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.
The big problem is it also (accedentially or not) harms interoperability. (Nothing is as safe as saving a video to your local storage media. Because they beleave access to youtube is earned not owed, even if you paid them real money for access. Soo many fairly and unfairly deleted yt videos.) There are many tools for youtube that scrape the site for metadata or the video/audio itself but because their 3rd parties too small to even pay atention to, they have not been blessed by Alphabet inc. (discord music bot, yt-dlp, the wayback machine equivlant for youtube videos, DIY TV streaming boxes like Kodi, nicer FOSS android apps like Newpipe, socialblade, etc…) I fear these could be broken by a change like this. Its secretly just the twitter/reddit API debate again.