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.
Yep, well, I guess we can celebrate this change then, because it won’t affect us, but it will make that free lunch a little harder to get. Though from these comments it doesn’t sound like much harder. I don’t know why YT can’t solve this by fully baking the ad content into the streams. There are even some community driven products out there that amass ad start/end times so that sponsor plugs can be skipped. But YT could make even that toothless with a little randomization.
Their goal never will be to have no people bypassing it. It's always a balance of "reasonable effort to prevent it" with making it enough of an annoyance to deter everyone from doing it.
Yep. An arms race.