Google is intentionally throttling YouTube videos, slowing down users with ad blockers

ublockorigin etc... 5 second unnecessary delay, very annoying . that's my experience

I have no issues at all, once a vid is running. Choosing a vid takes much longer these days though, because the goddam stupid fucking algorhythm serves up 95% slop these days. Already viewed vids, ones expressly blocked, "news" stories that are YEARS old, or those in weird foreign languages, make up most of the garbage I get offered....

Aha I'm not crazy! There was about a week where YouTube videos were so slow and we mainly use SmartTube on the shield TV, the fucked up part is I pay for YouTube premium, I just like the UI and options available on SmartTube better then the default app.

It did seem to get better, so maybe they realized I fucking pay for this service.

might be brain damaged but haven't noticed a slowdown or seen any ads in occasional use.

I watch ad free, and screen off through the Brave browser. All good for now.

So this is it. The enshittification has reached slowlorris levels.

Remember when videos would buffer all the time on non-chrome browsers lol

Freetube works pretty well, there's a cat and mouse game with youtube changes though.

https://freetubeapp.io/

In related news, PeerTube just achieved its funding goal - including all of its stretch goals.

I've noticed occasional "buffering" before playback starts through the past week or so. Takes like ten seconds before the video starts playing. Hasn't been worse than that so far, knock on wood.

Youtube feels like an impossible service to actually compete with, whether through the enormous and complicated setup required or amassing creators/users. It's basically a monopoly and it sucks. One will just have to resist Google's bullshit using whatever means available for as long as possible.

A wild YouTube appeared!

Go, uBlock Origin!

Wild YouTube used Throttle!

It's not very effective...

uBlock Origin used Evolve!

It's super effective!

YouTube fainted!

So it's wait a few seconds and watch a black screen or watch a minute of ads? What a choice...

I watched videos on Newgrounds using dial-up

They are going to have to slow ad blockers by a lot for me to consider it slow

I'm finding I'm using youtube less and less that I can't actually remember the last time I used it for anything. Youtube has so much crap now.

Because of their monetisation scheme for content creators, it was profitable for creators to drag 15 mins of information out to one hour, and then to include shock faces as thumbs to get more clicks, and then to get more viewers just to watch a bit of the video as viewership dwindles into just mindlessly watching suggestions.

I feel sorry for those creators who have gone balls deep with youtube content and who have no "plan b".

Yo I pay for premium and it’s been fucking slow. Cancel my subscription? Guess I might need to.

Yeah they are, I noticed it get really, really bad this week. It's an awful experience. But they'll leave my browser before my adblocker does.

I didn’t know if I’m crazy or of YouTube is genuinely slow for me (with adblocker)

Turns out I was not crazy

“Do evil.” Google’s official new slogan.

Why aren't you using another platform?

God damn American companies love fucking up everything for money!

I've started bulk downloading videos with yt-dlp and watching them locally. No ads or throttling to deal with.

I'd sooner spend five minutes waiting for the video to buffer than five seconds watching an ad

Oh hey I ran into that issue, fixed it by blocking the element on ublock and spoofing my user agent

Edit: I put more details under nameisnotimportant's comment, I was about to head to bed so I didn't really provide details LOL

Ive been commenting on creators videos asking them to upload elsewhere as well. I doubt it will work, but we could try

Revanced is fine so far

Been using revanced for months and haven't noticed a difference other than no ads or sponsors on bigger channels.

"Is your video not loading ? Check out why, you fucking ad dodging commie" is the feeling i got from youtube's newest message while my video was unexpectedly taking 10s to load

Then I suppose it's a good thing they're limiting non-premium users from using the "high bitrate" quality options?

^ that was sarcasm. HARSH sarcasm. With both middle fingers pointing toward a Google logo and spitting.

We can live without YouTube, they can’t live without us.

I've been seeing this for a couple weeks now along with a popup telling me "ad blockers aren't allowed" at work where I'm forced to use Chrome. I have UBlock Lite installed. Typically a refresh takes care of the popup and a 10 second delay later, the video loads.

Daniel Suelo for CEO of YouTube!

Why do i feel like this happened a while ago? Like, isn't this old news? Or "olds" as it were?

They cannot kill Adblocks, because if they would — a lot of html5 embedded YouTube videos would be coming worthless and so would youtube (discord for example)

fine by me i listen to audio of videos i watch and i dont mind the lower resolution because it means im using less internet

Down with google

I also think they slowed it down for firefox users.

Oh no, where will I get my AI slop?

I'll wait.

I’m curious what people would prefer for revenue generation models. Just subscription fees? A lot of folks also seem resistant to that as well.

Good, kill your product

Grayjay :)

That's a relief. I've been dreading the day when they introduce server-side adsm but it seems we're not there yet 😅 I'm not sure what they think they'll accomplish with this when it's A LOT less painful than turning off your adblocker and dealing with the ads, though. Maybe they're just trying random things to see what works.

HA! Jokes on them! I'm running a budget dell PC from 10 years ago! The PC itself is slower than any delays they cause! I'm talkin' 3-5 minutes to load each video. Sometimes the whole PC freezes, and you need to unplug it. Sometimes the browser crashes right at the end, so you gotta relaunch the browser, and then wait 20 minutes for all the tabs to populate. Then you gotta end task on all the individual windows. Then you gotta reload just the tab you're looking at, and THEN you can wait 5 minutes again.

You think I'm even going to notice your 10 second delay?

Wish they could use Gemini to generate ad clicks instead.

uBlock Origin->gear icon (settings)->My Filters->add this line:

||googlevideo.com/videoplayback$xhr,3p,method=get,domain=www.youtube.com

Is google’s company motto still ‘Don’t be evil’?

Ok so im not crazy. I was wondering why videos kept buffering every minute this past week.

Books are where it's at!

I've got 500Mb fiber internet and YouTube refuses to stream above 360p unless i manually change it. Which each update becomes harder and harder to do as they hide the video quality button somewhere else.

I feel like this has been happening for a while, but maybe it's just that YouTube's website is shite.

Oh no! What will I—Video Downloader. I'll just watch offline at my leisure.

https://joinpeertube.org/

I've been using this

https://skipcut.com/

I had to allow a bunch of stuff in pihole because I wasn't able to use Google flights or Google News and some functions in Gmail, the sites never finished loading

I noticed this today

I haven't noticed on Tubular.

I mean sure I guess but I can just like download them for later?