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.

    • thecodemonk@programming.devEnglish
      3·
      1 year ago

      So help me out here… I’ve tried to ditch YouTube a couple of times. I currently have a family premium sub. Since it’s now like 22 a month, I’d love to save it for something else.

      I watch a ton of electronics repair, ham radio, and car repair channels. Some of these channels have only 2k to 100k subs, some much less, like 10. I also look up a lot of how to repair videos a lot when working on my own broken crap (lawn mower, washer, etc).

      I tried peertube twice and it’s just not it. Nebula doesn’t have the content. What else is there? I just can’t seem to find a good replacement. Once I can find something for myself, it might be possible to get my wife and kids switched, but it would have to be a lot of gaming videos, make-up tutorials, and freaking happy planner stuff… I just don’t think any other service is going to have this content.

      I do prefer finding blog style articles for the repair stuff, but it seems that ship has sailed now. Everything is a video now.