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.
Revanced
LibreTube
NewPipe
NewPipe with SponsorBlock https://github.com/polymorphicshade/NewPipe
Search for these on GitHub not Google.
Google has a vested interest in not doing much about bad actors getting their malware to the top of those search results.
SmartTubeNext
PornHub
skip
clipious
As long as Google won't block them too. I encurage you all to leave a message for you favourite creators that you are going to watch them even on different platform.
They cant do it, it uses the original apk and add patches on top of it
SafetyNet is now a thing. I bet Google won't turn it on for YouTube, but there are possibilities to at least make usage of this type of apps limited to only most stubborn of people.