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.

  • Deemo@bookwormstory.social
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    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)