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.

  • MonsterHighStan
    3•9 months ago

    I just tried libretube but it crashes every time I click on a video :(

    It’s such a shame because I used to use newpipe all the time and I absolutely loved that, until it also stopped working

    • @[email protected]English
      5•9 months ago

      Did you install it from fdroid? There is a problem in fdroid version that crashes app when trying to play video. Its already fixed on github but fdroid is slow to update.

    • @[email protected]English
      1•9 months ago

      I think you need to update NewPipe.

      If you just installed the app from an apk file, try installing it from the F-Droid app instead, to keep on receiving new updates.

      Alternatively, you could add it to the Obtainium app (use the search bar when adding), since it supports GitHub, F-Droid and many more repositories.

      That’ll keep you updated!