Is it just me, or is the Internet becoming less usable?

[robgul]

YouTube shittery continues to increase, with regular pop-ups suggesting I pay £12/month to stop the shitverts they know I ignore.  It's basically extortion.  The latest bug/feature is showing the countdown to skip shitverts, then restarting the timer with more shitverts instead of showing you the content.

Another piece of cynical bastardy is the pop-up that says "fewer ad breaks for this long video".  Yeah great, but they're two unskippable minutes each now.

The best way to watch YT is on a real browser with a good adblocker, although they are enacting countermeasures against those now.  Unfortunately, most of my YT viewing is on a "smart" TV, where you get the full enshittified experience.

There is an answer that works to stop the ads - if you install the Opera browser + uBlock there are no ads (Opera purports to have its own ad blocker but that's not infallible) - you need to go to the settings in Opera to enable the ad blocker and make sure "Allow acceptable ads" is disabled. 

AND when you start Opera wait a minute or so while, I think, the ad blocker does some sort of handshake with Opera and/or the internet - then watch with no ads.

I'm using Firefox as my default browser with an ad blocker (that YouTube intercepts) - and just use Opera for YouTube.

Give it a go.

[MikeFromLFE]

I don't use YouTube very much but if I have to I'll fire up FreeTube on Linux.
It seems to be a YouTube wrapper but without the sh!t - it will even accept the same URLs as YouTube.
I'm sure there are other, similar services for your choice of OS.

[rafletcher]

I use Chrome on the MacBook, and an adblocker and get no ads on YT.

[Cudzoziemiec]

YouTube seems obsessed with the increasingly disgusting and weird hero-wars.com adverts and excessive gambling. Both make me angry. I'd even prefer Hello fucking Fresh or Fuxking Wix.

I think these must be targetted in some way, cos I see completely different ads. I don't even know what hero-wars.com is (and I'm more than happy for no one to tell me). I've no idea what you're watching or doing to make it show you that and gambling – I would have thought you an unlikely customer! But then I've no idea what I've watched or done to be shown that ad of someone lighting tea lights under a flowerpot. Or even what that's trying to sell.

[Cudzoziemiec]

What I have noticed is that many internet ads, especially at phone-screen size, have no distinguishable style. Print ads you often know what it's advertising even with the names and logos removed, due to characteristic colours, lighting, layout, font, etc. Whereas eg the little ads for Ebay (which I virtually never use) and Temu (which I've never used) look identical. In fact a lot of internet ads are similar; boxes with bland photos and one line of text in always the same font.

[rogerzilla]

YouTube shittery continues to increase, with regular pop-ups suggesting I pay £12/month to stop the shitverts they know I ignore.  It's basically extortion.  The latest bug/feature is showing the countdown to skip shitverts, then restarting the timer with more shitverts instead of showing you the content.

Another piece of cynical bastardy is the pop-up that says "fewer ad breaks for this long video".  Yeah great, but they're two unskippable minutes each now.

The best way to watch YT is on a real browser with a good adblocker, although they are enacting countermeasures against those now.  Unfortunately, most of my YT viewing is on a "smart" TV, where you get the full enshittified experience.

There is an answer that works to stop the ads - if you install the Opera browser + uBlock there are no ads (Opera purports to have its own ad blocker but that's not infallible) - you need to go to the settings in Opera to enable the ad blocker and make sure "Allow acceptable ads" is disabled. 

AND when you start Opera wait a minute or so while, I think, the ad blocker does some sort of handshake with Opera and/or the internet - then watch with no ads.

I'm using Firefox as my default browser with an ad blocker (that YouTube intercepts) - and just use Opera for YouTube.

Give it a go.

I don't see ads when using YT on my phone or PC (UBlock Origin).  But you can't install adblockers on a TV.

[Kim]

The trick with TVs is to use them for displaying video signals and never give them access to the internet.

[TimC]

The terrestrial TV signal where I live is so poor, I often can't watch the mainstream channels without using their streaming options online on my TV.

[Kim]

You could use some other device (Chromecast, Apple TV, Raspberry Pi, whatever) to do the streaming.  That way when it becomes enshittified your expensive television still works.

[FifeingEejit]

YouTube shittery continues to increase, with regular pop-ups suggesting I pay £12/month to stop the shitverts they know I ignore.  It's basically extortion.  The latest bug/feature is showing the countdown to skip shitverts, then restarting the timer with more shitverts instead of showing you the content.

Another piece of cynical bastardy is the pop-up that says "fewer ad breaks for this long video".  Yeah great, but they're two unskippable minutes each now.

The best way to watch YT is on a real browser with a good adblocker, although they are enacting countermeasures against those now.  Unfortunately, most of my YT viewing is on a "smart" TV, where you get the full enshittified experience.

There is an answer that works to stop the ads - if you install the Opera browser + uBlock there are no ads (Opera purports to have its own ad blocker but that's not infallible) - you need to go to the settings in Opera to enable the ad blocker and make sure "Allow acceptable ads" is disabled. 

AND when you start Opera wait a minute or so while, I think, the ad blocker does some sort of handshake with Opera and/or the internet - then watch with no ads.

I'm using Firefox as my default browser with an ad blocker (that YouTube intercepts) - and just use Opera for YouTube.

Give it a go.

I've used Opera Ad Blocker in the past.
The Internet for the most part became even more unsuable without Ads

[pcolbeck]

uBlock Origin blocks all YouTube ads in Firefox on both Linux and Windows. Never tried it on a Mac as I dont have any Apple kit.

[Cudzoziemiec]

YouTube shittery continues to increase, with regular pop-ups suggesting I pay £12/month to stop the shitverts they know I ignore.  It's basically extortion.  The latest bug/feature is showing the countdown to skip shitverts, then restarting the timer with more shitverts instead of showing you the content.

Another piece of cynical bastardy is the pop-up that says "fewer ad breaks for this long video".  Yeah great, but they're two unskippable minutes each now.

The best way to watch YT is on a real browser with a good adblocker, although they are enacting countermeasures against those now.  Unfortunately, most of my YT viewing is on a "smart" TV, where you get the full enshittified experience.

There is an answer that works to stop the ads - if you install the Opera browser + uBlock there are no ads (Opera purports to have its own ad blocker but that's not infallible) - you need to go to the settings in Opera to enable the ad blocker and make sure "Allow acceptable ads" is disabled. 

AND when you start Opera wait a minute or so while, I think, the ad blocker does some sort of handshake with Opera and/or the internet - then watch with no ads.

I'm using Firefox as my default browser with an ad blocker (that YouTube intercepts) - and just use Opera for YouTube.

Give it a go.

I've used Opera Ad Blocker in the past.
The Internet for the most part became even more unsuable without Ads

Ditto and ditto. It didn't block the ads, just the websites that objected to ad blockers.

[Cudzoziemiec]

The other sort of ad block does better, the one that campaigns against LED ad screens.

[TheLurker]

I did think about putting this in ctrl-alt-del rant, but this seems a, slightly, more logical place for it.

Niklaus Wirth died at the very beginning if this year.  You may not know the name, but he was particularly well known in ComSci and programming circles especially for the Pascal & Modula languages.  I have fond memories of using the Watford implementation of ISO Pascal on a Beeb.

Nigh on 30 years ago he wrote a short paper on the need to keep software lean.  Well we all know what happened to that ideal, don't we?

https://cr.yp.to/bib/1995/wirth.pdf

And to mark his death that plea/analysis was updated by Bert Hubert

https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/a-2024-plea-for-lean-software/

Neither of these articles is especially technical nor long so I would suggest that, when you've got a quarter of an hour or so to spare, that you do read them so that, the next time you are swearing in incoherent rage at a some terminally enshittified web site, application or operating system, you know where the blame lies.

If you can't be bothered to read either piece I'll leave you with the last sentence of Wirth's paper,

“The plague of software explosion is not a ’law of nature’. It is avoidable, and it is the software engineer’s task to curtail it”

Cheers,
Lurk

[Pickled Onion]

Thanks, both very interesting, and lots of quotable snippets.

[FifeingEejit]

The problem with kicking back against the businesses decision to enshitify is "jotters"

Sent from my IV2201 using Tapatalk

[TheLurker]

The problem with kicking back against the businesses decision to enshitify is "jotters"

Why else do you think I buy a lottery ticket every week? 

[FifeingEejit]

I bumped into this earlier in the week and forgot to post it here

https://www.ft.com/content/6fb1602d-a08b-4a8c-bac0-047b7d64aba5

it also talks about companies downsizing... or wad that a tory graph rant piece... maybe it was, one of the things that strikes me in some of the examples out there of how companies work

we need a shopping basket sub-app
cool we'll hire 9 developers, and a couple of dev ops guys...
we need a buy it now button... 9 and 2...
we need an product spinner widget... 9 and 2...

ok I don't know if this is what really happens but I've seen it too many times.

we've got 8 devs and 2 testers developing a data aggregator and complex discharge workflow system. plus what ever else the clinicians decide they need for the life of the product.
and what ever else comes along.

either were massively understaffed or all these wanky pish startups are massively over staffed anyway.



Sent from my IV2201 using Tapatalk

[sam]

A little off topic, but my wife was a programmer, primarily Unix/C/Sybase, old school stuff. I don't know a damned thing about it. Anyway, the closing years of her last job provided horror story after horror story of enshittification, from the abandonment of proper documentation to [insert many examples I haven't the expertise to coherently describe] that comes from the loss of institutional memory. Lots of celebrations when things were fixed, ignoring how they got broke in the first place. It literally made her cry to see what they'd done to her work. She retired early, unable to hack it anymore.

Back on topic: The Web We Lost
http://opentranscripts.org/transcript/the-web-we-lost/

[rogerzilla]

The YT false countdown to "Skip" now seems to be completely embedded and happens every third or fourth ad break.  I bet it's another deliberate ploy to piss us off so much that we pay the extortionate subscription.  Which is more than a streaming service, for a platform with mostly amateur content.  No way.

Can you get smart TVs that will run YT in an ad-blocked browser?

[sam]

This sounds like something that would've been mentioned on one thread or another, but if not, the DuckDuckGo browser incorporates a video player that gives an ad-free experience. I might not mind ads if they hadn't gone overboard, and inserted them with more finesse; I'm forever multitasking anyway, and can easily occupy myself one screen over.

I loathe amateurism in entertainment

I love it, if their heart is in the right place.

[sam]

And another thing.

Imgur, one of the image sharing services I use, has just started rendering uploaded .jpgs more lossy. As something of a perfectionist, this irks me greatly. One of the ways I amuse myself and the 'bots is to come up with books I'd like to read (here's the latest crop). Jpegs have to be high quality to keep text from going fuzzy.

I don't blame them, as I'm not exactly sure how they make money anyway; and I would, believe it or not, happily pay {something reasonable} to have an account to ensure less future enshittification; but in my little world, it's yet another example of the centre not holding.



Scroll up and down for moiré

[Jaded]

jpgs are crap for text. or logos.

[sam]

jpgs are crap for text. or logos.

They're fine, at least for my purposes, if they're at 100%, and are almost inevitably smaller than .pngs, e.g., the above fake book cover is 161k as a jpg and 419k as the latter. This is something I pay attention to. Although these sorts of services accept png, I interpret that as "piss no good", i.e., taking the piss with free services isn't good for my karma.

[Jaded]

110% would be better, I guess.