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.
They’re begging for a direct competitor.
I feel like with the storage space and bandwidth needed for something like that that anyone with the money to start a true competitor would probably just be another mammoth tech company we all hate just as much :(
Yes, it would have to be something similar to the fediverse, but somehow able to host thousands of UHD Videos lol. Maybe creators can seed torrents of their content and pray to Ramen for donations/subscriptions.¯\_(ツ)_/¯
*…then there’s also the issue of the sorts of fucked up videos people would upload on video centred fediverse… :[
Anyone who’s considered it has gotten their start by hosting content that YouTube won’t, and as a consequence devolve into right wing nightmare scapes pretty quickly.
See Bit Chute for an example. Probably best known for Reddit blocking the entire domain when they refused to take down the video of the Christchurch shooting and the Facebook video that the shooter claimed inspired him (one posted by Otago Muslim Association titled “Very interesting video. Only for Muslims. Please do not redistribute.”).
removedute
I…don’t know what that means, and Google isn’t helping.
lemmy.ml has pretty strict filters and censored removedute (see the first 5 letters)
If they can’t make money with almost a monopoly and Google adsense why would a competitor do any better? Maybe if a competitor would just charge a hosting fee to the content creator and let them worry about making money. Some hobbyists wouldn’t mind be paying for things while dipshit “Personalities” get a wakeup call, win/win
I feel like with the storage space and bandwidth needed for something like that that anyone with the money to start a true competitor would probably just be another mammoth tech company we all hate just as much :(