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’ll start giving a shit about youtubes bottom line when youtube starts caring about the creators bottom lines. Youtube fucks creators so god damn hard.
Just look at this for example’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-QtwGfILTo
Jesus Christ, man. I said Youtube isn’t perfect. It’s a fucking corp. They should burn the board of directors at the stake. HOWEVER, creators still rely on payment from them.
And??? Nobody owes anybody a fucking ad view. If you like the channel there are many ways to support most if not all.
Patreon, other donation venues, shit even fucking memberships on or off YT. You say you aren’t shilling yet you desperately want their ad campaigns to continue pushing forward?
You don’t have to give YT any data, look at Piped and other alts
And the creators know how Google could pull the rug at any moment. This is why they also have sponsorships, which is a more stable revenue stream not dictated by Google’s greedy whims.
Okay it’s clearly imperfect but I don’t see other similar platforms doing any better (most are doing much worse, e.g TikTok/Twitch)
A decentralized alternative would be nice but, I don’t see many ad-block users out here donating their own $ to these projects