this post was submitted on 10 Oct 2023
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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.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago

Use Invidious while it still exists as a project I'm a fan of the yewtu.be instance. Pretty reliable. The Piped project is good as well. Don't even use the YouTube domain at all, hate giving them analytics and site usage info nevermind ads

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Here is my take on this.

First, I am with OP on this, but with mild counter points:

  • I block ads because they are intrusive, contain scam and viruses
  • I don't want to pay YT because I am already the product, and my trust is long gone about them saying they respect my privacy
  • "Hosting is expensive" is what we hear left and right but...
    • letting people upload many hours long is not what YT was supposed to be,
    • 4K vids and up are huge, so is HDR, do we really need such fat video files/streams? I don't...
    • for those who need 2000inch TV size quality, yeah, they want to charge those.
  • I would be OK to pay, but google will rise the price eventually and it feels like changing a contrcat I signed to begin with and I dan't agree with that. (price raising reason are the previous points above, I am not concerned by those and I don't see why I should pay that much)
  • I am a google pixel user, google already got some of my money anyway, which I am happy with.

In the same vein, I wait Netflix to raise their price again (I bit the bullet twice) but there won't be a third time.
Same for Spotify.

Those services should realize they are not essential, just bare useful, and should be priced as such.

Just my 2cts.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

As soon as I have to see ads, I'm gone. Not mad, I get the business need for them. It's just not worth it for me. Most of my actual subscriptions are through a rss reader, and that effectively blocks all but the sponsorblock ones. For which I have sponsorblock.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago

I finally bit the bullet and switched from Chrome to Firefox last night after they flagged my adblock for YouTube as malware and forcefully disabled it. Fuck that noise.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Netflix is bringing ads to paying customers. Lets not assume Youtube will be ad free if you pay, because the whole business model is shifting away.

Regards the history thing, YT/google dont actually need that. They have their own register of users and histories. Not sure why they need to tell you to "switch it on" unless you're actually consenting to something else? Third party tracking, perhaps?

A lot of users are switching to sites like LBRY and Odysee, even Rumble. I've been using Odysee to watch stuff lately.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

FYI if you delete your watch history, then watch one video, you can pause it again and get a proper homepage. Just don't clear that one video. I just clicked on a DJ set from someone I liked three weeks ago as that one video and it hasn't broken again since.

I switched to Firefox a few years ago when Chrome started forcing HDCP, my uBlock hasn't been affected at all in the most recent changes.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

just use frontends like invidious - for mobile there are tons of apps for these frontends, i recommend newpipe if you dont care about shitty recommendations

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Thank you for mentioning the overlay blocker. Never heard of it. I was just on YouTube today and haven't seen this. Are you in the US? I feared this day would come. Not sure what I'll do.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (4 children)

YouTube is straight up evil. We need an alternative solution.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

Silly question if you don't mind me asking, when you got the pop up:

  • Which browser/adblocker where you using (also did you use any custom filters)?
  • What device are you watching youtube on when you saw the block (windows, macos, ios, android, linux)?
  • Where are you located? (like which country)

I never saw these popups just curious.

Also my setups using a web browser (no issues):

  • (Mac OS Soma) Firefox Stable with ublock origen stock filters
  • (iPadOS 17) with adguard safari content blocker stock filters

Setups with third part clients (no issues):

  • Revanced android
  • Smarttube (Fire TV)
  • YTLitePlus (iPadOS)
[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

Use an alternative front end like https://piped.video

You may want to try various instances (in preferences) as the main one has been under a lot of load

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