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Goodbye Youtube and thanks for all the fish

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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  • ITT: Entitled users think they deserve YouTube without paying for it.

    Be honest with yourself, you are entitled. Stop acting like youtube is fucking you over by enforcing what is a reasonable policy for those who refuse to pay with their money.

    Piracy is also entitlement. I am honest with myself when I pirate and use ad blockers on the internet. Why can't you be?

    You can downvote me all you want but at the end of the day I am right and you are immature for not being able to handle admitting you're doing things off the moral high road you want to believe you're on.

    Stop using YouTube if you can't get what you want out of the service. A lot of lemmy users did the same with Reddit, it's within your reach. If you don't like how YouTube is (and it does suck if you arent a yt premium user) and your ad blocker no longer works, it's time to find a new platform that preserves your privacy and respects your rights as a user. Just don't act so goddamn entitled.

    • 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

    • Lol, piracy is entitlement? You should say that to all the people who pirate because they literally can't afford to spend money on luxuries, or those who are archiving old/abandoned media, or those who prefer to test a game's performance before buying it.

      You're making some really big blanket statements and standing on those statements to talk down on people. I don't even disagree with your main point; people who have more than enough resources to pay for their content are entitled for thinking it should all be free.

      However I also don't think that the average person enjoys watching a 30 second ad on a 7 second video, and then another ad at the end to listen to while searching for the next video. That's not entitlement, that's just being reasonable.

      But sure, do your thing where you call people entitled while simultaneously carrying a superiority complex, I'm sure that helps you convince people to think the way you do.

      You can downvote me all you want but at the end of the day I am right and you are immature

      This reads like a toxic middle schooler wrote it lmao

    • So... we're entitled. You're entitled. Pirates are entitled. Adblockers are entitled. Whats your point?

      Seriously what's the point of this comment? What do I do with this perspective?

      What do you even mean by "entitled" at this point? That we believe we should get something? So what? For me it's more like I "can" get something. I don't watch ads because they're literal fucking brain poison. I watch YouTube because content creators produce things of value to me on there. I pirate because I can.

      I'm not sure how entitlement even comes into play here. So I say I'm entitled, so what? What does that change?

      Do you just want to not hear us be upset when things change? When we have to pirate and adblock differently, we are gonna talk, we are gonna complain, we are gonna rabble.

      If you don't do those things.... well, we're not really talking to you. You're not invited. Go be morally superior somewhere else. And that IS what you're doing: you're acting morally superior for doing the same exact thing as us but claiming that by saying "how doing so makes you an entitled little brat" you are somehow better than us. You're a really bizarre fellow.

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