YouTube Says New 5-Second Video Load Delay Is Supposed to Punish Ad Blockers, Not Firefox Users
Firefox users are reporting an 'artificial' load time on YouTube videos. YouTube says it's part of a plan to make people who use adblockers "experience suboptimal viewing, regardless of the browser they are using."
https://www.404media.co/youtube-says-new-5-second-video-load-delay-is-supposed-to-punish-ad-blockers-not-firefox-users/Open linkView original on kbin.social1695
Comments389
"They're the same picture."
Also, that does not explain why:
Now, if only we knew who made Chrome and YouTube... The mind boggles.
Given that Google's been talking about switching Chrome to a new plugin format that would limit the ability of adblockers to function on Chrome, and given that Google owns Youtube and profits from the ads Youtube displays...
Nope, I'm not connecting the dots. Not sure why Google would be wanting people switch from Firefox to Chrome at this time.
It's more obvious than that even; their SEC paperwork states that adblockers are a risk to their profits. That's more than enough info to assume they're going to go to war in the near future (now) with them.
They've always been at war with ad blockers. It's just most major multinationals have matured or diversified to a point where they are functional monopolies, and no longer gain any value in competition or service improvement.
At this stage of the merger and consolidation phase of global capitalism, with captured governments that won't dare break them up or fine them more than a meek virtue signal, the most cost effective way to satiate the infinite growth of capitalism is to increase the exploitation and value extraction of their existing user base as much as possible (aka enshittification).
Concluding implicitly: "... and therefore a threat to all your computers' security" :-)
Sounds like the single best reason to use one.
Dear God, won't anyone think of the shareholders?
Just for clarity, they already switched protocols (Manifest v3), they just have continued to support the old format (v2) that allows unlock origin to work. They are discontinuing support for v2 next year.
What really pisses me off is that mv3 is becoming a standard that Vivaldi, Firefox, Opera, Edge, etc. will use.
Mind you that Firefox will adjust it to be able to fully support ad blocker.
C'mon man not everything needs a /S
(They're being sarcastic)
The last scenario is clearly a breach of anti-trust laws. It is time for alphabet to be broken up. Their monopoly is way worse than AT&T every was.
Alphabet's monopoly is bad, make no mistake.
But they aren't controlling all electronic means of communication for 90% of the continental United States, as AT&T did in the ma' bell and pa' bell days.
Google controls over 90% of the search business in the US and that's the way the vast majority of people begin their browsing. It's why US v Google is currently in the courts
MS vs US back in the 90's did not result in anything significant. This pretty much will happen again with Google. Some lobbyists will just do their thing, some minor slaps in the wrist and concessments between DoJ and Alohabet etc and Google will continue to Googling around.
I'm not trying to argue there's appetite to break up Google among the people with the power to do it. I'm just arguing Google has a monopoly similar to Ma Bell.
Yeah I agree
Adsense is literally 90% of the market. Let alone android...
Uh... Gmail, Ad sense, search?
They've got like a dozen duopolies going on, they have far more control and ability to leverage it than Bell ever did
I am a Firefox user who uses adblock and I don't get the issue.
I think uBlock might already be blocking that code.
I was getting the delay early yesterday and then it went away. I guess they must have done something in uBO.
Just turned it off. No difference.
YouTube rolls features out in waves
Same here. Firefox, ublock origin, privacy badger. Videos start playing in under 2 seconds. I've also never got the adblock warning.
Lucky I guess.
They just haven't rolled it out to you yet.
Chrome sends every single website you visit to Google. You already pay with your privacy.
I know several websites consider firefox's built-in privacy settings an adblocker in certain configurations. I get notices on many sites and use no adblocker. Not sure if it's the case here.
What do you mean by change user agent to chrome? Asking 4 a friend
For a specific how to, there's a bunch of firefox addons that do it, but the mozilla recommended one is this
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/user-agent-string-switcher/
It's super easy to use, just open it and it gives a bunch of options.
This is my current (fake) user agent;
With two or three clicks, this is my new (fake) user agent;
A few more clicks;
And finally;
Now, that last one is making it look like I'm using internet explorer... Youtube videos will not load with that last one active. Claims my browser is too old and not supported.
I don't know why they all start with Mozilla/5.0 but the apparently a lot of websites will block your requests if you don't have it (or a valid browser strings like it?)
Almost all user agent strings start with that Mozilla prefix because Mozilla made the first browser with "fancy" features, so in the early internet many websites checked for that string to determine if they should serve the nice website or the stripped down version. Later when other browsers added the features, that also had to add that to their user string so users would get the right site. Which just cemented the practice.
Just a reminder to not use user agent switcher unless it's absolutely necessary, and if you do, limit it only for certain sites that need it. If enough people change their user agent, website operators will be like "See, no one use Firefox anymore. We shouldn't bother to support it anymore".
This is a good summary of this mess: https://webaim.org/blog/user-agent-string-history/
I personally like seeing Mozilla loud and proud in all the user agents.
It's a mess, but also an echo of history.
When you browse to a website, your browser passes info about itself to the server hosting that site. This info is intended to help the server provide the best rendering code for your browser. This is called your User Agent.
However, Google is using it here to identify Firefox users, and is apparently choosing to lump them all in a box called "adblock users" instead of trying to identify an ad blocker more accurately.
If you do change your user agent, I would use an extension that does it only on YouTube domains.
We want independent metrics to show rising Firefox use, not falling.
Yeah cool I’ll have a look. Any extensions spring to mind?
That's because they may use code to detect as blockers that is not legal in the EU, so they might have thought that they're super crafty and used markers such as user agent for their cool coercion delay code thingy
To add on
You can spoof this user agent to see if a website does something shady depending on which browser you're using.
So if you keep all other variables the same, and just toggle the user agent value, YouTube behaves differently
How can we do that?
I haven't tried it in a while, but I think there are browser extensions for it. Might need to ask someone else for how to do it these days
Supposedly Firefox users spoofing the Chrome user agent don't get the issue because the script tries to execute the 5s delay in a way that works on Chrome but not on FF. Because the Chrome method doesn't work on FF, it just gets skipped entirely. But I'm not sure if that's entirely accurate, just read about it.
But then shouldn't there be a delay when using actual Chrome?
There's people reporting exactly that if they're using certain ad-blocking tools.
I did see Chrome users mention a delay (on lemmy) but I haven't personally checked it out
My understanding is the method they can use on chrome is near instant, but the alternative they use on Firefox is slower, hence the delay. Is this BS? Yeah probably, but it does at least logically follow.
It could be as simple as for Chrome assuming there is a certain API, while for Firefox, give it a try and assume no if no response in 5sec
5sec vs 3x20sec.
Easy choice
3x20, a bunch of wasted CPU cycles and probably a rare form of malware
Not too mention .01 points off your san permanently
Oh sanity, yeah per ad
The degree in which corporations engage in psychological warfare against customers is astounding. Not surprising, just outrageous. Don't want notifications on? We're going to ask you to turn on notifications in the the program every single day until you do it. Don't want to watch ads because our infinite greed has destroyed what used to be a good platform with a reasonable number of ads before we bought it? Then we'll make the experience less pleasant until you comply. They already make multiple parts of YouTube disagree with ad blockers on purpose to break the sites features. Not that I use anything other than NewPipe and Piped anymore anyway. I'm just sick of shitty corporations acting like we're children who can be punished.
We are in a war indeed.
I think it’s a new trend with CEOs and investors. They want infinite growth so the strategy is aquire / create, grow, squeeze, throw away, while creating new products to migrate fed up customers. Rinse and repeat.
Investors goal: maximize ROI this year.
CEO goal: infinite growth and/or increase share price to keep funds flowing.
I believe the current economic behavior isn’t sustainable. Some day things will go south.
I actually think they are currently all going south. This increase in ads is just one part of the fall I think.
Id say the last stage of squeeze might be more accurate.
Because it’s possible to recover now.
Once the majority of big corps reach the no return stage, we’re all screwed.
The idea that the only real duty of corporate leadership is to drive shareholder profit is apocalyptically naive and ultimately nihilistic, and it has been since the words dribbled from Milton Friedman into the NYT magazine back in 1970.
short term. The problem is driving short term profit. In the short term, you profit by abusing your customers. If you considered long term profit, you need to also consider customer satisfaction
No, I stand by what I said.
If you build something well, it will sell itself. You won’t need financial gymnastics to make your company or the product look good.
Stupid financial tactics like stock buybacks (which, as a result of how the stock market works, have a direct positive impact on stock price) should be illegal.
The problem is the focus on profit over and above the focus on literally anything else. That’s what modern corporate leadership has come to understand as the true meaning behind Friedman’s words. And it’s killing our society, our environment, and in many cases, the companies themselves (because the tactics are obviously unsustainable).
Infinite growth in a finite world is impossible.
Do we need to start requiring all C-suite managers to learn thermodynamics?
They know, they just wanna accumulate as much fat bonuses as possible before the crash.
Welcome to the basic problem of capitalism. It's unfortunately by design
This is it and there's another wrinkle driving it IMO which is the end of QE. When rates were at sub-inflation (so basically negative) and investor capital was everywhere, none of these companies really cared about milking the customers because they were already fat and happy milking the government indirectly. Now the government cheese machine has dried up and so now we've gotta get the stock price up a quarter of a point by any means necessary instead.
It's literally like that shit from Ready Player One where the guy suggests that you can fill up the VR screen with like 80% ads before the user gets sick from it. That's what they are doing now, they will push ads until people either stop watching or not enough people subscribe to Premium. The fact that you can't even skip ahead in a video without getting more ads, even if you just got the pre-roll ads. It's completely unacceptable and I think that there should be laws that would prevent that type of consumer abuse.
Don't you just love being fed plausible deniability BS over and over and over again. I've lost friends over this bs. People who always argue in bad faith, always invoke plausible deniability, always min/max each interaction with hidden motives - should be given no attention and credibility. Unfortunately, those people strives in corporate environments, and as you would expect, they're often responsible for marketing, PR, sales, and corporate strategies. Corporations are the annoying lying friends you don't want around.
YouTube didn't have ads before it got bought IIRC, not that it would have lasted that way even if it was not bought
It's been many years, but I remember a small banner ad below the video and maybe one to the side. It was so reasonable though it's hard to remember for sure.
That was after it got bought IIRC, but it's possible I'm misremembering.
At least we know for sure neither of us is confident about our memories.
I'd still prefer to wait 5 seconds than have to watch a fucking sanitized corporate advertisement trying to sell me bullshit I don't want and won't buy with annoying fucking music, voiceover, and footage of people pretending to be happy.
Fuck off, Google. Good thing this will be easily bypassed anyway.
If it were one ad I might be fine with it, but it's usually 2-3 ads every 5-10 minutes, at a volume twice as loud as the video, and each up to 2 minutes long.
A made the mistake of watching YouTube on my TV a few weeks back, without an ad blocker. I was getting 1-3 15 second ads every 2-3 minutes!
And inserted randomly within the content
Oof, get'em.
I hate ads too. Would you consider paying for a service so it's user supported instead of ad supported? I do, pay for YouTube, Spotify, Hulu no ad tier. It gets old because it starts adding up. I'd rather pay for a user owned platform like a coop of some kind, but still, these things do cost money to run.
I won't pay for Youtube because they keep making their product worse and treating creators horribly.
I won't pay for YouTube because the executives are literally thousands of times wealthier than I am.
Why the fuck would I give money to people who are already obscenely rich?
People don't have issues paying. As you said, if it was a user-run co-op, people would be fine with it. But as it stands right now the services keep raising their prices just because they can while all the money goes to the bosses and shareholders while the actual people who do most of the work get whatever is left over
I do pay for some services, where there is reasonable value.
However I rarely use YouTube so was fine with dealing with the devil of ads. Was. The inexorable march of enshittification will likely make me either never use that service or try technical workarounds for some of the enshittification (excessive ads)
I won't be shocked when they eventually get rid of this altogether. They shouldn't be shocked when I switch to 100% piracy when they do.
Fuck ads.
But wait, wouldn't a 5 second pause on loading still be way better than sitting through minutes of adverts? :-D
Punishment my arse
I'll take a 5 sec delay over ads any fucking day of the week.
Just now
Next up will be resetting the volume control every video, or limiting the resolutions you can view at.
They already kinda do the resolution thing. Premium gets higher bitrate versions of the videos.
Wouldn't it be neat if YouTube had reasonable competition? You know, so when YouTube adds a five-second delay as a strange style of punishment, a different platform would look more attractive?
There will never be a real competitor to YouTube, because nobody else is willing to run at a net loss for a decade before seeing their first profitable quarter, like Google did with YouTube.
Turns out, free video hosting is expensive as fuck.
That sounds reasonable but you're thinking way too small. Lets not forget that Tiktok is already more popular than YouTube with a very, very large chunk of younger people, for example.
But besides that, let's not forget that absolute giants in the business have been toppled. Look at Yahoo! as one example. Hell, even entire countries can fall within a few decades, whole empires.
So, assuming that there will never be a decent YouTube competitor is a very limited way of looking at it. Who's to say Google will still exist in any meaningful market leading way in 20 years?
Sure they're big now, but what if the entire face of the internet and how we use it and what we want fundamentally changes (say with the addition of highly advanced AI that brings changes we can't even predict right now).
There will absolutely one day be a service that can rival YouTube and eventually replace them, it's the same with every product from every business, it's the circle of life I suppose. But whether that will happen within the next 5 years, or 15, or 30, only time can tell :-D
Never say never, though!
TikTok isn't YouTube. It's two different method to consume videos. TikTok doesn't replace YouTube per se. Some people split the available attention time between them and in favor of TikTok.
It will be hard to compete on the YouTube field. But, there is multiple places for a different way to consume video with a different user experience.
On the YouTube field, it will be hard. I don't see creator moving with their community. The same issue has with let say Reddit, Twitter, etc.
That’s the commenter’s point: YouTube might not be replaced, but that doesn’t mean it cannot disappear.
Its so strange they let their users store 2 hour+ VODS but dont let users upload edited videos? Would make so much sense and even save them storage since user’s would replace VODs with edited videos since no one watches VODs
In the relatively rare cases that I watch stuff on twitch, I usually watch the VODs. Don't have the time or energy to sit though hours of a stream in one sitting, nor am I usually able to catch one live, nor do I like feeling like I'll miss something if I have to leave early, so I prefer to just watch the recordings of them at my own pace over multiple sessions.
I often watch vods. My favorite streamer's time zone and streaming schedule mean that I can only catch a couple of hours of the beginning of their stream before going to bed, and I couldn't regularly watch 8-10 hours of stream in one go anyway, so I watch the vods of the streams I want to see the rest of.
They already make a killing with their cloud with much less business risk in the form of AWS.
Maybe. But give decentralised federated hosting a few years. It might never be a rival but it's possible it will become a viable alternative.
If PeerTube can fix their major discoverability issues, it can potentially pose a real threat to YouTube. But that's the biggest thing keeping it back right now, is that it's impossible to just find anything you want to watch.
Unless you want to watch hour-long seminars on Linux. In which case, PeerTube's got you covered.
I think discoverability is in its infancy for the fediverse in general.
But I'm old enough to remember when vast tracts of the internet were hard to find and everyone used directories. When that changed, everyone jumped online.
Yet there is a gazillion of porn sites out there. The thing is, once YouTube become shitty enough its users are itching to find an alternative, porn operators like MindGeek might launch a competitor site because they're already have a scalable video delivery service. I wouldn't be surprised if they're already working on it.
It's not really a technical problem anymore. Which isn't to say it's easy to run such a site, but rather to stress that YouTube is like a social media site. The value is in the users (and the content that they create and consume). You could make a perfect YouTube clone, but good luck getting people to use it when their favourite creators don't. And good luck getting creators to care when the users aren't there.
And Lemmy is misleading. Most people don't use Firefox. Heck, most people don't seem to even use ad blockers.
It's funny too because ads literally are a 5 second delay (at least) that you get when you dont use an adblocker!
I honestly think I prefer the delay over the ad.
Same. Give me the delay. At least I know that’s only five seconds, as opposed to a ten-second unskippable ad followed by another ad that I can skip after five seconds.
You're absolutely right, but we haven't even touched on the worst part of ads, which is how they utterly poison your brain with annoying jingles, annoying colors, and stupid catch-phrases, all psychologically engineered to get stuck in your head.
And let's not even go into how they prey on your fears and insecurities, or deceive you into thinking you need things that you actually don't. How they prey on vulnerable children, or the elderly, or brainwash small children into manipulating their parents against their best interests. Or how privacy has been shredded since the advent of behavioral tracking.
I'm not exaggerating at all when I say that advertising is one of the world's biggest psychological hazards. I would rather sit in an empty room with no stimulation whatsoever than let that poison into my brain.
If I see an unskippable ad, I like to play the game "Roll the dice until Youtube gives up". Hit the refresh key until it gives me the correct video length. Devalues Youtube's ad product and costs YouTube more.
am close video on mobile
That is the way to do it. Then open it on NewPipe or another 3rd party app without ads if you want to see it.
They're still letting you skip ads??
At some point Hulu did that - just like three, thirty-second blocks of silent 'shame on you for ad blocking!' I totally preferred that to ads...
Now I just don't use Hulu?
Ah, the good old days. Put on your show, get up and grab your snack/drink, come back just in time for the show to start, no ads the rest of the way
And even before that when adblockers just straight up worked on Hulu no shame screens to be found
I've been using Nebula. It's a subscription-based alternative with no advertising, but I get it for free because I'm subscribed to Curiosity Stream (which is basically Netflix, but for documentaries).
The only downside to Nebula is that there aren't a lot of content creators on it, so you don't have the variety of videos that YouTube offers.
The captions suck too. I subscribed to the same deal as you. I did it mostly to support the creators. But I basically never use it. The creator whose affiliate link I used to sign up? Their own captions are amazing on YouTube (human written with colour and positioning) and auto generated garbage on Nebula.
I'm still waiting for MindGeek to launch an SFW version of pornhub to compete with YouTube. If YouTube keeps getting shittier, they might eventually do it.
Turns out people don't want to compete with something that runs at a loss. and as soon as someone figures out how Google will just copy them with a massive infrastructure lead.
Peertube is almost there. Just needs a good server really, most of the servers are too small for the market share. Or at least fit the general public, I'm loving it ATM.
All of the people saying "I'd rather wait five seconds than watch an ad" seem to be optimistic that it will continue to be 5 seconds and YouTube won't keep upping it.
But they can't extend it longer than the shortest ads, since then it'll affect users after they watch ads too, which kinda defeats the point
Exactly, so this still guarantees a better experience than ad viewers because you will always have the minimum ad length
That's not a problem. Just put in longer ads. Or multiple ads in a row.
They aleady do that
Honestly, worst case scenario, if YouTube manages to completely eliminate adblockers, maybe by making some kind of cryptographic system where the browser has to provide a token embedded inside the ad video stream in order to access the video, I would still use an extension to mute sound and draw a black bar over the ads while technically playing them in the background, it's not the wait time that bothers me, it's how repetitive and obnoxious the ads are, I just don't want to perceive them.
Which is why you have to void warranties and go through a lot of hassle to r Unlock the bootloader, or root your own phone and have actual control over it.
And that's the reason Google is trying to push shitty web standards to remove your control.
And why Apple and Microsoft keep restricting your access to your OS, with rumors of Windows 12 being cloud-only.
Many governments around the world don't want you to have any control or privacy. Many tech giants don't want you to have any control or privacy. It's the same old thing religions have done forever. Enforce a lack of control and privacy through violence, social pressure, or resources. Only now, the enforcement style is indirect, trying to say you don't own your device, can't use ad blockers or privacy tools, have to agree to terms and conditions that waive your rights, your usage has to be monitored, or that backdoors have to be built into everything.
Don't expect this behavior to stop unless regulation is created to prevent it, or the company caves to financial or social pressure to change....for now.
Don't expect regulation to be created unless you put people who care about privacy and such in power.
Even then, people in power need to be held accountable if they misbehave, or nothing else matters.
It all comes back to class struggle and politics.
"Which color hat did the extra in the background of your latest ad wear?" Wrong answer = 10 ads.
If they could, YouTube would hire someone to sit on your couch and make sure you consume the ads with your utmost attention.
I'll take 20 minutes of silence over 1 second of ads. I will never willingly watch an ad I didn't explicitly request. Ever.
Life is short and I won't devote any of it to advertisements.
That being said, I do pay for YouTube premium because I do use it a lot and understand that the platform has every right to make money. But that makes what they're doing with Firefox and ad blockers worse.
Ads are psychological abuse. I will not watch them. If YouTube make it too hard to use their service without watching ads, I don't need to use YouTube.
This is why I refuse to pay for YouTube. They are literally actively making the experience worse, rather than trying to make the paid experience better. This is laughable.
Guess they'll have to do a better job at convincing me that I should pay for what's historically been free. I've never tolerated ads and I'm not about to start. At this point they're encouraging me to carry on out of spite, underhanded tactics are just giving me more reasons not to do what they want.
You realize that they are only able to pay for "what’s historically been free" because of advertisements right? Google might be able to sustain Youtube even without ads because they have other revenue sources, but the vast majority of their revenue are from advertisements, and it would be a massive loss of money to keep Youtube up without it generating ad revenue. Hosting videos is one of the most expensive things a website can do. If we are to ever hope for other companies to compete with Youtube, we should expect for it to not be free. All that said, Google can still go fuck themselves though - I cannot possibly endorse their methods.
Yes, I do realize how terribly expensive hosting videos is. It doesn't change my stance as a customer/end user, however.
Dude you are the product. Or do you think that they didn't build your profile based on your experiences and tastes and then sold it to other companies.....
Wow someone hasn't understood how the internet works
Salty from the sound of it.
No, I think it's a reasonable stance. I pay for Crunchyroll and Hidive because I like the paid service they provide, it's a good experience that they are providing and I find value in it. Why would I pay for something that I don't find value in, something where a company tries to actively downgrade the experience of its users rather than try to upgrade the experience of its paid service? I like services where they don't try to actively screw over their users. I pay for Lastfm and Trakt too, because again I like the paid service that they provide.
It's hard to provide something extra when all their content comes from users. They tried with
redtubeYouTube Red originals but those were pretty lame.animepahe
Same holds for YouTube. They just got rid of the only no ads subscription here. Which was half the price of premium. So they kick people out of that, and afterwards going to war with ad blockers... If they really wanted as much people as possible to pay, they would have kept that abbo. But probably it's better for them financially to have a bit more with ad blockers and ads and convert some to the premium tier
Look, I think YouTube is one of the few major "social media" sites that net positive for social good. And it loses Google money every year with saving everyone's videos forever and hosting 4k and even 8k content...
But you can't withhold the carrot and use the stick. They're eroding trust with the people that have liked and supported YouTube throughout the years. There are plenty of people like me, that would gladly pay some amount of money. Just not THAT amount of money. Create some payment tiers and decent benefits for climbing up it.
I hate that I'm subscribed to premium, if there were a viable alternative I'd be gone in a heartbeat.
"supposed to"
Oopsie whoopsy, we accidentally made competing browsers disadvantaged.
Deliberate, disguised as accidental. Disgusting.
There is no acceptable answer to "why do you make your own services suck?"
"We know you didn't do anything wrong. We meant to hurt someone else."
Normally this is when I'd go all yar har fiddle dee dee, and don't get me wrong Imma do a lot of that too, but a lot of my favorite video essay nerds are also on a platform called Nebula that's dirt cheap, ad free and owned outright by the people who make the content. It's a good way to balance the whole "people need to get paid for the content they make" thing with the whole "these platforms are predatory and abusive" thing.
Nebula will also sell lifetime subscriptions for $300 occasionally. When you compare it to netflix's standard price of $15.49/month, it pays for itself in less than 2 years.
I admire their mission. Giving the power to the video creators is great. I'm all for coops. But, as a user I find it lacking. If you want to watch anything outside of educational videos and video essays you have to go elsewhere. It doesn't have very good content discovery. I know creators don't like chasing an algorithm, but as a viewer I like having recommendations based on what I watch.
I bought a one year membership, because I support what they are trying to do, but I rarely watch anything on it.
So 5 seconds of silence... Yeah punish me daddy google.
I do not think Google deserves the benefit of the doubt anymore, people need to stop using their services.
I'd rather a 5 second pause then see something trying to hijack my freewill.
No ads or delays > No ads with delays >>>>>> ads
Honestly, as long as the video itself doesn't have interruptions, I'm okay with the ad-free experience having a small delay or even lower video resolution. I don't have to have 4k 120 FPS video on everything.
What I don't want is constant interruptions, wild changes in emotional tone or volume, obnoxious and manipulative ads, politically sponsored bullshit, or constant pestering to disable my ad blocker and tracking protection. In short, once the video starts, leave me alone.
I can appreciate that Google has spent its entire existence trying to find another revenue stream beyond advertising, and largely failed, but I don't care. If my choices are to continue being manipulated and lied to by companies and politicians paying for the privilege, and not using YouTube, I'll just stop using YouTube. I've done it before with other services I used much more frequently.
Either they shut up about using ad blockers, or they give me an alternative.
And yes, I realize this is a very selfish and entitled response. If I get value out of something that costs other people time and money to provide me, it is fair that I give back in some way. Traditionally, that was done via companies serving ads and spying on its users.
But enough is enough. Modern advertising and tracking keep getting worse, and trying to enforce them is not the way to move forward.
As opposed to the perfectly optimal experience you get when allowing ads
A 5 second break, while suboptimal, is significantly less suboptimal than having to watch 20+ second ads.
Yes, but ads make them money.
Oh, no! Better disable my ad blocker quick!
If you're on desktop and open several videos at once (such as getting home from work/school and opening all the new videos on your subscriptions tab) you really don't notice.
What I do notice are the ads at the beginning, quarters, middle, and end of a video
Ah yes, because ad viewers get to enjoy the video immediately with zero delay whatsoever. You sure showed those adblock using scum by... Still having a better experience with adblock enabled by virtue of only subjecting them to silence instead of an ad while still not making any money.
Even assuming what they're claiming is truely their intention, it's still dumb as hell.
Lol, I'd rather wait 5 seconds than see an ad lol.
ads can be 30 seconds
Ads can be 15 minutes. Like they're adding goddamn infomercials now.
At least 2-3 times I would get an entire K-pop music video as an ad.
Sure I can be skipped, but it will play when I’m in the shower listening to a podcast.
I don’t speak Korean or listen to kpop, so it’s weird it’s being advertised to me as I’m not the target audience.
I've seen more than one hour long ad. It let you skip after 5 seconds, but imagine if someone were leaving it on as background.
When they first launched YouTube Red I remember they were throwing whole episodes of their shows up as pre-roll ads.
sacre bleuuu
Wait 5 seconds and it plays or bombarded with ads that, at best, takes 5 second and an manual action before watching a video?
Yeah, if I wasn't using Freetube on desktop I'm still not watching ads.
Bro my position is very clear. I'd rather forget about YouTube entirely than let ads back into my life
Can vouch for Yattee on iOS, but every once in awhile I’ve had to grab new invidious instances as things happen
So they will allow ad blockers now? I'll take a five second delay instead of shitty ads.
I'll spoof the user agent because that shit is disgusting.
If it actually targets ad blockers and not FF in particular, that won't do much other than telling all the websites you visit that yet another user is using chrome and not FF.
I didn't do it so take it with a grain of salt but people were saying they saw improvement in loading when changing the used agent to chrome.
I saw others reporting a similar issue in Brave. 🤷♂️
Oh well, we'll see how it plays out, right now there is a lot of speculation going on
There are other ways to detect FF, but they can almost always be worked around with enough effort.
Deliberately and actively try to make user experience worst is shit evil. Now im gonna actively share ubo to all people i talk IRL
Why was it a mistake? I've used Google workspaces for business email for about 5 years and find it to be a really good and inexpensive service.
They forced our hands in creating and using adblockers. Remember how awful the web was getting before we could adblock? Pop ups, force play videos with full sound, entire webpages full of ads with a tiny bit of content in the middle.
YouTube sucks now. Just constant ads.
cough piped cough
All jokes aside, I strongly recommend a service like Invidious or Piped.
piped does not support live streams at this time unfortunately
On Invidious, not all instances support live streams, so you have to click around until you find one that does. Maybe it's the same for Piped.
laughs in "phoronix" without "adblocking"...
Hmmm, watch an ad or wait five seconds..... Not sure they thought this one out.
“People say breaking up Alphabet into heavily regulated entities is supposed to benefit the public, not investors”
I don't mind ads, I understand that websites need to finance themselves to cover their costs (and maybe build up some capital to expand). But I do mind tracking, user profiling, personalization / user targeting, trading this data with dubious companies worldwide, and obnoxious ads, for example pop-ups or auto-play videos with a 1 micron sized close button, or a forced timed ad which is hiding the content.
It's like having a bunch of people following you around, taking note of everything you do, evaluating that data, making statistics, dicsussing it with other people you don't know, etc.. Then, when you want to make yourself a sandwich, step in between you and your sandwich, taking up a megaphone and scream into your face : "OH, WE NOTICED THAT YOU ARE MAKING A SANDWICH. CAN WE INTERST YOU IN NEW FANCY BUTTER KNIVES FOR ONLY 59,99 €?" [Then going on about it for 3 minutes before they are stepping out of your way].
There are laws against that in real life, and in the digital realm this is missing. Considering how much time a lot of people spend online this is something which needs to be taken seriously.
It's really scary sometimes. There was a time when I was stupid enough to use facebook, just to stay in touch with friends. Once I talked with a friend about allergies and asthma, and I told them I have a pollen allergy. A short time later an ad showed up on my facebook feed, advertising some nasal spray for allergies. Wtf?! And that's just the surface. "Harmless" ads. Who knows what else happens with that data?
And then we get stuff like Cambridge Analytica.
Google lived long enough to become the villain.
Old news, they've been the villain for much longer than you think
Don't be evilDon'tbe evilWhen they were allowed to buy YouTube because their Google Video couldn't compete was the turning point.
https://www.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/17tm9rp/comment/k9i62zu/ for a working fix
For those that don't want to click on a reddit link:
Credit to u/paintboth1234
www.youtube.com##+js(nano-stb, resolve(1), *, 0.001)For those that had no clue where to put this:
Click on uBO icon > ⚙ Dashboard button > Add the filter(s) in "My filters" pane > ✓ Apply changes > Open new tab and test again.
Freetube, Newpipe, Indivious. All great.
5 seconds of silence vs 30+ seconds of ads. Tough choice Google, tough choice.
Trying to monetise the fraction of a percent of users who actively avoid your advertising and wouldn't engage with it or purchase products from the advertisers even if forced to watch them is the epitome of corporate greed. Pathetic, money grubbing billionaire corporations deserve to burn to the ground rather than be supported by the societies they leech off like the cancer they are.
Okay. Yeah. Sure.
I feel like the explanation follows a thread of believability, but even then, this feature was terribly coded if it was circumvented via User Agent string manipulation.
I don't believe that ad blockers modify the user agent, so if you can modify the user agent of FF to emulate Chrome and solve the issue, then that means Chrome users that use ad blockers don't have to deal with the delay and therefore their claim that they aren't punishing FF users his utter horse shit.
I was under the impression Chrome doesn't let you use ad blockers anymore? idk I use
archfirefox btwI thought Chrome was planning to oust ad blockers in 2024. Idk if that's true though, maybe I'm mis-remembering.
I've kinda stuck with Firefox for many years now because I never saw any reason not too. I honestly hardly ever used extensions though (except ad blockers), so maybe there's something I don't understand about any downfalls of Firefox. I just don't see any, especially nowadays. It just works for me, so I never fully switched.
I've tried other browsers, but I just come back to Firefox ever time. It's a comfort at this point
lol, I take back the snark I gave in another thread the other day about Google doing this to fuck with people now. Egg on my face for giving them the benefit of the doubt.
They can't honestly think this will have the desired effect. I also bet the poor sod that had to implement it "strongly advised not to do it". But was over ruled by some know it all shit head MBA.
I wish I could make YouTube "experience suboptimal revenue" in retaliation, but sadly I can't block more than 100% of ads.
Can you say "anti-trust"
This is hillarious! I didn't even notice that. YT always delayed video loading a little. Is this really a change?
Yeah it really just looked like the normal shitty youtube connection you get when their servers get a wee bit overloaded.
I haven't noticed any delay in Firefox. I have noticed that the ui fails to load sometimes. Video works just fine, but there's nothing else on the page. So hey, Google, if you could keep that up that'd be great.
from what i've understood, they are selectively pushing it out, like they did with the adblock blocking shit.
So not everyone is getting hit by it.
Yep. And using the page feedback button gets you off the list from what I can tell. No response from Google but removes the ad block shenanigans instantly.
Which, to me, screams that they want to make life miserable for the general masses who dont know any better, who will blame it on their browser or something else besides google.
While quickly removing it from the people who know how to complain about it, so they wont be invested/pissed off enough to go around explaining the technical aspects of what they are doing and bringing the blame back on google.
And it might work, cause remember...folks around placesl ike this tend to me more technical than the average person. So cant use the discussions around here pointing it out and dissecting its cause and shit as the norm.
Totally agree. My kids don't understand why services like youtube suck so much at other people's homes. My house is only FF with uBlock Origin and I'm looking at putting in a PiHole soon. It's insane how bad the internet experience has become in the last decade.
I miss the mid 90s internet. When there wasnt even search engines. Just digital yellowpages and webrings, with no advertising or corporate exploitation.
they're so shockingly inept, i can't believe it anymore
I don't believe this instance of anticompetitive behavior was an accident either. They just thought while doing it for ad blockers, might as through in the competition in the net too. They just got caught. Now they can plausible claim it was an accident.
Like much of big tech, they are too big. This makes also being anticompetitive just too easy to resist.
Punish?
The sad thing is, I consider this an upgrade. I'll take a moment to breathe and maybe break out of the negative spiral that is modern internet use.
Huh, I just thought youtube was running slow. Still better than ads.
Extensions like "agent spoofer" allow you to customize the details of what your browser reports to the web page.
Personally on my home pc, I'm using a galaxy s21 with the netscape browser
I find the use of having Firefox pretending to be Netscape like using your parent's ID to buy liquor underage. Too funny!
I love netscape the best browser to ever exist(ed)
except firefox
I like the cut of your jib!
I don't understand why companies still place ads on youtube. I've never ever bought a product or visited a company's website which was advertised on youtube.
Are there really people who listen to youtube ads?
Active enshitification.
It's like when a teacher can't target the bad kid so they punish the whole class instead.
Ads are sub suboptimal viewing.
GrayJay is still working pretty good. I cannot use the YouTube app, or mobile browsers because most of the content I'm interested in isn't highly visual so I like to turn my screen off and listen. I am ok with a reasonable amount of ads but the anti-feature of background play disabled without premium is just stupid.
You need YouTube ReVanced.
Google's modus operandi - business as usual. Deploying their dirty tricks on their mass of servers to edge out and destroy competition. When caught out they apologize all surprised Pikachu style, then do it again differently. This is likely in response to news about Firefox mobile finally allowing extensions to work. People are probably trying it out, but their Youtube experience will be crap, so they'll go back to chrome.
Whatever you say Google. Hey EU, Google wants to chat with you.
I feel like all the people running Firefox (most of my friends/family and many colleagues) are just going to say “damn, YouTube sucks. I should look elsewhere” and not “oh, it must be slow because I’m not on chrome.” Heck my parents don’t even know what chrome is.
Like look where?
Nebula is great and really cheap for the content. Ofc maybe it depends on what you watch; but it's great for me o7
Still illegal
when are they gonna learn that any client-side restriction or hindrance can and will be defeated? sleep(5000) is kinda like them throwing a fit, not actually trying to punish anyone. obviously we'll find a way to avoid waiting the 5s, do they think we'll just give up?
i never experienced that delay in the first place...
I'll just blame it on my ISP being shit
Oh wow, I just opened lemmy because a YouTube video was taking extra time to open in Firefox lol.
Cruelty, is Thy name.
I haven't noticed this in the browser, but I've definitely noticed it using the YouTube app on Roku. No Firefox or ad blocker there.
I've never seen this fake load thing and I always use Firefox
They don't roll it out to all users at once. Similar to the video blocking
This delay has happened on Brave browser too, it's not FF specific. But it's pathetic either way.
I mean, if they really wanted to show you ads, they could just switch the returned stream when the video player calls for certain chunk, then when that ad is done playing, switch back to the original stream. The user experience would be basically like watching TV.
I don't know if it makes a difference, but I'm in Canada and I've noticed none of this. No video load delays, no anti ad-blocker pop ups, none of it. I'm not going to stop using Firefox or Ublock Origin though.
It's punishing me and I'm using their app. Their video loading has been spotty as shit lately. And I know it's not my bandwidth, I've got 5Gbps available and 12ms latency to YouTube's closest data center.
I'm not even blocking the ads when I use it.
I will never again use Chrome again (well maybe except YouTube if stops working in non-chromium-based browsers), we need to get Web back into our hands! It is sad that it took me too many years to realize that, I hope others will follow.
It was only a month or two ago when I didn't believe I could make firefox my primary browser, but I was so wrong. I don't notice any performance implications after weeks of using FF compared to chrome, despite having read comments to the contrary.
Strange then how my Vivaldi browser doesn't have the load time, then. Almost like it's a punishment for non-chromium users.
Freetube on PCs, LibreTube on Android. Block that, fuck-o.
Youtube be like: "Theyre the same people"
I'm not experiencing that issue on Grayjay 👍
How did we function before youtube. besides music videos I rarely like video anything. howto skip skip skip. Used up all my skips on amazon too.
Piped or FreeTube on desktop.
LibreTube on mobile. SmartTube on Android TV.
I haven't had to deal with Google's crap in a while. All of these have no ads and have Sponsorblock built-in. I do miss the algorithm's suggestions but I do discover new content creators through Nebula (and FreeTube has decent related video suggestions in my experience).
More than happy to wait
Does this apply to Freetube, Invidious and other yt mirrors?
Tee hee. I don't use UserTuber.
Funny, because my ad-blocked vids load just fine in Safari
Haven't experienced that so far (but that's probably because I don't log into my YouTube account anymore and mostly use private browsing), but I imagine that's something that adblockers will eventually be able to block?
I'm using Firefox but is it not possible to block ads in chrome too?
What's that federated video service that carries a bunch of YouTube videos?
Video is hard because it requires a lot of space and bandwidth. We really need a storage and/or compression breakthrough.
We also need the internet providers to stop being so stingy with network speeds and bandwidth limits.
Imagine, 100 people trying to load a video from your single hard drive, it’s not fast enough for that. It’s not like a picture where the entire thing can be sent at once. So, it will require a decent tech upgrade across the board before that can be federated successfully.
A large creator could do something like that and invest money into it, but it will still really be controlled by a small group of people.
We have had constant advancement in compression. People just keep using it to make higher quality, higher resolution videos rather than actually reducing file sizes.
I agree that compression has advanced steadily. I’m really referring to a break though. Something that gets 1080 videos down to 100mb.
But more realistically, I think storage is where we need to look. If I can get a 100tb ssd for not too much, then I can more realistically host a video library.
Bandwidth can be paid for, it’s fast enough. It’s just that the companies charge a ton for faster speeds.
The solution is real-time P2P bandwidth sharing. I guess peer tube does that. More watchers=more bandwidth.
YouTube 1080p is 8-10 Mbit/s according to what I could find. That'd be 100-125 MByte/s for 100 people. I think my SSD is more than fast enough for that.
Even better, a 1 Gbps connection is also (just) enough to actually upload the video to those 100 people.
And with 100+ people watching, P2P distribution should work really well too.
This is one reason I’m excited for AV1. Being able to store high quality video in a fraction of the disk space is something that will bring being a competitor to YouTube much more viable.
I was going to play around with it, but it wasn’t part of the standard ffmpeg and I would need special build flags to use it.
That’s above my understanding, so I didn’t move forward.
I’ll have to check to see if it can be done at this time.
Peertube, but it’s not great yet. I’ve not tried to use it for a few years, so maybe it’s gotten better.
Little do these companies know that poor people know how to be patient and older people remember the days of free ad supported internet dialup via cds, so this is not new and people will continue where business models fail.
Maybe changing your user agent just let's you reroll whether you are in the group of users that are used for testing the increased loading time
And this right here ladies and gentlemen (and other) is why we need to host our own. Hopefully somebody comes up with a peer2peer based youtube competitor.
Nope, still too easy to get around.
It was happening for several days with me but it seems to be fixed now
How many of you use YouTube on the actual website, and not just an embedded video on another site?
I do, on desktop anyway
I use YouTube for me subscription feed and for the video recommendations. I redirect every watch page to Invidious tho.
So what? I have to wait about 5 seconds anyway because I have a slow internet connection. No big deal. 5 seconds of not watching a youtube video is probably good for you.
I say this a lot but I'd happily pay for YouTube if the company didn't run it so arbitrarily
And I sure as fuck don't want to pay now, if this is how they treat their viewers
There isn't any alternative for either content creators or consumers so of course people can't just stop using it. But that doesn't mean everyone should just accept anything from them. These kinds of things definitely hurt both the YouTube and Google brands and there definitely are Google products that you can stop using and avoiding to give money to YouTube.