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.
Which is exactly why it’s fucked for google to offer it and recoup viewer’s data on the backend.
Honestly, it seems like a fair trade to me. I get to use an expensive service without paying for it, in exchange they build a profile on my activity.
If that doesn’t seem like a fair trade to you, you can always pay for YT Premium.
But everyone else is forced to have their data harvested because everyone else is pressured to move their content to a subsidized walled garden.
They’re only “pressured” to do so because doing anything else is prohibitively expensive.
Consider the fact that YouTube ran at a net loss for about a decade before having their first-ever profitable quarter. That’s the reason nobody else can host a free video sharing platform with any degree of reliability, because most other companies can’t afford that sort of long-term loss before reaching that critical mass where it actually becomes sustainable.
If you were to try to build a similar platform without any sort of subsidization, you’ll be out of money almost immediately, and you won’t have your video platform any longer.
It’s a necessary evil. If there was a better option, somebody would have thought of it by now, and there would be an actual competitor to YouTube somewhere.
I’m not talking about free video hosting.
I’m saying no one puts anything on paid hosting anymore because a company that can afford to ignore cost for decades offered a below cost service so now if you wish to view anything anywhere everyone puts it on the platform that harvest your data. Because no one put things on free hosting there are fewer options for it forcing people deeper into the walled garden.
It’s fucked up and anything bad that happens to youtube is deserved.