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.

  • bric@lemm.eeEnglish
    85·
    1 year ago

    Youtube ads don’t just pay creators though, they also pay for video hosting, discovery, and streaming, which aren’t cheap. A lemmy for video streaming would be great, but there’s a reason it hasn’t really happened yet, you’d need a much larger portion of viewers to pay than what it takes lemmy to run, and you’d need a bigger community of developers to build it, which is why most youtube alternatives are strictly paid products. None of that is criticism of the idea, I think it would be great if we could wrench away some of youtube’s monopoly, but at the same time we need to understand why it’s a challenging concept

        • Dave@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          1 year ago

          Well, not necessarily, right? It could be funded any number of ways, but on YT you’re locked in to either watching their ads, or paying their premium.

        • madcaesar@lemmy.worldEnglish
          32·
          1 year ago

          Is it though? How much revenue does Google get from bombarding me with ads? I despise ads, block them whenever I can and will actively avoid products that interrupt my shows.

          Instead they could get 5$ a month from me for no ads.

          Yet here we are, they sending ads my way and me fighting them off with every tool possible.

          With all the tracking they do, you’d think they’d be able to identify power users like me, I run piholes, blockers, vanced etc, yet they still don’t seem to understand I’m not the target audience they are looking for…

          • chuckd@lemmy.worldEnglish
            33·
            1 year ago

            Instead they could get 5$ a month from me for no ads.

            They do this already. It’s called YouTube Premium and they’ve determined it’s worth more than $5 a month. My guess is the amount they decide to charge is not an arbitrary number, but one that covers their expenses based on expected engagement.

            Unpopular opinion: If people either paid monthly, or they didn’t run pihole, blockers, or vanced, the monthly price of YT Premium would probably be closer to your magical $5 cost. Although, honestly, I doubt you’d pay the $5 either.

        • Dave@lemmy.worldEnglish
          3·
          1 year ago

          Well yes, this is the problem isn’t it:

          1. Monopoly X sucks
          2. Federated alternatives developed
          3. People complain that there’s not enough content on them