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.
Something I don’t think anyone is talking about is that, if this is now considered a ToS violation, Google will probably decide at some point to start banning accounts over it. Oh, you use adblock? Now your email, Drive documents, and photos are gone.
This is great, I’m sure I"m not the only one that now no longer thinks of Google as a safe place for my email and photos. And their search sucks now, there’s not much reason to have Google in my life at all anymore. The era of Google is over (I hope!).
Time to make a second Google account just to use for YouTube viewing.
Maybe at least a portion of people will realize they should not entrust anything personal to an advertisement company and use an actual mail/storage/etc provider instead.