this post was submitted on 21 Nov 2023
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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."

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[–] [email protected] 617 points 1 year ago (30 children)

"They're the same picture."

Also, that does not explain why:

  • Chrome users who use an adblocker don't get the issue
  • Firefox users who do not use an adblocker get the issue
  • FIrefox users who use an adblocker, but change User Agent to Chrome, don't get the issue

Now, if only we knew who made Chrome and YouTube... The mind boggles.

[–] [email protected] 167 points 1 year ago (7 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 63 points 1 year ago (4 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 38 points 1 year ago

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).

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[–] [email protected] 76 points 1 year ago (6 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 255 points 1 year ago (3 children)

5sec vs 3x20sec.

Easy choice

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[–] [email protected] 184 points 1 year ago (7 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 36 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (9 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 162 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (9 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 46 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 143 points 1 year ago

But wait, wouldn't a 5 second pause on loading still be way better than sitting through minutes of adverts? :-D

Punishment my arse

[–] [email protected] 121 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I'll take a 5 sec delay over ads any fucking day of the week.

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[–] [email protected] 115 points 1 year ago (16 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 93 points 1 year ago (14 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 32 points 1 year ago (2 children)

There will never be a real competitor to YouTube

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!

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[–] [email protected] 97 points 1 year ago (6 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 36 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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

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[–] [email protected] 92 points 1 year ago (16 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 86 points 1 year ago (10 children)

"supposed to"

Oopsie whoopsy, we accidentally made competing browsers disadvantaged.

Deliberate, disguised as accidental. Disgusting.

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[–] [email protected] 79 points 1 year ago (14 children)

There is no acceptable answer to "why do you make your own services suck?"

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[–] [email protected] 78 points 1 year ago (2 children)

"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.

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[–] [email protected] 71 points 1 year ago (12 children)

I do not think Google deserves the benefit of the doubt anymore, people need to stop using their services.

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[–] [email protected] 67 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I'd rather a 5 second pause then see something trying to hijack my freewill.

[–] [email protected] 32 points 1 year ago

No ads or delays > No ads with delays >>>>>> ads

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[–] ElBarto 67 points 1 year ago

So 5 seconds of silence... Yeah punish me daddy google.

[–] [email protected] 63 points 1 year ago (2 children)

YouTube says it's part of a plan to make people who use adblockers "experience suboptimal viewing"

As opposed to the perfectly optimal experience you get when allowing ads

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[–] [email protected] 60 points 1 year ago (1 children)

5 second ad delay in blessed silence

5 seconds of someone screaming into my ear "BUY! BUY! BUY!"

Oh, no! Better disable my ad blocker quick!

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[–] [email protected] 58 points 1 year ago

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

[–] [email protected] 55 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 53 points 1 year ago (13 children)

Bro my position is very clear. I'd rather forget about YouTube entirely than let ads back into my life

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[–] [email protected] 52 points 1 year ago

This is bullshit even being truth lol "is supposed to punish adblockers" such entitlement and normalization.

[–] netchami 52 points 1 year ago (2 children)

YouTube can go screw themselves, use Invidious or Piped to access YouTube. You can also combine this with LibRedirect to automatically redirect all YouTube links to Invidious or Piped. There are amazing mobile clients like LibreTube or NewPipe for Android and Yattee with this guide for iOS. All of these don't have ads or trackers.

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[–] [email protected] 52 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Honestly, I never bothered to install an ad blocker before today. I just figured ads were tolerable. This move by YouTube got me to switch to firefox and install ublock origin and oh my is it glorious. I can wait 5 seconds for my video to start since I am used to ads anyway.

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[–] [email protected] 51 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (8 children)

Lol, I'd rather wait 5 seconds than see an ad lol.

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[–] [email protected] 51 points 1 year ago (5 children)

So they will allow ad blockers now? I'll take a five second delay instead of shitty ads.

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[–] [email protected] 50 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Deliberately and actively try to make user experience worst is shit evil. Now im gonna actively share ubo to all people i talk IRL

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[–] [email protected] 47 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 43 points 1 year ago (4 children)

YouTube sucks now. Just constant ads.

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[–] [email protected] 43 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Hmmm, watch an ad or wait five seconds..... Not sure they thought this one out.

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[–] [email protected] 37 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (13 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 35 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 47 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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)

[–] [email protected] 37 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 35 points 1 year ago (7 children)

Google lived long enough to become the villain.

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[–] [email protected] 34 points 1 year ago (6 children)

Freetube, Newpipe, Indivious. All great.

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[–] [email protected] 34 points 1 year ago

5 seconds of silence vs 30+ seconds of ads. Tough choice Google, tough choice.

[–] [email protected] 32 points 1 year ago (8 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 31 points 1 year ago

Okay. Yeah. Sure.

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