A new wave of slowdowns is hitting users, with the only resolutions being disabling the ad blocker or upgrading to premium.
Or just switching to ublock origin.
Or just switching to newpipe.
Or just switching to freetube.
etc
etc
etc
I have ublock origin on firefox and it’s really bad for me currently. This has traditionally been the good combo I believe.
Not just slowing down, but stopping, then restarting after skipping a few seconds that you cannot access no matter what.
For now the best solution I’ve found is to copy the video url, open potplayer and just hit the paste command and the video runs flawlessly.
So they’ll have to close that loophole eventually, which means enshittifying the video streaming protocol for everything that isn’t the native web viewer, which will inconvenience more people who were used to something working, leading to another workaround, leading to…
Youtube is gradually accelerating their enshittification. I’m looking forward to when it comes to a real head. Too many serious interested parties rely on it. I don’t know if peertube will be the first fallback, but I’m sure it’ll get a big bump.
Change your useragent to Chrome.
It breaks the detection of your adblocker… for now.
Is it possible to change the user agent just for specific websites? Do you have a recommendation?
Or downloading videos to watch later? Does Plex recognize YouTube videos?
Plex does not recognize them in terms of pulling down metadata but you can still organize them in folders and browse that way. I find the Plex route is a healthier way to engage with video content than platforms that just keep serving you whatever the algorithm thinks will keep you peeled to the screen. It’s more intentional and less of a passive consumption kinda thing.
tl;dr: Yes, but probably takes some effort for most content.
Plex will play the files, but metadata is hit or miss. If it’s something that’s on thetvdb or themoviedb, it can be matched as a series or movie, respectively. With some effort, you could also probably include all the relevant metadata when downloading the videos, then have plex use local metadata, which could cover anything not big enough for the big metadata providers.
I think it’s also possible to find plug-ins/scripts that will pull metadata directly from youtube, but I’ve had bad luck relying on that stuff and then development stopping, so I avoid it these days.
YouTube revanced has also been working for me
And still, I’m more likely to stop using YouTube than to stop using an ad blocker.
That’s what they want. Get all the users they aren’t able to monetize off the platform to lower their costs.
I mean, I like a good Google hate train as much as the next guy, but that’s kind of a legitimate thing to want.
Follow the damn train, CJ!
Ooooooh my dawg
It’s YouTube’s fault for setting the wrong expectations when they benefited from wild growth and success by being free all these years. I dare they go 100% paywalled. I know they won’t. Otherwise they can’t double dip on both premium and advertiser money. Even if they manage to go 100% paywall, it’s inevitable that they will start introducing adverts to paying customers as well.
Then I’mma leech HARDER
That’s a double edged sword though, lose viewers and you lose appeal to advertisers. Lose users and they’re going to go somewhere else. That somewhere else will eventually grow and be competition. The bigger it gets, the faster it will grow.
They used the “You” as in the people, during their growth years to build their platform. Now they are going against the people since they no longer need us.
Good news: you can have the best of both by watching everything for free through piped video!
Way ahead of you. Recently got Nebula, which has dramatically reduced the amount of time I spend on YT. Besides, this way I can help also the people who make the videos. They don’t need to be so dependent on the whimsical and unpredictable nature of the algorithm and the ever changing landscape of what is or isn’t advertiser friendly on the platform.
If YT feels like further cranking up the enshittification dial, I say, bring it on. I’m ready to drop my watch time even lower than it currently is.
I’ll never understand why they spend so much effort pushing ads into people’s faces that don’t want see them and so little making ads more attractive.
A very large chunk of what people consume these days is effectively already ads. Every Youtuber holding a product into the camera is an ad. And people want to watch that. They want to know what new products are out there. It just has to presented appropriately.
Forced ads with mandatory 5sec isn’t making people interested in your product, heck, numerous times I might have been interested in a product, but lost interested since I couldn’t rewind the ad or because the ad didn’t link to anything that gave me further information. A 15min video from a Youtuber reviewing a product in detail is way more effective than any regular ad I have ever seen, yet there are almost no ads in that style.
Too be honest I was fine with seeing an ad every few videos. But at some point it became unskippable ads before , during and after a video.
Ads got too aggressive, people made adblockers, ads got more aggressive because of lost revenue, almost everyone starts using adblockers.
They did it to themselves, people were content with simple ads on a page, it’s once they started interfering with the content and access of it that they became a problem.
What boils my blood the most is how manipulative marketing is. The number of worthless ass jingles I remember from the 90’s from companies I’ve never purchased anything from is ridiculous.
I never had an issue with YT’s 1-2 skipable ads at the beginning, or even the banner ad. But they got greedy.
The midrolls and the unskipable ads was the trigger point for me.
I was fine with even having a couple very short unskippable ads every other video. Now it is all of them with one in the middle of videos longer than 5 minutes. And then of course the content creator has to put in an ad because YouTube does not pay shit for views.
Yeah and I wouldn’t even mind like 5 minutes of ads at the beginning compared to randomly dispersed in the middle
I mean, they didn’t get greedy, as far as everyone knows they are losing a ton of money (at least if you can extrapolate anytbing from the fact that twitch is massively unprofitable)
Pretty sure YouTube has already been declared to be profitable. But frankly I’m pretty suspicious of claims of unprofitability for services being run for over a decade. Why would any for-profit company bankroll them if it wasn’t worth it? There has to be some creative accounting going on.
Doubt it, if it was profitable, they would be announcing that to everyone as loud as they could. Besides, if twitch is unprofitable, I doubt that google is in a much better situation
I wouldn’t apply Twitch’s situation to YouTube, IF it’s even true, because YouTube got a much wider reach and more advertising possibilities than gaming and somewhat related audiences.
It doesn’t seem to me a given that they’d boast about their success either. Because if they hide the situation the way they do, they can do this, turn to the customers saying “Welp, I guess this much is not enough. Gotta put more ads on it and raise prices 🤷”. It’s easier to placate the users if they are convinced it is inevitable. I imagine you are considering of what investors might think if products are said to be unprofitable, but overall Google/Alphabet still gets tens of billions in clean profits every year.
Most of all, again, if this is such a money sink that in over a decade they couldn’t figure out how to make money of it, why would they still keep at it? Why wouldn’t they sell it off or close it? If I assume they are honest about unprofitability, as much as I doubt it, then they must be getting something else from it that is equally valuable as raw money. Maybe it’s user data. Maybe it’s the social clout of controlling a major media platform. But it has to be worth it to them or they wouldn’t be hosting it. It wouldn’t make sense.
But personally I just think they are lying about unprofitability, including Twitch. It’s just a convenient excuse for layoffs and price hikes. It’s not like they are going to show everyone their full balance sheets.
That was the initially when YouTube was created. Everyone knows that Google has no problem cancelling anything that’s not profitable.
If it was profitable, then why did google stop posting the financial statistics for YouTube
to get the benefit of the doubt on unpopular decisions. Same thing with hiding thumbs down counter from videos.
If they want to, they can go 100% paywalled. But I guess people like to conveniently forget that YouTube wants to double-dip.
A very large chunk of what people consume these days is effectively already ads
That’s what grinds my gears. I understand ads pay bills, but showing multiple ads before a trailer for a video game or movie is excessive.
Plus nearly all advertising is insultingly stupid as to appeal to idiots.
Ads are a way to fill people’s heads with brand names until nothing remains except for those brands and only those brands feel safe and familiar until it becomes a conditioned reflex to choose those products. And it works.
The Holy Market forbids people would actually choose products based on their own experience and price.
I actively avoid brands with annoying ads.
When unsubscribing from pretty much any service there’s usually little text box asking why. Whether or not it’s the real reason for leaving, I love citing obnoxious ads as the thing that pushed me out, especially for high-dollar moves like banking or insurance.
I know it’ll never accomplish anything, but it feels good. ^_^
brand recognition is desirable only if positive.
Most ads are about brand recognition and not so much about trying to sell a specific product. Even if you think an ad is stupid, if you still can remember the brand then the ad worked.
That generally just makes me remember not to use that product or service because the ad was so annoyingly stupid
No, it didn’t as brand recognition is desirable only if positive.
There is potentially a world in which you want to see ads because ads themselves do technically provide a service. You do want to know about things you care about and would want to buy… you just don’t want it obnoxiously shoved into your face all of the time in psychologically manipulative ways.
Look at the way ads used to look “back in the day”, with details about the product, its features, and reasons you would actually want to buy it. New tractor model, this many HP, pulls 4 bottom plow, burns this much diesel per hour, buy now and grow more corn.
However it turned out that it worked better just to try to trick people into buying a product that they didn’t need, and that’s how we got the ads we have today.
True, but if corporations don’t care to adhere to ethical standards, then the users shouldn’t need to either.
Because a significant amount of our economy and daily life is predicated on filling it with superfluous crap. These ads are just a race for crap de jour.
Like for real, you have all the money in the world and you know what I like and don’t, so why don’t tailor the ads to not annoy the fuck out of me?
“MORE!” - already wealthy people.
But they just get less money from me, because I remove all non organic ads. Would non organic ads be less annoying, they could sell more shit to me.
Paying attention to your needs/desires takes work. They don’t want to work, they just want, “MORE!”
Not really, they are clearly spending money and resources to grab my attention and it’s not like the work is done by people who are profiting in the end anyway. Than again - I’m rather anti consume to begin with, so maybe people like me are not a valuable market to beginn with, which is fair.
Which, strangely, was in fact the entirety of my point.
I’d much much much rather watch ads for products that are not the least relevant to me. I’m not going to be an active participant in my own manipulation. I’d rather be annoyed.
Yeah the last ad I remember seeing was for a movie, that actually looked interesting. But rather than tell me the name in the first 10 or 20 seconds they wanted me to watch to the end before revealing. So I skipped straight out of that.
They used to have a popup that told you the movie title and they took that away, so now they get a skip. If I am actually interested, I just google the actor I recognize.
I’ll never understand why they spend so much effort pushing ads into people’s faces
money
Also, disappointingly, most people don’t care about the ad all that much.
Watching YouTube load slowly is better than watching ads.
Exactly! I started surfin’ da information highway in the 90’s. I remember watching an image unveil itself slowly as a morning sunrise.
I really wish government would just come in already and shatter google into a million pieces with the anti-monopoly hammer already.
Google is far worse than AT&T ever was when it was shattered into the baby bells.
Just gotta learn from AT&T to not let them re-congeal back together like somekind of fucked up liquid metal terminator 20+ years down the line.
50% of congress wants to know how the computer mouse stays alive without food.
They pretend to be ignorant but they’re really looking the other way because they’re lobbied for meager sums like $10,000
Our best and brightest?
Frankly, I’d stop using YouTube entirely before I’d start using it without an adblocker. At least there are no signs of it slowing down for me, yet.
I’d consider paying a few bucks a month, but not $10 or more
Get rid of shitty YouTube music and give me a tier that’s no ads only
That’s just leaving money on the table
I will download videos then. I refuse to not use an adblocker on the modern internet.
Pirate everything, it’s the only way to show greedy corporations the content should be free.
It would be really cool to be able to download YouTube videos withour the sponsorship segments, I wonder if there is a way to do his already?
yt-dlp has a command-line option to download videos while using sponsor block.
yt-dlp https://youtube... --sponsorblock-remove allLike the ads surrounding the video and breaking the video up or the spots in the video where the creator hawks their latest wares?
If I see one more PCBWay ad…
I swore I’ve seen a FOSS project that did that. An ad segment detector basically
My worry with all this is that they might say fuck it and put DRM for all YouTube videos which would block attempts to download the videos. Not make it impossible as seen with streaming services but not as trivial as now…
Time to quit YouTube then
Heck yeah let’s all go to break.com
Didn’t know this was still a thing haha. It brings me back
I already subscribed to someone on Floatplane. If it gets much worse on YouTube, it might be time to switch fully.
The day they go 100% paywalled, is the day their dominance ends. They will never do this because, contrary to the corporate dickriders in this thread they rely on bait and switch tactics to draw the crowd in the first place.
I didn’t say anything about paywalled.
Google’s plan is to DRM the web
Well the good news is Widevine is very expensive, and doesn’t work. It’s not as simple as right click / save target as, but Widevine decryption is why you can torrent any of the shows/movies on those streaming services.
Everytime someone requests a video on those services, the service pays a fee to Widevine. $0.50 USD per request for the first 30k requests/month. How much you think Google is willing to pay someone for you to watch cat videos for free?
“We’ll make our service worse, that’ll show them!”
Ok google, good luck with that.
Unless you inform those customers with some kind of UI that they’re being throttled because of ad-block how does Google expect them to uninstall it?
I genuinely believe they are trying to push adblock users off the platform completely
At this point I’m convinced they’re trying to drive people away to shrink the overhead on bandwidth and servers, but it doesn’t work like that. Not after you got them hooked on videos of cats after years of a steady drip of memes.
I wish we can fast forward to the part where Youtube completely destroys itself and a new platform takes its place so we can enjoy it for 10 years before the enshittification cycle restarts again.
The problem is that only conglomerates can eat the cost of running such a platform. Ads will be the end of free interne, that’s for sure.
I’m not so sure – YouTube is much larger than you might think. It’s not the video platform you grew up with anymore. No one in this world can match the backlog and content density/diversity of YouTube, not even all streaming services combined. People complaining that YouTube is dying because a few YouTubers “retire” from their main gig or that it’s not the same anymore don’t understand how YouTube works. They might not comprehend that the time of their “bubble” has come to an end. When this happens, there are already five new bubbles/niches that are even bigger, and you might not have heard of them, but they are more successful than their “predecessor.” The old bubble is still there to consume in the backlog. Someday in the future, AI will have a field day with the data accumulated via YouTube.
It is transforming, for sure, but I don’t think it will destroy itself completely. In a sense, you can say it will destroy whatever view you had of YouTube as a platform because it is not what it once was.
To my knowledge, YouTube will hit the billion-user milestone this year (Netflix currently at ~250 million paid users). If we look at other data trends from streaming services, it suggests that YouTube will grow more over the coming years. I don’t know how anyone can match YouTube as a whole. In certain niches, sure, but as a whole, it would be like fighting windmills. There’s a reason no one tries to tackle YouTube as a platform and only goes for certain niches.
And if it would be federated, there would be no cycle.
So I have YouTube premium but also have ad-blocker, for the first time yesterday I was noticing absolutely abysmal speeds on YouTube and I suspect this is why. I thought my computer was starting to shit the bed initially it was so brutal.
I have YouTube premium
Wow, so you pay them and they still screw you? Glad that’s a product I’ll never buy then!
I know, right? But I suppose their reasoning is that my ads are also blocked across the rest of their ecosystem, my subscription isn’t covering those losses.
Still though, a model that requires that customers look at something they don’t want to nor will engage with smells like failure.
I’m generally okay with the idea of “you can get it for free and we’ll include ads to pay for it, or you can pay instead”.
Where I’m definitely not okay is “you can pay, and we’ll include ads anyway.”
The sick twist is that I use Ublock Origin and won’t ever pay for YouTube premium and I haven’t experienced even the slightest issue streaming videos on YouTube. 😂
I have YouTube premium and an adblocker and I don’t have this problem. I’m skeptical that it’s related.
I have YouTube premium and an adblocker and I don’t have this problem. I’m skeptical that it’s related.
I too am a YouTube premium customer, and my video performance is horrible lately.
Funny enough, on my living room smart TV YouTube app my performance has been bad as well, even though I am logged in to my premium YouTube account.
Something is going on, and it does effect some (at least) premium customers.
Same, YT Premium, Firefox, ad blocker, no issues with streaming.
So, since writing the above I’ve been having issues with YouTube. I’ve been connected to my VPN, so perhaps that’s part of it (by which I mean Google slowing it down, the VPN doesn’t noticeably slow down any other sites).
I tried deactivating my ad blocker, but it hasn’t made a difference. I’ll try more stuff to see if I can figure it out.
Anecdotally at best. I know it’s not what you want to hear, but you’re making a conclusion based on something one person said.
I was wondering if this was coming. I don’t use YouTube in-browser much if at all, so I don’t see this. But I am not surprised. The fact that they’re slowing down people who pay for premium is kind of an act of war. It shouldn’t be a thing, and the fact that it’s happening at all is a misstep on Google’s part. Not that the whole slowing down people who use ad blockers isn’t. But this will detrimentally affect adoption of premium subscribers which I thought was the last thing they’d want. Because they obviously don’t make enough off ad revenue to support the platform. That’s part of why they push premium so hard. They need more premium subscribers. This is idiocy.
I can’t remember what video I watched that talked about the unsustainabilty and likely the late stages of an ad revenue driven internet content model, and this situation reeks of that.
I don’t know what new paradigm might replace it if this is the case, but the current model feels like it’s absolutely failing.
I have premium, uBlock Origin, and Mullvad VPN. In Firefox the other day, the stream was dying every 10-30 seconds. Like it would just stop and give me a spinner. I would have to “Copy URL at current time”, open a new tab, and paste it in to get it to go any further. I do have bad internet, but this was nuts. And then I gave up and used Duck, and it played flawlessly in their embedded player.
Good job, Google.
If it happens again, I’ll try disabling uBlock Origin on YouTube and see if it improves.
I dusted off an old laptop, put debian on it, put an SSD and now I have my own invidious instance, among other services…
No ads, no throttling, no bullshit. Google is very welcome to suck it. I’d gladly stop using youtube, but there’s no competition.
I know it’s a pain, but what’s to stop us from using download-clis? In theory I could “collect” the urls that are recommended to me from my home page, call the clis, click all the videos to update my recommendations then close the browser.
I know it’s a pain, but what’s to stop us from using download-clis?
The answer is right there.
using the browser isn’t necessary to keep your watch history up to date.
yt-dlp can log in as you by reading your cookies from your browser, and, with the optional --mark-watched flag, mark your downloaded videos as watched in your YT account.
TIL. Thank you very much. Looks like I’m going to be using that if YouTube gets even more painful.
Next step is guaranteed to be limiting the number of views without being logged in.
The more stuff they do to shoot themselves in the foot, the sooner something else comes in to replace youtube
I have YouTube premium. It still detects the adblocker. It’s infuriating.
There is competition when it comes to technology stack. People just don’t want to use alternatives because the amount of content/users is less on others.
Be the pioneer and help others move across.
Care to share any of the recommendations? I don’t use YouTube often but would be happy to visit and use an alternative
The no competition in the market, is the issue. Hope the situation improves in near future. With it innovations will gradually increase & the demand within the markets will point the directions.
Thank you for reminding me to get myself an invidious instance set up. It isn’t a huge pain or anything, right?
Not really, they have a docker compose file ready to go, and it works without issue.
I wish I could do the same thing with my 2008 VAIO laptop :/
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Pornhub owns most of those alternatives.
*Aylo
I love how they have clearly tried to hide that they make their money from porn. They used to be called MindGeek. The private equity firm that owns them is called Ethical Capital Partners.
Ethical Capital Partners
So I assume they can guarantee none of the women in the porn they show are victims of human trafficking.
(I can’t know that in the porn I watch either, but I don’t host it.)
People dont really care where their content comes from, so long as it loads properly. But content creators dont want to migrate from the platforms they have all their followers on. If i have a decent YouTube channel that is large enough to be my primary income, I’m locked in because there is no real way to migrate all those followers over to a new platform. Nebula is the closest i think we have to a true YouTube competitor, but it’s a tiny fraction of the user base and most Nebula videos are available on YouTube for free.
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Reputation, if you think Nintendo is copyright happy when people put their things on YouTube wait for it to be on “pornhub kids”
LoL wouldn’t even let YouPorn’s team compete
People will pirate porn, they don’t care to pirate COD montages
Use a different front end like piped video! All the content is free and no ads!
I don’t have an ad blocker, I just have the standard strict tracking protection enabled in Firefox. What’s more, I pay for YouTube Premium. But still they add a five-second delay every time I visit a web page. It’s infuriating.
Might as well just stop paying for premium then if they’re going to ding you anyway.
Why pay when you can watch it for free without ads through piped video! Pirate everything, live for free!!
That’s why Invidious exists.
Apparently this seems to be mainly affecting Chrome users, lol.
Well, yeah! Google controls Chrome
Yeah but what I find funny is that if people had already jumped from Chrome they probably wouldn’t be having problems.
