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.
YouTube is greedy. They make plenty of money without stuffing in more ads and pulling crap like this. I don’t use an ad blocker, but I’ve considered it (or just dumping YouTube completely) because they have really ramped up the ad interruptions. I’d subscribe if they had a cheap YouTube-only plan. But they don’t. You either have to pay for bundled music or TV and I don’t want or need either.
Yes, there are business costs, but they don’t produce the content they air, and their payout to those who do produce the content is a relative pittance. Their infrastructure is shared among other Google products, so it’s not like they’re having to pay for all their server racks out of a single budget. And I’m sure Google is trying to figure out how to train AI on all the content that’s posted there. Not to mention all the pirated content posted to YouTube that Google is making money from, without compensating the creators or copyright holders.
If was running a competing business like Facebook, or Amazon, I would seriously consider ramping up a competing product.