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.
All the morons defending a mindless corporation in this thread forgot that Google has far overstepped it’s boundaries in general. It got to where it is from harvesting free data from users. And now is initiating a web DRM that will far overstep any boundary seen. If a website decides to adopt it, everyone is screwed.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/07/googles-web-integrity-api-sounds-like-drm-for-the-web/
It really is quite something seeing people so concerned on behalf Google’s revenue streams, and dedicating such passionate advocacy for them.
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“Duck player” in duckduckgo browser gets around it 👍
The websites that would adopt it are probably not worth anyone’s time to begin with.
The risk is actually that banking and government services will adopt it. Which you sorta are forced to use at one point in time or another.
Greed, by definition, has no limits.
What happens when they block adblockers? Do you think they’re just going to stop there? Or will they go from 3 ads every 10 minute to 4 ads every 10 minutes?
Greed, by definition, has no limits.
The solution to the problem is to have higher standards. But people with low standards get mad whenever that’s pointed out.
They’re useful idiots for a reason.