Goodbye Youtube and thanks for all the fish
Goodbye Youtube and thanks for all the fish
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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Script blocking > Ad Blocking. Block all of the tracking scripts, all of the ad-aware stuff, disable redirects and scripts embedded in the ad frames, bypass script-based paywalls, etc. It is a pain in the ass to go to a new site and have to figure out who the 20 domains are that are trying to load scripts, but finding those tracking fuckers and hitting "distrust" is so satisfying. I swear that any ads I do see are so all over the map because nobody knows who the hell I am and I like it that way.
Video sharing websites should be a public service without expecting users to shell out money to watch and upload eachothers content. This was its original spirit way back in the early 2000s. It didn't start out as a corporate product, it was turned into one by Alphabet. Now from a buisness prespective there needs to be a profit and the server farms that host videos are costly to set up and maintain. Its sort of understandable why google is squeezing as the free investor money is drying up.
Fortunately there are federated open source alternatives like peertube. But peertube needs to become more intuitive/gui friendly to the average person and youtube needs to ROYALLY fuck up bad enough to make a decent chunk of users look for and try alternatives. Maybe were close at hand to more people flocking towards foss alternatives as corporations squeeze harder and harder.