this post was submitted on 10 Oct 2023
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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.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Hasn't happened to me yet, but I know it will.

Sucks; but to be honest most of the YouTube things I watch have been moving off YouTube for awhile anyway.

First Reddit, now YouTube. This year is a year of change for my Internet habits.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Here is my take on this.

First, I am with OP on this, but with mild counter points:

  • I block ads because they are intrusive, contain scam and viruses
  • I don't want to pay YT because I am already the product, and my trust is long gone about them saying they respect my privacy
  • "Hosting is expensive" is what we hear left and right but...
    • letting people upload many hours long is not what YT was supposed to be,
    • 4K vids and up are huge, so is HDR, do we really need such fat video files/streams? I don't...
    • for those who need 2000inch TV size quality, yeah, they want to charge those.
  • I would be OK to pay, but google will rise the price eventually and it feels like changing a contrcat I signed to begin with and I dan't agree with that. (price raising reason are the previous points above, I am not concerned by those and I don't see why I should pay that much)
  • I am a google pixel user, google already got some of my money anyway, which I am happy with.

In the same vein, I wait Netflix to raise their price again (I bit the bullet twice) but there won't be a third time.
Same for Spotify.

Those services should realize they are not essential, just bare useful, and should be priced as such.

Just my 2cts.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

FYI if you delete your watch history, then watch one video, you can pause it again and get a proper homepage. Just don't clear that one video. I just clicked on a DJ set from someone I liked three weeks ago as that one video and it hasn't broken again since.

I switched to Firefox a few years ago when Chrome started forcing HDCP, my uBlock hasn't been affected at all in the most recent changes.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

just use frontends like invidious - for mobile there are tons of apps for these frontends, i recommend newpipe if you dont care about shitty recommendations

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Thank you for mentioning the overlay blocker. Never heard of it. I was just on YouTube today and haven't seen this. Are you in the US? I feared this day would come. Not sure what I'll do.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (4 children)

YouTube is straight up evil. We need an alternative solution.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

My Ublocker works fine, and I have never seen this message come up

[–] [email protected] 9 points 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)
[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

Use an alternative front end like https://piped.video

You may want to try various instances (in preferences) as the main one has been under a lot of load

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