I'll be that guy and say this isn't crappy design and shouldn't be in this community. We've already got posts filling top of all we don't need more where they don't belong.
Thankfully it isn't hard to remove with ublock origin. Just enter Element picker mode and select the pop up to remove it. Then do the same for the greyed out background & it'll work normally.
I've paid for YouTube premium pretty much since it started being a thing and had to drop it recently for financial reasons. Simply existing these days feels like I'm drowning. The bombardment of ads and frequent notifications to come back are making me want to ditch YouTube entirely. I've been using YouTube in Firefox with desktop site requested to play my videos in the background and I try to use odysee as much as possible now. Their price hikes along with no recognition of how long I've been a paying member has really gotten to me.
I use Firefox and have uBlock Origin installed. I block ALL cookies from YouTube and Google and other Google sites. I am not signed into any Google properties and I have not seen an ad for over 10+years. I never use an app or mobile and use only a desktop on Linux.
Google will not win over products like uBlock Origin because, it's NOT an ad blocker, it's an element blocker. It allows the user to remove annoyances, and that sometimes includes ads.
The only way Google will get to force ads on people is if they REQUIRE you to sign in to it's services and force cookies on you. It will have to be a walled garden. Meta, Xitter, bluesky, reddit, will all eventually go to the walled garden because they are greedy. Users will leave and the Fediverse will grow.
People are fed up with ads and all the "improvements" that sites like YouTube make. Ambient mode, auto play, end cards, notations, all unnecessary. And we block it with element blockers.
Everyone needs to sign out on desktop if you’re using Ublock origin bypass. This whole TOS thing could be grounds to start going after your account they don’t achieve the outcome they’re looking for
This is a long time coming. Who in their right mind thought that a service that allows pretty much anyone to upload gigabytes of videos would be free forever. I get that people don't like ads, but the amount of outrage is overkill.
Me personally because I don't have a Google account nor saw a real gain in getting one (for what I do in my day to day), I just switched to these for subscriptions.
Me personally, I didn't mind ads back in the day when they weren't so annoying. But somehow YouTube + content creators made ads so annoying at some point that I started to use ad blocker and sponsor skipper.
My theory is that by becoming so aggressive with ads , YouTube income / video actuallly decreased due to people getting fed up with ads and getting ad blockers. Now they go even more aggressive so people will start to look for alternatives.
It'll be interesting to see following development.
You know what annoys me the most about this?
I looked up the price of Premium. It's not great but not too bad either. I hate subscription services so I thought "I'll just buy the annual plan"
Google doesn't offer the Family Annual plan in my region. Only Individual Annual.
Fucks sake Google! If I'm trying to give you money, the least you could have done is make it easy!
I get that losing something you previously had access to is frustrating, but people here act like they should have the privilege to get YouTube for free. That's not how a company works.
Who here expected a company like this to pass up on making more money by allowing add blockers? You were cheating the system, and the system caught up. It sucks. Either find a new way to cheat the system or accept that they won.