by The Testing Guy
Last night on Wednesday, May 10, I came across a post on Reddit saying that Youtube is beginning to block videos if you are using ad-block, such as me on Firefox using uBlock Origin. I thought that was some kind of April Fool joke so I ignored it. Today, I received a community post by Youtuber Cynical Reviews saying the same thing yesterday. So I thought: "We're in the endgame now".
My history of the Internet
I've been with the Internet since the very beginning of it. I used dial-up back in the 2000s and switched to DSL later on. My family used to chat on Yahoo Messenger, play flash games (RIP Adobe Flash, you will be missed for your large catalog of content you provided for us), play Boom Online, and watch videos on Youtube. Those days, Internet was expensive, counted by MBs you consumed, so you had to watch the amount. I only downloaded heavy files at night to cut cost. But it was less restrictive, less corporate, curated like today. It was the "wild west" where anything could happen. You could find fun things while searching the old web. Back at that time, it was Yahoo Search, nobody heard of Google yet. Youtube was its own company then, just launched. I started watching it at a later time. I used to watch Inuyasha, the entire collection on Youtube, because copyright wasn't enforced then. I started watching nigahiga in 2021. If you follow his channel, you can basically see the history of Youtube and the world of the second decade of the 21^st^ century unfolds.
What's wrong with today's Youtube?
It's generally what's wrong when anything becomes too big, too popular. It's becoming sanitized, safe, family-friendly (whatever that means), corporate. And Youtube is no exception. I see its changes from a service centered around its creator to slowly moving away, instead pleasing the advertizers, the investors, the big names in the MSM (mainstream media). So Google created various changes to their platform, including but not limited to: demonetize any video with curse words in it (even videos not meant for kids); false copyright claims run rampant (even on channels whose videos are owned by the creator get copyrighted); losing revenue by Youtube taking your copyrighted video and giving it to the "original" owner; ad runtime increase; before video then after video then middle, from 3, 5 seconds, to 15 seconds, skippable to nowadays unskippable, some ads even 15 minutes, a lot of them are scam; Adpocalypse; and now, about to force me to turn off ad-blocker.
Commentary
Like hell I'm turning off ad-blocker. This has been going on at other sites as well. They detect that you're using ad-blocker, block the site and "ask" you to take it down. Sure, take it down so they can shove ads covering your screen, loud videos in your face. While I can ignore any other sites doing this, I can't ignore Youtube. It has become a large part of everyone's lives and livelihoods. I can just buy Premium and forget about all this, but that's on top of more bills to pay (Netflix, Internet, VieOn), and you pay for something that is and will always be free. Maybe you can buy it to support your creators, but that's the case, why do they have to take sponsorships and Patreons, open their own merchandise store then? Sponsorships are ads that are on top of Youtube's dumb ads, this time INSIDE the videos. As seen in adguard's article and EFF's article, this isn't the first time Google tried to shut down ad-block. And to me, it's kind of depressing thinking about what's to come, as the Internet becomes more restrictive as time goes on. Soon due to geopolitics, there will be a localNet^(tm)^ instead of Internet, where each country has their own version of the Internet. And because your typical user doesn't care, they will stay on Chrome and Youtube, which Google has the power over and can tell us what to see and not see, not just ads, but contents that fit their "vision". Firefox may give us some freedom from Chrome now, but for how long? I saw even Mozilla has lost its focus over the years. I thought DuckDuckGo focuses on privacy, but then they sell your data to Microsoft. My favored Linux distribution, Ubuntu, becomes more corporate, forcing weird decisions like this and this. Reading on Reddit, and recently finished watching Cyberpunk Edgerunner, I think we are already living in a cyberpunk dystopia. Various service we use for our conveniences like Facebook, Google might as well came out of George Orwell's 1984, or I can do one better, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Maybe... This is the endgame for all of us.