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've literally never gotten any message like that I've been using a blocker forever.
They've been slowly rolling it out for the last few months, I haven't been hit with it yet either.
https://www.tomsguide.com/news/youtube-testing-three-strikes-rule-to-block-users-with-ad-blockers
Relevant article...
Yea it's a small test, they already hit me with it, I had to switch to brave to stop the ad-block-blocker
Brave is not good in terms of privacy. Use Ublock Origin.
I did, I used uBlock with Firefox for around 3 years by now, and just recently YouTube completely blocked uBlock, I tried many different filters and YouTube still managed to block it.