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 would say that ads like YT’s are the kind that pushed adblockers into being popular. Well, that and redundant/audio/popups ads that are annoying. Sometimes I turn off the adblocker and generally it’s an immediate mistake.
I know it wouldn’t be a large portion of content (though having control over the final look could widen the appeal), but I think Google could’ve gotten vector content supported in HTML5 spec (in collaboration with software, and maybe some kind of automated conversion to hybrid video) and thus supported on YT. It can be significantly less data for high-fidelity visuals, and unlike rendered video it’s the same data for 720p as it’d be for someone with a 16K monitor or whatever in 20+ years from now.
Actually reducing costs in this manner would probably be too generous to competitors, just as Flash being killed off was good for YT. AV1 does help, but is still likely a big resource cost to store/serve at 4K+ (or just in general) not to mention re-encoding hardware and knowledge needed.
Kinda just like how WEBGL tech didn’t actually include a container format (the reason why so much Flash content was easily archived by normal people) as it does not benefit content hosts to allow downloads (even if it’d lower cost of repeat viewings particularly by users who don’t actually provide the host with revenue).