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.
Nebula.tv has lots of excellent videos, a healthy community of creators, a sustainable business model, a lot of good communication between subscribers and management, and I believe is not in financial trouble so far. It’s not free, but it’s affordable.
As a former Nebula subscriber, here’s my hot take: it also has no real community and no chance for exposure to the up-and-comer (IE no way to breakout since it seems invite only?)
I’ve found so many great YouTube channels filled with deep experience and expertise before they “catch on” (and some never “catch on”). The ability to find the small, powerful voice who’s just trying to share knowledge…
I’m not defending YouTube/Alphabet here (as a company they’re no better than any other), I just think Nebula isn’t a great alternative and unless things change, can never be. It’s a walled garden in too many ways (paywall/creator invitations).
In the year I subscribed to Nebula, I mostly watched the same videos on YouTube. If they were technical enough there was valuable discussion attached to the video; on Nebula that’s not the case and not possible. Even if it was possible I can’t imagine people fragmenting their discussion spaces between YouTube and a closed ecosystem like Nebula.
Don’t even get me started with their (Nebula) inability to build a video queue -> wasting time and space on a poorly thought-out implementation of Autoplay was a terrible decision that further pushed me off the platform.
It’s sad, I really wanted to like it. But I voted with my dollars and left.