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.
Lol it was some Google employee’s job for months to work on this anti AdBlock method and uBlock Origin bypasses it like same day
Don’t assume ineptitude.
I’ve been in the position of being asked to implement an anti-feature. I made it take as long as possible to drive up the cost and designed it to be trivially bypassable because I’m not motivated to intentionally trash my own project.
Subterfuge at work, a fun subject to study.
Some of my favorites from a declassified WWII “simple productivity sabotage” manual:
-
Insist on doing everything through “channels.” Never permit short-cuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions.
-
Make “speeches.” Talk as frequently as possible and at great length. Illustrate your “points” by long anecdotes and accounts of personal experiences.
-
When possible, refer all matters to committees, for “further study and consideration.” Attempt to make the committee as large as possible — never less than five.
-
Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible.
-
Haggle over precise wordings of communications, minutes, resolutions.
-
Refer back to matters decided upon at the last meeting and attempt to re-open the question of the advisability of that decision.
-
Advocate “caution.” Be “reasonable” and urge your fellow-conferees to be "reasonable"and avoid haste which might result in embarrassments or difficulties later on.
When I first saw these I was like goddamn, psyops got to my executive director!
I always thought if youtube pushes the anti ad policy too hard they risk alienating the tech people who will end up on another platform which will start growing much faster. What they do is come up with half assed ad blocking. So casual people and people on locked systems like iPhone YouTube app are forced to watch ads.
Anyone not bothered by ads or Lacy enough will make Google money by watching ads. So they’re squeezing as much money without going too far. If they wanted to, they could have ads which would be unblock-able.
Adblock solutions still exist for twitch. I’m using one right now. Never seen a single ultra intrusive pre-roll or full screen ad in months. Banner ads occasionally sneak through.
It does break every now and then for a week or so when twitch updates things, but still infinitely better than sitting through ads.
Ive had to dick around with my adblock settings once every few days lately.
Firefox + ublock origin = I haven’t had to do anything for the last year and stuff just gets blocked with no downsides.
And don’t forget to show your appreciation to the people who maintain that whole shebang - of course, only if you’re able to. Sending here and there 10 bucks, for example to the Newpipe or libretube team - or to your resident open source adblocker - doesn’t hurt, it’s only a few clicks and it really makes a difference.
How would one do this? I use ublock origin on Firefox, but I’ve started seeing the same pop-ups on YouTube the last few days and would love to get rid of them.
On PC: Click on the little uBlock Origin symbol on the url bar, then click on the little gears in the middle right to go to the dashboard, and then select the Filter Lists tab.
To begin, ensure that the first option, auto-updating filter lists, is turned on unless you have a reason for it to be off.
Then, make sure that you have ALL the ad-related filters turned on, and all the annoyances filters selected as well. Only some are selected by default so you need to look them over carefully. Look over the other filters while you’re at it and turn on any others you’ve missed that you think you might want.
Then, once you have enabled all your desired filters, select “Apply changes” and then “Update Now” via the two large buttons at the top left of the page. You should see all the filters go from an orange triangle to something else. Export your new settings if you want a backup of what you just did, and close.
If a filter list you turned on breaks something, just turn the newly enabled ones off again OR whitelist the broken site. But honestly you shouldn’t have any problems, the uBlock Origin filter lists are pretty fine-tuned these days. I have them ALL turned on, lol.
I’ve done this several times over the last few weeks as I’ve been trying out Linux distros and refuse to use Firefox without ad-blocking. Let me know if you have any problems.
Sadly it looks like Google/Youtube have now circumvented Ublock again. After implementing the changes you suggested above, it got rid of the pop-ups on Youtube for me for a week, and now they’re back and I can’t get around them even after updating Ublock. Hopefully Ublock gets around these quickly.
I had that problem as well, I had to make sure I didn’t have any other blockers/privacy/enhancer addons that changed YouTube in some way, after that, ublock worked properly again.
