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.
I only looked into blocking ads sometime around like 2014-2016? I was perfectly fine with them for a very long time, they got more and more invasive and poor quality to the point I looked into blocking them. Haven’t gone without an ad blocker ever since. No way in hell am I dealing with the current state of YouTube ads which are drastically worse than what pushed me to start blocking them to begin with.
I started blocking ads on various websites when they got so numerous that it would actually lag my computer and make things hard to use. That was also around the time YouTube started pushing more unskippable ads. I was only ever mildly annoyed by the occasional sidebar ad and waiting 5 seconds at the start of a video, but when ads started covering websites and interrupting videos, I sought and found the ad blocking community. They did it to themselves.