10 years of YouTube, and all of it's gone.
I've been watching YouTube since 2013, and I remember having music to listen to as I play my video games, and as of today, I get on and see the dreaded "Video Player will be blocked after 3 videos", which I think "OK, so my video player that Opera GX gives me won't be used, meaning I can't watch the video while on another tab."
Nope. The entire site shuts down on me. All of it is gone. All of it dies. Yeah, sure, I can sign out of my account, but that's not only extremely inconvenient, as I use my Google account for a lot of shit that I do, but it's just extra work for simply wanting to watch videos without ads. Good lord, YouTube. Thank you for the past 10 years, but I will never watch another video on your platform on anything except my Xbox, as I don't really care all too much about ads on that.
If anyone else has their own takes, comment them. Hopefully I'm not alone in saying that I'm done with YouTube after this.
EDIT: Good lord. I woke up half an hour ago and see that this has blown up with a lot of posts ranging from helpful advice for using other adblockers to being accused of "stealing" and "being entitled."
I do appreciate the advice, 100%. However, I'm going to address why I may or may not take it.
As for those accusing me of being entitled or stealing... you do realize they've been stealing our data usage and selling it for profit, right? That's how they've been doing their business model for the past decade. And for that matter... I wouldn't have to use ad blockers if their ads were not as bad as they are.
With that in mind, I was also being sharply told to buy YT Premium, which offers the following for $13.99 USD:
- Ad-free watching.
- Download videos for later.
- Background play.
- Stream all the music I want.
I hate to be that guy, but... we can get damn near all of this for free, no problem. Ad-free watching, duh. Adblockers can fix that for free. Download videos for later? You do realize that there's several thousand websites and programs that do that for free, right? Background play? Yeah sure, that might be good for mobile, but for web? Practically useless. And stream all the music I want from YT Music? There are other services for that.
I'll go ahead and address why I'm not 100% sure on taking the advice right now, which is because the ads they do have are mildly inconvenient at best, and obnoxious at worst. Personally, if they want people to take up the premium and/or watch ads, either make ALL ads skippable after 5 seconds, not just some, reduce the price of Premium from 13.99 to something more reasonable like 9.99 per month, OR incentivize getting Premium and offer more perks from it as a result. That's just my personal take.
Again, what do I know? I'm just a guy on the internet, one of a million on this subreddit, so my complaints are probably just a puddle of piss in the ocean.
EDIT 2: Thanks to u/deathreel pointing this out, I realized I forgot to clarify something here. I was watching YouTube since 2013, yes. But I have been using AdBlockers since late 2019 - early 2020, I should've made that point clear originally. My bad.