this post was submitted on 10 Oct 2023
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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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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Something I don't think anyone is talking about is that, if this is now considered a ToS violation, Google will probably decide at some point to start banning accounts over it. Oh, you use adblock? Now your email, Drive documents, and photos are gone.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

This is great, I'm sure I"m not the only one that now no longer thinks of Google as a safe place for my email and photos. And their search sucks now, there's not much reason to have Google in my life at all anymore. The era of Google is over (I hope!).

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

just use frontends like invidious - for mobile there are tons of apps for these frontends, i recommend newpipe if you dont care about shitty recommendations

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Thank you for mentioning the overlay blocker. Never heard of it. I was just on YouTube today and haven't seen this. Are you in the US? I feared this day would come. Not sure what I'll do.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

FYI if you delete your watch history, then watch one video, you can pause it again and get a proper homepage. Just don't clear that one video. I just clicked on a DJ set from someone I liked three weeks ago as that one video and it hasn't broken again since.

I switched to Firefox a few years ago when Chrome started forcing HDCP, my uBlock hasn't been affected at all in the most recent changes.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (4 children)

YouTube is straight up evil. We need an alternative solution.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

Silly question if you don't mind me asking, when you got the pop up:

  • Which browser/adblocker where you using (also did you use any custom filters)?
  • What device are you watching youtube on when you saw the block (windows, macos, ios, android, linux)?
  • Where are you located? (like which country)

I never saw these popups just curious.

Also my setups using a web browser (no issues):

  • (Mac OS Soma) Firefox Stable with ublock origen stock filters
  • (iPadOS 17) with adguard safari content blocker stock filters

Setups with third part clients (no issues):

  • Revanced android
  • Smarttube (Fire TV)
  • YTLitePlus (iPadOS)
[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

Use an alternative front end like https://piped.video

You may want to try various instances (in preferences) as the main one has been under a lot of load

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