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.
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.
Those platform exist because the Web is utterly terrible when it comes to discovering content and monetizing it. "Google-bad" is easy to say, but I have yet to see a real alternative.
Google Videos was an alternative to Youtube in the early days, but since Google is too greedy to invest in innovation, it just buys it's competitors, so we don't see them unless we consider community alternatives that can't be bought by Alphabet like Peertube.
TIL Vimeo is a figment of my imagination and that Google is actually harmless
Youtube still pays those Creators money for their content, some dedicated enough even do that as their job and live off of that youtube money, some very, very comfortably. If YT (or a similar entity for that matter) didn't exist and get money trough ads and subscriptions how many of those creators do you think would still make content, let alone live off of it?
Everyone here screams how bad and greedy YT/Google is, but when it comes down to giving the creators they watch money trough other means (patreon etc.) who actually would do that? yeah...no one.
Except for, you know. There are hundreds of creators who live out of Patreon and sponsor money who don't monetize their videos. It's true there aren't that many people willing to pay for video creators. But they're not zero.
This
Oh won't someone think of the poor shareholders!
There is https://nebula.tv/ which hosts most of my favorite creators without all the YT crap. I am very happy to pay them.