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.
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
Eventually they'll just shut down the APIs that allow that to happen just like reddit did. There will still be workarounds to that, but it will make things harder.
The thing I worry about is if they go so far as to ban people's google accounts for violating the TOS like this. I'm sure they can find out exactly who is doing it through an IP lookup even if you are using a front-end client.
It's best to migrate everything off google accounts now before that happens. Google has too much power.