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.

  • Ronnie
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    1 year ago

    Perhaps ads become more unreasonable because so many people block them that those who do watch them are forced to pick up the slack?

    • BeigeAgenda
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      1 year ago

      No, it’s just following the curve, until their metrics show them that people stop watching they reduce the number of ads 10% until next cycle.

      They have been using the frog boiling method, and crossed my limit like two years ago, when they went from a 5 second ad each x videos to two ads for every video.

    • Honytawk@lemmy.zip
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      1 year ago

      When businesses are required to increase profits by 30% every year to not be seen as a failure, they would increase the ads no matter how many of the users watch them.

    • teamevil@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Nah…the cable company charges you to watch commercials , cell phone providers charge you to sell your data…on and on