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.

  • isotope@lemm.eeEnglish
    71·
    1 year ago

    Leaving my project Tubo in case someone finds it useful. Support for it just got merged on Libredirect

    • onlinepersona@programming.devEnglish
      21·
      1 year ago

      Since I can’t read clojure: does this proxy or does it download the videos and serve them? I imagine the latter, but is there a limit? For example VPSs have tiny drives (10GB, 20GB, etc.) with a LRU cache it would be possible to use this on those things, but even on bigger hard drives, the videos have to get cleaned up eventually.

      • isotope@lemm.eeEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        It does neither atm, it simply serves you the streams as-is. The plan, however, is to eventually proxy all requests so that the services aren’t able to see it was you who made the request but only get the proxy’s IP

        • onlinepersona@programming.devEnglish
          2·
          1 year ago

          Actually serving the streams as is is great for me. If the proxy could a toggle, that might not be bad! Especially for VPSes with low bandwidth.