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.
I do not think I am entitled to use YouTube and not paying for it. I just think companies like YouTube aren’t entitled to deceive me with opaque TOS’s that enable them to gobble up every little detail about me which they then hand over to their colleagues at Alphabet/Google or, worse, sell to companies without my knowledge. It’s incredibly pernicious, and I think framing as “you don’t want to pay for things” is unfair, to be honest.
I listen to on-air reads on my podcasts. I let youtube run their ads as well. But I’ll be damned if I don’t leave my VPN and little snitch running every time I am browsing anything remotely related to Google and similar companies. We would all be foolish not to! They are welcome to run their ads all they want, I am not even begrudging their learning about their audience to a degree, but they are not entitled to know my daily routine, such as when I take a shower and take a dump. They are not entitled to know everything about my friends and family just because they stood too close to me while I used their services.
They are welcome to make money. They are not welcome to do it literally however they please. We are allowed to push back by taking the task of anonymizing our data into our own hands.
That being said, when they run five minute ads that are basically cartoons geared towards my children, I do not feel bad at all for finding ways around that. They time them in a way that they’re hoping we don’t notice when they come on. Incredibly deceptive and often they are longer than what we are watching in the first place