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.
YouTube messed up by not being a paid only service first and later offering an advertisement supported free tier. That way around, they’d be celebrated.
They wouldn’t have as much content that way.
I mean the very first year or two. As I understand they were burning money anyway, but it’s too late now.
Tell me you weren’t around for the first years of YouTube without telling me you weren’t around for the first years of YouTube
Also not sure why you wanna price poor people out of the internet to avoid ads.
People obviously don’t want to pay for stuff. Complaining about ads on YouTube but refusing to pay for no ads. I mean everyone thinks it’s free to host all those videos right?
Everyone thinks they make no money by selling trillions of ads right?
Kinda hard to sell ads when everyone blocks them
That’s clearly not the case and everyone knows it. I would be surprised if 10% of ads get blocked
I wouldn’t. The vast majority of people are not tech savvy and generally just go with whatever the default is.
…you are under the impression that’s not completely aligned with my point?
Paid-only YouTube would never have become what free, ad-supported YouTube is/was.
It would never have seen the same mass adoption.
Thats a fair assumption. I think it might’ve just taken longer, especially if the ad-supported tier was there quickly too, or even as an option from the start.