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.
Alternatively, those individuals could choose to pay money to not get ads served and have useless data harvested if they're privacy oriented.
Also, I know for a fact that plenty of organizations still host their own videos. Say what you will but I'll take a YouTube lecture over a Panopto one any day of the week - the Panopto one sucks bollocks lol.
They still harvest your data if you pay.
Everyone and their mom harvests my data on the internet. In fact, businesses are gonna harvest data about their paying customers, internet or not. People who really care about privacy will create profiles that don't expose information they consider to be sensitive.
I don't see a picture of the average internet user both being incredibly savvy about the harvest of their personal information and being privacy oriented but also somehow willing to pay for services. Content providers definitely enact shady policies but users aren't exactly angels either.
And fuck them and their mothers.
I'm not a fan of advertising and this modern capitalist bullshit either, but I'll tolerate the things that I find reasonable, and I think YouTube is definitely more reasonable than what Netflix and the rest of the streaming sites are trying to pull off. Though I guess they aren't really the same thing since Netflix doesn't operate at a loss intentionally.