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.

    • @[email protected]
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      359 months ago

      Swapped over about 3 months ago, it’s good to be back in the FF ecosystem. Swapped to chrome long ago after FF became super fat on the resources, now it’s the other way around.

      FF + pihole is awesome.

      • @[email protected]
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        49 months ago

        I’m starting to lean this way as well.

        I’m not a huge open source/privacy/whatever purist, but it just seems that more and more often, I am reading that FF is the go-to again.

        • @[email protected]
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          19 months ago

          It’s been great so far, and the import function from chrome worked perfectly. It’s what I was worried about the most.

    • @[email protected]
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      9 months ago

      Not anymore, they’re rolling this out in separate swaths. so if you haven’t seen it, it just means you’ll get to wait a little longer.

      > >no longer works > FF+UB does work with the instructions you can find on reddit.com/r/ublockorigin < no longer works <

      Edit: Freetube works on pc, and F-droid and NewPipe works on Android

      • @[email protected]
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        19 months ago

        You need to use default ublock settings and disable other plug-ins as they are causing the message. Ublock works fine on Firefox