Well, for me it is, anyway...
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| This started happening around 6 PM EST. |
Can't get around it --for now-- so, I guess I'll just go listen to the music I've already ripped from my CDs. I own those CDs, so it's not like I'm going to get a knock on my door from, oh, Deutche Grammophone asking me to pay them so I can listen to Herbert von Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic play Grieg's Peer Gynt Suites.
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| One of the first CDs I ever bought. Sorry, Herbert, but Jethro Tull's Aqualung was the first. |
Given where von Karajan presently is, I doubt he needs the money anyway.
Embedded videos still play normally so you can watch them on other sites (Like my blog or Pitchfork or Stereogum) without having to see ads - for now, at least. Also, with an Ad Blocker running, you can still see everything on YouTube except the actual video, so you can just download it and watch it, then delete it. More importantly for me, I can still use it to get YT's algorithm to suggest more things I might find interesting.
ReplyDeleteFor the moment I can't be bothered to do most of that so I just whitelisted YouTube. We'll see how annoying the ads get and how long I can stand it. I'd guess that, if Google really do manage to enforce an Ad-only regime on all of us, some of the traffic will move to other services, anyway. That said, I also think the era of Free Stuff Online is coming to an end. I'm a lot less convinced than I was a decade ago that the future will be almost entirely digital. There are quite a few signs of a non-nostalgic flight to the physical beginning to ramp up and this is the kind of thing that's pushing it forward.
Some vigorous tweaking --and a lot of aggressive updates from uBlock Origin that have been highlighted on Reddit-- seem to have fixed it for me on Firefox for now.
DeleteI guess you're correct in that merely selling our information isn't profitable enough for Google and other companies these days, so given that even the FBI is recommending people use ad blockers Google's insistence on this crap is... concerning, to say the least.