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.
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 concede that a part of the money goes to the content creators, but I can't reconcile paying Google with my conscience. IMO, they are the greatest danger to the Internet, pushing on all fronts to make it a corporate hellscape.
I rather use Patreon and/or Nebula to support content creators, even if it is more expensive and less convenient.