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.
Here’s an interesting idea: pay for what you consume. We can argue whether ads or a YouTube Premium are a fair price, but I don’t think you’d have a moral or legal leg to stand on if your argument is that Google must provide you with hosting and streaming for free.
You are consuming resources on Google’s computers. I think they have a right to ask for payment.
To me, the ad tracking industry is completely out of control, and I’m not going to disable my ad blocker. So I signed up for YouTube Premium.
It's mind-blowing how people think they have a God-given right to freeload and leech off of the tech, music, film and television industries. For big tech in particular they whine and bitch about having to watch ads, having their data collected in bulk and being asked to pay for services they've been using for free for years. Meanwhile content creators on YouTube in particular have been hit by many unpopular advertiser friendly guidelines and taken many revenue hits because Google remain beholden to their key stakeholders which are the advertisers. Adblock users are part of the reason why so many content creators have to now resort to shilling crappy VPNs or mobile gacha games in every single one of their videos just to break even.
Similar argument goes with the entertainment industry. "How fucking dare they stop me from stealing all these shows and movies!" "How fucking dare they move their stuff to rival streaming services!" It's more baffling that they think a single $9.99 a month ad-free subscription is going to pay for an entire industry when production costs are skyrocketing and the industry previously enjoyed much higher pricing under the cable model.
"This shit is getting as bad as cable" is another argument I often see thrown around by people justifying piracy because they want to freeload, as if you are being forced to subscribe to every single platform all at once. Cable hardly even gave consumers that choice to pick and choose. You had to pay dozens, if not over a hundred dollars a month to Comcast, TWC, etc for access to everything, even a lot of stuff you otherwise didn't want to watch.
FTFY
It's what they do. Extract rent for user generated content - whether that be videos or advertising metrics. The disparity between the value users provide to Google and that which Google provides to users is immense.