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 have no idea how i'd replace YouTube in my life - sites like Reddit are one thing, but there is no current viable analogue to YouTube. Premium is pretty cheap for what it is - happy I made the decision to subscribe years ago
There are alternative frontends for YouTube, like freetube and piped, that focus on privacy and ad free viewing. Just throwing this out there for people who can't afford premium. Also, from my end, ublock origin still works fine on Windows 11 and Linux for ad free viewing. I still haven't seen the popup in the OP personally, and I just use regular old non premium youtube.com on firefox with ublock and privacy badger.
If you can afford or are willing to pay for premium, then that's not a bad way to go, either. It actually seems reasonably priced for what it is. I just don't like to give money to google.
You're just making them more profit.
Yeah, but like, you can just not pay them money and get an adblocker instead.
But you're just upset I'm calling out people being taken for a ride because you're one of them.