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.
All the morons defending a mindless corporation in this thread forgot that Google has far overstepped it's boundaries in general. It got to where it is from harvesting free data from users. And now is initiating a web DRM that will far overstep any boundary seen. If a website decides to adopt it, everyone is screwed.
youtube shows ad for paramount plus under my video
Cancels YouTube premium.
So anywho there’s a thing called freetube. Just saying. Idk that it’s a perfect alternative, but it’s at least one step further from googles prying eyes and grubby hands.
Tbh, I block ads when I can but have a hard time getting angry about this. YouTube is both incredibly useful and incredibly expensive to operate -- seriously, what other service lets you upload hours of HD video which anyone in the world can access instantly, indefinitely, for free, and at the same scale YT does? It's a peerless engineering marvel and it would be a tragedy if it were to shut down. If seeing some short skippable ads is what it takes to keep that resource viable, that's honestly pretty fair.
PC: Install Firefox. Then install these extensions: Sponsorblock for YouTube, Enhancer for YouTube, uBlock Origins with all the filters turned on except the language filters (you can use them if you wish) and Return YouTube Dislike. Keep uBlock Filters updated by checking for filter updates once a day.
Android: There's Revanced. I use pre-built apks along with Vanced MicroG from RVX Lite in Telegram.
Just to let you know, if you use uBlock you can expect it to adapt to this new shenanigan pretty quickly. Also I think €120/year are ridiciously overpriced. Ask me about €30/year and I might consider it for a second.
To be honest, I wouldn't mind ads on Youtube if they were less per hour and less obnoxious. But no, every 12 second video now has an ad leading to it.
Not to mention, if I would pay for every single Video service the usual 8-15€ I would pay like €1000 per year and THAT IS NOT GOING TO HAPPEN.
Give me "pretty much everything" for €100 per year and we can talk. My offer stands.
If only peertube had the same culture as Lemmy and Mastodon.
But it feels like, imo, Peertube has fallen to the same pitfalls as other YouTube alternatives.
99% of vids I see on Peertube instances are far-right conspiracy theory videos among other obviously abhorrent content that would otherwise be banned on youtube.
However, as a teacher, my school IT system default browser is chrome, and adverts on YT videos when you're trying to teach a lesson can really suck all the momentum and attention from the class.
Chrome allows you to save javascript as a bookmark URL called bookmarklets. I'm not so clued up on java, but I found this code that zips through the adverts super quickly. Someone can probably improve on this;
javascript: var v = document.querySelector('video'); var t = 16; v.playbackRate = parseFloat(t)
I enjoy watching YouTube with no ads so I bought premium. I actually bought the family one and share it with 4 others. Personally, I find it to be a great deal.
I also pay for extra storage (even tho I have a nas) because it’s convenient to have.
I’m a pirate at heart, have a 3k movie library on Plex and use nefarious to queue download, and I’m a long time crypto nut so I understand privacy and sticking it to the man.
But I also find great quality of life improvements by simply paying fair prices for good content 🤷♂️
It’s a fun hobby to try and dodge ads and steal and stick it to these companies. But really can be time consuming and gets old (it did at least for me when I got old).
Ohhhh how I wish my favorite youtubers would create their own Peertube instances...
They'd have complete control of their own content, and any donations could go directly to them.
I know it's kind of a pipe dream, but let me dream dammit.
I hate ads as much as anyone and have been blocking them for almost as long as ad blockers have existed. I still acknowledge the fact that ads are the primary revenue source for a lot of things on the Internet, and I selectively enable them for content I want to pay for.
How do you think Youtube is supposed to survive without ads or subscriptions? When they puts ads on their site, the unsaid agreement is that you exchange your ad views for their service.
I'll play devil's advocate here... Ads pay revenue. Revenue pays for the service. The service pays content creators. I'm not saying Youtube is perfect, but adblocking, or using alternate front ends, hurts the content creators first. Youtube Premium gets rid of the ads, pays the content creators more, and gets you a spotify-type music streaming service as well. I'm not trying to shill, but the deal is pretty fair, it's only $3 more than spotify, and you get 0 ads on youtube as a bonus. If you really don't want to see and you don't want to pay for it, then please, don't use the service. Youtube still gets data from you, even if you block ads. You want to hurt them, then do it the right way. Blocking ads hurts the creators more than anyone else.
Edit: Every day I am reminded of how many people believe they are owed everything for free.
Script blocking > Ad Blocking. Block all of the tracking scripts, all of the ad-aware stuff, disable redirects and scripts embedded in the ad frames, bypass script-based paywalls, etc. It is a pain in the ass to go to a new site and have to figure out who the 20 domains are that are trying to load scripts, but finding those tracking fuckers and hitting "distrust" is so satisfying. I swear that any ads I do see are so all over the map because nobody knows who the hell I am and I like it that way.
I just tried it out, watched three videos (one was 49 minutes) and nothing. I use Firefox with NoScript and U-Block (also Enhancer for Youtube, but I doubt that's relevant). I wouldn't have know this was happening if no one posted about it.
Hear me out: Google makes money by selling ads. People who buy from those ads don't have an adblocker installed. People who are intelligent enough to block ads wouldn't buy from them anyway. If Google allows it to be too easy to block ads then their model collapses. I'm ok with jumping through a couple hoops to continue to block and Google doesn't lose anything while I get to still watch the content I like without wasting anyone's time. It's to Google's benefit to serve videos to only people who will actually buy that crap anyway. If Google or anyone wants to sell to me, they simply have to make a great product. If they do, I'll see it in use for it's intended purpose and buy it. For example, I didn't have to watch any ads to buy a Nintendo Switch years ago...
I see a lot of people saying X and Y are safe. Eventually nothing will be safe. All they have to do is require login to view content. Make login require CC or SMS then enforce a ratio of content played over time.
Price wise, they're just insane. It's all B-Rate content for more then the price of any other streaming service.
I either pay to use the app or I get ads that pay for the platform to continue being used but I don't want to see the ads so my ad blocker blocks the ads.
A company is going to continue making revenue. I don't know why anyone is shocked by a company that makes ads changing a site to ask you to view more ads. Genuinely baffled that users waste their time complaining about something a big trillion dollar company owns and actively runs changing their platform to continue making them trillions of dollars then getting on here and going, "take that Google I am fed up."
Meanwhile, I have just been paying for YouTube premium with no ads supporting the content creators I love and moving on with my life.
Sometimes I forget people like watch YouTube on purpose. I pretty much exclusively use it for music that's not on Bandcamp, short clips of old shows, and the occasional guide for something that's too visual to be described well in words.
i've still never seen this message outside of a screenshot; ublock origin in firefox (including tor browser, just need to hit the new circuit button sometimes) still works fine as of today. and so does yt-dlp.
the fact that some ad blockers are seeing this is a bad sign though :(
I use FreeTube on my desktop and Newpipe on my GrapheneOS Pixel 7, I don't see any ads or graphic overlays. The family uses AppleTV and the YouTube app is a horrible experience with the amount of ads, even for a 3 minute video. Future project is to look into Pihole or something to block ads at the router level.
Is it enshittification, or how the Internet should work for commercial services? Youtube isn't publicly funded. You either pay for the product or become it in exchange for use.
First, I am with OP on this, but with mild counter points:
I block ads because they are intrusive, contain scam and viruses
I don't want to pay YT because I am already the product, and my trust is long gone about them saying they respect my privacy
"Hosting is expensive" is what we hear left and right but...
letting people upload many hours long is not what YT was supposed to be,
4K vids and up are huge, so is HDR, do we really need such fat video files/streams? I don't...
for those who need 2000inch TV size quality, yeah, they want to charge those.
I would be OK to pay, but google will rise the price eventually and it feels like changing a contrcat I signed to begin with and I dan't agree with that. (price raising reason are the previous points above, I am not concerned by those and I don't see why I should pay that much)
I am a google pixel user, google already got some of my money anyway, which I am happy with.
In the same vein, I wait Netflix to raise their price again (I bit the bullet twice) but there won't be a third time.
Same for Spotify.
Those services should realize they are not essential, just bare useful, and should be priced as such.
I finally bit the bullet and switched from Chrome to Firefox last night after they flagged my adblock for YouTube as malware and forcefully disabled it. Fuck that noise.
Use Invidious while it still exists as a project I'm a fan of the yewtu.be instance. Pretty reliable. The Piped project is good as well. Don't even use the YouTube domain at all, hate giving them analytics and site usage info nevermind ads
As soon as I have to see ads, I'm gone. Not mad, I get the business need for them. It's just not worth it for me. Most of my actual subscriptions are through a rss reader, and that effectively blocks all but the sponsorblock ones. For which I have sponsorblock.
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.
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.
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.
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
tbf i changed my mind recently as i paid for spotify but had yt vrevanced and st next. but after thinking about it, i switched the family subscription from spotify to youtube premium as it has both youtube and music while 5 out of 350 songs are missing for the same fucking price.
You have to build a sub list with FreeTube, but it's well worth it. There's an import from youtube feature, but I haven't been successful in making it work.
honestly at this point I don't even understand using the normal youtube front end anymore. I have been using piped as my youtube app on my phone for a while, and I think it's time I switch frontends. What sucks is video is one of the few things we don't have a decent way of federating right now just due to the sheer volume of disk space required.
I’m still surprised what platforms make money WITH the content that USERS make , charge or restrict USERS view. It’s kinda crazy model that people accepted for so many years. For one side this is good because it will make users to reconsider what they do and how they corporations make money from it. Google money model has a date of death.
They could always make actual relationships with advertisers and host ads on their own site. And make it not interfere with the content itself. Difficult concept, I know.
YouTube messed up by not being a paid only service first and later offering an advertisement supported free tier. That way around, they'd be celebrated.
I just got this for the first time today. I was able to dismiss it and go on to watch ad blocked YouTube on Firefox, but I wonder how much longer this will be an option.
Nebula and Curiosity Stream are looking really good right now.
It’s working perfectly in Safari, loaded up with ad blockers and Vinegar. I’m streaming ad-free tropical 4k jungle sounds from my Mac Mini as we speak.
Is there a reasom paying them is so bad? I can spit on Reddit because they basically freeloading from user generated content(or stolen content) and strongarm everyone into working for them, but at least Youtube allow their content creator to monetize their content, even though they sometime ban one stuff but not the other(one veritasium video got demonetized due to containing suicide in the story), so paying to remove ads in both youtube and music is kinda a win for me, so i'm not entirely sure why the hostility on this.
I can't make it show that message. I tried both Chrome and Firefox with ublock. Do I need to use a different adblock to even see these warnings from youtube? I would like to verify this is true before sharing this information.
Once everyone views the ads, the view per ads value will drop and become worth less, no creator will ever get more money. As if YouTube will miss out and pass down their revenue to the small people, lol.
If there was no browser workaround i wound use a third party client and possibly selfhost it for family.
Hard to get away from Youtube itself.
I wonder how many % of the users actually use any adblockinf tool
Not sure if anyone else has posted this, but you can check https://github.com/mendel5/alternative-front-ends for privacy focused frontends for various sites. There are many alternatives for youtube that have no ads as far as I know and require login, and are easy to convert youtube links to.
I just got this popup today too, but only in Brave, it doesn't show up in Firefox and LibreWolf at all and I use uBlock Origin for all of them. Looks like it's just a Chromium thing. I mainly use Firefox anyway, I only use Brave as a music player at work because I have too many FF tabs opened in 3 windows already.
I have no idea how i'd replace YouTube in my life - sites like Reddit are one thing, but there is no current viable analogue to YouTube. Premium is pretty cheap for what it is - happy I made the decision to subscribe years ago
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.
Why are you not using a Piped or Invidious instance?
I tried to watch a stream uploaded on YouTube and they put adrolls every 5 minutes, for a 3+ hour video. It was unwatchable. Sucks that pretty much every site is fucking over its users lately. Maybe it's a sign I should just get away from the internet for a while.
the battle between ad-blockers and ad-blocker-blockers is eternal. adblockers will adapt.
if i block ads, it's only fair that google tries to block my blocking of their ads. calling this "enshittification" is silly, they didn't make their product worse they just are doing a better job of enforcing the rule that's always been there.
I mean, it makes sense no? They are a business after all. Why wouldn't they try to enforce their ads? I personally don't watch YT that much but why not just pay up if you need ad free experience? The content on YouTube is good because creators get paid well from ads
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.
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.
Ads are illegal bullshit. I use a whitelist firewall not an ad blocker. Any company that can not host their entire service at a single address is no different than a business selling you stuff then telling you to go pick it up on the other side of town. Forcing people to connect to 3rd party sites is the most criminal bullshit possible. That is like the grocery store saying you can't get in the store unless you go to McDonald's and wait in line first. You don't have to purchase, you just need to wait in line or you can't get inside. Alphabet should be broken up. Not google, not YouTube, ALPHABET should have everything split up for antitrust