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.
A lot of creators are already beginning to work based off donations (AKA patron and other sites). Thats one model that could work. Kinda like lemmy.world.
Those YouTubers have the option to disable ads on their channel if that is truly all the revenue they need, you don't need to make that decision for them
I thought creators cant disable ads now?
I don't have much but my few videos I have no longer have the option to disable ads.
I think they still can but they have less fine control over which ad placements they disable? I'm not totally sure, but that's what this link seems to imply https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6332943?hl=en
Youtube ads don't just pay creators though, they also pay for video hosting, discovery, and streaming, which aren't cheap. A lemmy for video streaming would be great, but there's a reason it hasn't really happened yet, you'd need a much larger portion of viewers to pay than what it takes lemmy to run, and you'd need a bigger community of developers to build it, which is why most youtube alternatives are strictly paid products. None of that is criticism of the idea, I think it would be great if we could wrench away some of youtube's monopoly, but at the same time we need to understand why it's a challenging concept