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 don't want to pay for YouTube premium because I don't want YouTube music. I already have Spotify, why should I have a redundant service that I'm actively paying for.
I have no issues with paying for YouTube since at the end of the day video hosting on the scale that YouTube does cannot be profitable by ads alone.
I just wanna pay like £5 a month for just ad free viewing, none of the extra fluff crap like downloads or playing in the background or YouTube music.
Spotify won't leave their price where it is. Youtube won't leave their price where it is.
The goal of all the streaming services is to get you in the system, then slowly raise rates. Each one of these services were running fine at $10 a month for a family plan.
There's no real competition because they each run their own exclusives. Netflix going to $20? i'll just go to Hulu! of but the next season of Wednesday will come out. but never fear, they'll all adjust up to 20 now, and they'll strip away those family plans as well.
None of them are going to stop until the average person can't afford more than once service.
They'll drive away their customer base to piracy, then bitch that they need to raise prices to stay afloat.