Goodbye Youtube and thanks for all the fish

mvilain@infosec.pub to Technology@lemmy.world – 1800 points –

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.

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No. It's a coincidence.

While the term blacklist does not originate from racist history, it has certainly been adopted by racists before computers, while terms like master and slave have clear links to slavery as a human history: in either case the terms along with others were found to be offensive to a large population and have since been changed to reflect human decency.

Edit: Haha, found the racists. VvV

On "master" and "slave" I could be convinced. Those are directly potentially offensive terms. They're also terms that went out of use when we stopped using IDE drives 20-ish years ago as far as I'm aware, but there may still be specific fields where they're used.

But to ban the word "black" because it was adopted by racists feels kind of ridiculous. Aren't we giving these racists a little too much power?

Master and slave are still used, like in brake cylinders I think.

The automotive field is just all kinds of insensitive... retarded ignition, tranny fluid, I'm sure there's plenty more...

They’re also terms that went out of use when we stopped using IDE drives 20-ish years ago as far as I’m aware

The flame war over this is still very much alive in electronics engineering for things like SPI buses.

"White Good, Black Bad" is a pretty easy case to win when it comes to the "should we consider changing how we speak to not look like an asshole" debate.

It doesn't seem easy to me, at all. Black/Dark also means night, shadow, invisible, while white infers light, visible, day. Lots of bad stuff happens in the shadow, and visa versa, and these themes are pretty universal throughout culture globally.

I guess globally folks are fine with referring to skincolors as white or black (which is oversimplified IMO), but locally the names of colors of the rainbow and the colors of human skins are not the same. Just like real life, because a caucasian's skin is not colored pure white, and a dark skinned person is not colored pure black. Language brought the two closer together, skincolors and absolute color, but they are not the same. If I read all the alternatives to white and blacklist, none of them are instantly recognizable to me. That'll happen eventually, and is not a reason to never change it. But saying black = skincolor so using the word black for bad = bad seems too simple.

Changed... but have nothing to do with the other.

It's like complaining that the Spanish word for black is "negro". Best go change that, eh?

https://www.change.org/p/consumers-who-are-fed-up-with-this-offensive-language-remove-the-word-negro-from-black-crayons

Edit: oops, fixed the bad typo, and added a context link.