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.
Hmm… I can’t remember if I’ve seen anything like that or not. 90% of my YouTube watching is on my TV, 9% is on my phone (full screen), and 1% is probably on the desktop, so it’s rare I’d have the opportunity to see this. The platforms I do watch on would be most impacted by in-video ads, and I get none of those, which is the main thing I care about. If only YouTube Premium let you auto-skip messages from sponsors.
Yeah I only ever saw it on Desktop since I do most my viewing there, and even then only on specific videos. So its not crazy frequent, just annoying its a thing at all.
I do love the idea of youtube building in a skip for in vid sponsors though, that would possibly bring me back haha. Like if sponsored creators were required to add a “sponsor” chapter to their vids, so premium users could have it just skip that block of the video 🤔
It would be nice, but there would be a revolt from all the creators. Right now they get 100% of that money, and if they had to rely on just a cut of Premium, it likely wouldn’t be nearly as much. They’d probably find other ways to weave it into the video instead of having a dedicated sponsored segment… which would be better. The cut away to the recorded sponsor read always seems a bit lazy.