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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But I delete my history every 1 week instead of every 3 months. So they don’t get much from my choices.
Implying that deleting them from your view actually deleted them.
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Since I can’t read clojure: does this proxy or does it download the videos and serve them? I imagine the latter, but is there a limit? For example VPSs have tiny drives (10GB, 20GB, etc.) with a LRU cache it would be possible to use this on those things, but even on bigger hard drives, the videos have to get cleaned up eventually.
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Ublock Origin literally works fine for youtube. If you ever receive a warning like this just clear your cache and refresh your filters.
Tbh, I block ads when I can but have a hard time getting angry about this. YouTube is both incredibly useful and incredibly expensive to operate – seriously, what other service lets you upload hours of HD video which anyone in the world can access instantly, indefinitely, for free, and at the same scale YT does? It’s a peerless engineering marvel and it would be a tragedy if it were to shut down. If seeing some short skippable ads is what it takes to keep that resource viable, that’s honestly pretty fair.
Look at all the free image / video services that either never took off or went bust. Especially streaming is quite expensive and isolating only this single aspect of Youtube - cost to operate: what do people expect? Everybody wants few to no ads at all and no subscription either.
As I said, I don’t want to even touch any other topic here like Youtube’s (perceived) quality or their (spicy) business decisions. If you don’t like the product, don’t use it. There is no right to free consumption of entertainment videos. Imagine paying for a taxi like you (don’t) pay for Youtube.
And if you know better, start your own platform.
All the morons defending a mindless corporation in this thread forgot that Google has far overstepped it’s boundaries in general. It got to where it is from harvesting free data from users. And now is initiating a web DRM that will far overstep any boundary seen. If a website decides to adopt it, everyone is screwed.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/07/googles-web-integrity-api-sounds-like-drm-for-the-web/
You don’t have a choice.
Also Ublock Origin on Firefox already bypass this.
The new word for “whitelisted” is “allowlisted”?
Yes. In the same way that “Master” and “Slave” have been replaced for racist engineering terminology, “Whitelist” and “Blacklist” are replaced with “Allowlist” and “Blocklist”.
Do these terms actually come from racist backgrounds, or did they come up as a coincidence?
It just feels weird someone would think of a way to degrade black people then decide to use blacklist for things they don’t want, then engineers decide to use master and slave to piss off black people whatever. Is that literally the history behind it?Blacklist was specifically used to refer to the refusal of entry as if they were a black person, so yes there is a racist history. Master and Slave is pretty obvious why especially considering everyone uses Parent/Child and Primary/Secondary these days anyway. Like maybe 10% of the change was because of “je-I-mean-sjws being offended” and like 90% just practicality because they’re outdated terms that aren’t really used.
Lol…omg. lol.
Phew.
I’m sure Americans used blacklist like that at one time or another, but the origins are a list of enemies and had nothing to do with skin color.
Master and Slave is also not something exclusive to black people, they’re generic terms that were appropriated.
ublock origin + Firefox still works. try open ublock origin dashboard > Filter lists then click the purge all cachess button
Maybe also delete your browser cache in case they flagged you with some cookie or stuff. I had to do that, but this stupid modal was rolled out between me watching 2 videos exactly at midnight. So… YMMV
If you’re on a browser, use invidious - https://api.invidious.io/
If you’re on android, use NewPipe - https://f-droid.org/packages/org.schabi.newpipe/
Fuck google with the entire alphabet and their graveyard of ideas
They’re begging for a direct competitor.
yes please
Once everyone views the ads, the view per ads value will drop and become worth less, no creator will ever get more money. As if YouTube will miss out and pass down their revenue to the small people, lol.
This calls for DEFCON enshittification talk
This calls for Bloonface’s rebuttal. (Which is older than the talk, but refers to the same concept by the same person. I’m going to assume most points still apply.)
Serving 4k video is not free.
If you refuse to pay for Premium and refuse to be served ads, what do you expect to happen? You’re a freeloader.
You’re a freeloader.
Nah, they still have my data to sell.
Is there a reasom paying them is so bad? I can spit on Reddit because they basically freeloading from user generated content(or stolen content) and strongarm everyone into working for them, but at least Youtube allow their content creator to monetize their content, even though they sometime ban one stuff but not the other(one veritasium video got demonetized due to containing suicide in the story), so paying to remove ads in both youtube and music is kinda a win for me, so i’m not entirely sure why the hostility on this.
Is there a reasom paying them is so bad? It’s Google.
I concede that a part of the money goes to the content creators, but I can’t reconcile paying Google with my conscience. IMO, they are the greatest danger to the Internet, pushing on all fronts to make it a corporate hellscape.
I rather use Patreon and/or Nebula to support content creators, even if it is more expensive and less convenient.
Sometimes I forget people like watch YouTube on purpose. I pretty much exclusively use it for music that’s not on Bandcamp, short clips of old shows, and the occasional guide for something that’s too visual to be described well in words.
Old man out of the loop, yells at clouds.
It’s my go-to player for various podcasts. I don’t end up watching, just listening. But it’s YouTube nonetheless.
While I don’t normally use it for music, the magic of it’s recommendation engine has led me into several amazing music niches, wich I wouldn’t have found otherwise.
