I run Firefox in both instances.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (2 children)

i've still never seen this message outside of a screenshot; ublock origin in firefox (including tor browser, just need to hit the new circuit button sometimes) still works fine as of today. and so does yt-dlp.

the fact that some ad blockers are seeing this is a bad sign though :(

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (4 children)

I use FreeTube on my desktop and Newpipe on my GrapheneOS Pixel 7, I don't see any ads or graphic overlays. The family uses AppleTV and the YouTube app is a horrible experience with the amount of ads, even for a 3 minute video. Future project is to look into Pihole or something to block ads at the router level.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago

I use SmartTubeNext on a Fire TV and it works fine.

It even skips over in-video ads.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago

I will let you know but I haven't have issues with ad blocker on PC yet

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (10 children)

Is it enshittification, or how the Internet should work for commercial services? Youtube isn't publicly funded. You either pay for the product or become it in exchange for use.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Any big tech company will both take your money and spy on your activities.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago

Copy URL, alt+F2, mpv 'paste URL'.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (5 children)
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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Here is my take on this.

First, I am with OP on this, but with mild counter points:

  • I block ads because they are intrusive, contain scam and viruses
  • I don't want to pay YT because I am already the product, and my trust is long gone about them saying they respect my privacy
  • "Hosting is expensive" is what we hear left and right but...
    • letting people upload many hours long is not what YT was supposed to be,
    • 4K vids and up are huge, so is HDR, do we really need such fat video files/streams? I don't...
    • for those who need 2000inch TV size quality, yeah, they want to charge those.
  • I would be OK to pay, but google will rise the price eventually and it feels like changing a contrcat I signed to begin with and I dan't agree with that. (price raising reason are the previous points above, I am not concerned by those and I don't see why I should pay that much)
  • I am a google pixel user, google already got some of my money anyway, which I am happy with.

In the same vein, I wait Netflix to raise their price again (I bit the bullet twice) but there won't be a third time.
Same for Spotify.

Those services should realize they are not essential, just bare useful, and should be priced as such.

Just my 2cts.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Something I don't think anyone is talking about is that, if this is now considered a ToS violation, Google will probably decide at some point to start banning accounts over it. Oh, you use adblock? Now your email, Drive documents, and photos are gone.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago

Use Invidious while it still exists as a project I'm a fan of the yewtu.be instance. Pretty reliable. The Piped project is good as well. Don't even use the YouTube domain at all, hate giving them analytics and site usage info nevermind ads

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

As soon as I have to see ads, I'm gone. Not mad, I get the business need for them. It's just not worth it for me. Most of my actual subscriptions are through a rss reader, and that effectively blocks all but the sponsorblock ones. For which I have sponsorblock.

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