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YouTube punishes ad-blocker users with slower videos on non-Chrome browsers
- tareqak 3y agoCould this action potentially open up Google to an anti-trust suit? If the claim is true, then Google is using dominance in one platform (videos - YouTube) to achieve dominance in another (browsers - Chrome).
- SuchAnonMuchWow 3y agoThey already use their dominance in one platform (android) to achieve dominance in another (chrome), the exact same way Microsoft have been found guilty of years ago. If the US govt wanted to sue google for it, they would have years ago.
- tareqak 3y agoSure, but I think this particular case is would be more clear cut. If a person can measure the time the page spends loading with a complete break down across a number of different browsers both on the same machine and on identically-specified machines together with a an external running stopwatch, then they would be able to show that which browsers are being slowed down. There is less hand-waving here with questions like, "Well, does bundling Chrome on Android really affect the browser market?" . We know that slower load times is a worse user experience, and if this claim is true, then YouTube and Google are squarely to blame.
- beretguy 3y agoI don’t even care because I use Invidious.
- kzhe 3y agoPiped & Libretube here, Lighttube also has awesome UI
- 1-6 3y agoIsn’t it easy to fool the request to make it look like it’s coming from Chrome? Are there extensions on Firefox to do this?
- gdcbe 3y agoDepends. If the check is only about superficial stuff like User Agent etc then that is easy. But they can fingerprint on all layers (tls, http, web api, js engine). To fake that all requires a lot of effort. Not all can be changed with an extension alone. Welcome to my world of browser emulation. But then again, all depends on what they check :)
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- godzillabrennus 3y agoReminds me of the RIAA fighting pirates. Doomed to fail.
- pwthornton 3y ago[flagged]
- BobaFloutist 3y ago>You are stealing from creators. On a purely financial level, it's far more accurate to say I'm stealing from Google than from creators.
- pwthornton 3y agoNo. Creators got 55% of revenue on their channels. You are first and foremost stealing from them. Google has plenty of money.
- MeImCounting 3y agoIF creators want to get paid they should run sponsorships in their videos or have patreons. Which most do. No amount of morally outraged shilling is going to compel reasonable people to watch ads. I frequently watch all the way through sponsorship segments that are entertaining and most creators vet what sponsorships they take so I also frequently use affiliate links if I am interested in a product. If google cant afford to host youtube its odd that its been around for decades in its current form but thats their problem. Not mine.
- overstay8930 3y agoIf you ever wanted to see how stupid the "YouTube is bad for blocking ads" thought camp is, this comment is a perfect example. "If creators wanted to get paid they should just run more ads" fucking LOL YouTube creates the (so far) unmatched creator compensation system with YouTube Red (now Premium), and now that Premium users generate so much more money for creators than Ads, they have to increase ads to compensate. Blocking ads literally makes you the bad guy, it's hilarious how people are trying to spin this as some freedom thing. Just say you think you're too good to pay for entertainment.
- downrightmike 3y agoFor the past couple months once they started popping up that request to disable ad blockers, the videos will often play for a few seconds and then just stop. This is chrome. It hasn't happened in the last week, but typically I see it more when there are updates that require chrome to restart. It seems like either an unintentional bug or a dark pattern. But punishing users that are blocking ads is the hardest sell. I've gotten viruses from ads, and I will not allow them. Google is never going to sell me on that. Maybe instead of slapping users, they should have had some fiscal responsibilities in the good times and not setup a complete adult daycare for their employees.
- PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y agoI've been seeing this behavior on brave and assumed it was a built-in feature of the browser to stop autoplay. tbh, I don't find it obnoxious at all, if they're really doing that to try and annoy me, they've instead brought back the ability to disable autoplay, which I'm thankful for.
- km3r 3y ago> I will not allow them Then pay for youtube premium. why should google provide you a service for free, without ads? They aren't slapping users, they are offering ads or paid. Free ad-free was never a sustainable solution.
- kimixa 3y agoI find this entire discussion difficult, as with any other service not agreeing to the terms of sale just means you don't use it. But online this seems to have become "Socially Acceptable Theft". It's not like youtube access is a human right, there's a million other alternatives to entertainment online, if you can't agree to terms of one just use another?
- onetokeoverthe 3y ago[dead]
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- Timshel 3y agoI had some slow down on Firefox with Ublock origin. Guess they won I installed Freetube (https://freetubeapp.io https://freetubeapp.io)
- the-dude 3y agoThe nag screens made me aware of https://yewtu.be https://yewtu.be Much lighter too, appreciate it most on my Raspi desktops.
- tomxor 3y agoInteresting, is the invidious API limited to 720p? or is youtube the one limiting it? I've no idea how this actually works.
- the-dude 3y agoI hadn't noticed, I am running the Raspi's on LCDs from the thriftstore. Remarkable product-market-fit.
- cornedor 3y agoInvidious supports the DASH streams, so I guess those are disabled on that instance.
- PawgerZ 3y ago"Preferred video quality" is set to HD720 by default, but you can change it to DASH and change "Preferred DASH video quality" to a higher rate.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- jsemrau 3y agoWhen I am not logged in I am getting one ad every 1 min 45 seconds. I measured it because I found it so annoying.
- Rastonbury 3y agoAbsurd, back to real TV for me
- gardnr 3y agoI tried to watch MotoGP the other day on "real TV". I turned it off because the ads were so bad.
- FirmwareBurner 3y agoDon't know about MotoGP but for F1 there are no ads if you watch the paid subscription stream. The stream on cable TV is indeed full of ads that it's worth paying for the subscription with some friends to share the cost.
- Rastonbury 3y agoMy comment was a bit tongue in cheek, but live sports is one of the last advertising venues where there isn't true adblock/skip Although protip is to find UK streams instead of US for the same events, shorter ad breaks
- shadowgovt 3y agoAirwave television is no shelter from this storm. Relative to the advertising I see online, I can feel airwave TV draining minutes out of my life.
- em-bee 3y agonow i am curious how much the slowdown is for adblockers compared to the slowdown through ads. at that rate i suspect even with buffering the adblocker version is still faster, at least at lower bandwidth.
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- _Algernon_ 3y agoIt's pretty trivial to write a yt-dlp one-liner to batch download all your subscriptions. You can even have it slice out sponsor segments using the SB API automatically. There's also projects like TubeArchivist which give a web ui to download and play youtube videos. There are also projects that provide alternative UIs for Youtube. The world is drowning in solutions to this problem, yet people keep whining and complaining about it. It is obvious that anyone who still uses YT while complaining about these measures should quit their BS learned helplessness and take an afternoon to figure out an alternative.
- creata 3y agoIt is easy, but I'm terrified of getting my Google account banned. Do you do anything to avoid that?
- k8sToGo 3y agoYou can use an invidious instance for example. It can also act as a proxy.
- _Algernon_ 3y agoNo. Of these mechanisms, the ones I have personally used (yt-dlp and TubeArchivist) do not rely on signing in with an account. They could ban my account on IP association alone, but that would result in massive false positives and backlash (everyone behind a VPN would be screwed for one).
- timetraveller26 3y agoWhat if I want my Watch for later videos, or a private playlist?
- yencabulator 3y agoSupposedly you can do that separately from the naughty yt-dlp run with https://developers.google.com/youtube/v3/docs/playlistItems/list https://developers.google.com/youtube/v3/docs/playlistItems/... (I don't know what the playlist id for your Watch Later would be, and the API for listing playlists doesn't seem to work either. Fun.)
- supermatt 3y agoFrom earlier reports you can just change the user-agent header to appear as chrome and the problem goes away. How do they keep pulling this anti-competitive bullshit? Do they not realise what they are doing, or are the fines still too low for them to take it seriously?
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- jacquesm 3y agoThey got away with it so far which they see as confirmation that they can do whatever they want and that nothing or nobody will ever make a dent in their armor. The scary thing: they might be right.
- jeffbee 3y agoJust because you don't see the flaw that they are hacking around when you switch the UA string doesn't mean the flaw doesn't exist.
- supermatt 3y agoIt’s not a flaw, it’s intentionally degrading non-chrome user experience - otherwise it would be identical behaviour regardless of UA spoofing.
- ChrisArchitect 3y ago[dupe] Some more on this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38363114 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38363114
- pvg 3y agoDiscussed at great length earlier https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38345858 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38345858 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38363114 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38363114
- dang 3y agoThanks! Macroexpanded: YouTube blames ad blockers for slow load times, not the browser - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38363114 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38363114 - Nov 2023 (220 comments) YouTube slows down video load times when using Firefox - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38345858 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38345858 - Nov 2023 (459 comments)
- ShadowBanThis01 3y agoLook out, you'll be down-modded and flagged by Google apologists.
- keeganjw 3y agoDoes anyone know if the slowdown still happens to Premium subscribers using uBlock with Firefox? Or just non-Premium users?
- sorahn 3y agoI have premium, and I use Firefox/uBO and haven’t noticed anything.
- blt 3y agoI've been catching low bandwidth recently, even on Android with YouTube Premium on WiFi. I have quality configured to "Higher picture quality, more bandwidth" yet still get something like 240p on a video with 1440p max resolution. They are getting user-hostile
- bee_rider 3y agoThis seems like such an inopportune time for Google to pick this fight; right when better YouTube (Tik Toc) has gotten popular. Anyway, all of these viral video sites are concentration destroying garbage. Hopefully YouTube will choose to die on this hill, and then we can ban Tik Toc and be free of this waste.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- kurthr 3y agoYes, but annual earnings growth is only 5% nominal. Real is below inflation.
- jacquesm 3y agoYou have to wonder why none of these big companies has figured out yet that the only things that grow without restraint are cancers. Every other entity has an upper limit to their growth and that's nothing to worry about. You've gotten as large as you'll be, congratulations, you're an adult. Now act accordingly.
- esafak 3y agoThey can't find a new revenue stream so they keep goosing their existing ones until they burst.
- creata 3y ago> better YouTube (Tik Toc) Is TikTok popular for long-form video content?
- qwertox 3y agoI had the same issue for around a week in Chrome, but it stopped being like that on Sunday. I never looked into it, I accepted it as a punishment.
- xwowsersx 3y agoBut it's significantly slower for me on Firefox even though I have YouTube Premium.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- b0dhimind 3y agoI have Firefox with no premium and a lotta stuff running on Youtube when I load (ublock, Youtube Enhancer add-on, and a few Tampermonkey scripts)... it only takes a second. Maybe they are slowing down premium users?
- PedroBatista 3y agoPlease keep making it shitier to the point I consume less and less of YouTube. These tactics are nothing new for non-Chrome users. Most of the "Oh they just didn't have Firefox in mind, no malice on Google's part" it's just bullshit at least in part. This is just one more instance of it, and it's getting pettier and pettier..
- overstay8930 3y agoYou not watching YouTube is literally what Google wants, you're a net negative to them, so they're making your experience as miserable as possible to make sure you don't come back without money or the ability to watch an ad.
- PedroBatista 3y agoKinda, platforms like YouTube's lifeblood are the huge amount of eye balls aka "views" so they can sell ads to companies hopeful those eye balls watch and click their ad. Of course I'm "a free loader" but there is still some residual "value" in me. Either way I don't care about Google, if they "win" I also would win by not wasting my time watching videos.
- Tommstein 3y ago> . . . you're a net negative to them . . . . In a world where people didn't share videos with others, you might be correct. This is not that world.
- bilekas 3y agoThat's funny, I've actually been seeing this with Brave but it's limited to the first video per tab session i watch.. Then it seems to be fine. I put it down to excessive AdBlock scripts being added, but if it's related to this that's quite a scummy move.
- mvdl 3y ago"Ad-blocker user punishes YouTube with not watching YouTube"
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- qmarchi 3y agoTo provide some clarity on this, it likely isn't targeting specifically non-Chrome browsers. Disclaimer: fmr Googler, used to work on YouTube Likely, this isn't necessarily targeting Firefox/Safari/Etc, but rather is using the UserAgent as part of a tuple with other factors. It _is_ however an anti-adblock measure meant to determine if the video is automatically getting skipped forward. The reason on why changing your useragent "fixes" the problem, is that you're changing the tuple and the anti-adblock system won't serve the code-at-issue until it determines whether you'd be a good candidate for the experiment. Secondarily, YouTube has no financial incentive to actively punish non-chrome useragents. They make money in their division by serving ads, regardless of the useragent.
- short_throw 3y ago> YouTube has no financial incentive... Nonsense. A Google controlled browser runs plugins Google allows with privacy settings Google creates. More data and no ad blockers is worth many billions of dollars to YouTube in the long run. They directly benefit from people thinking Firefox is slow.
- FalconSensei 3y agoThey already made gmail slow on FF on purpose some time ago, no?
- happymellon 3y agoDidn't they do the same to Maps?
- LightHugger 3y ago[flagged]
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- dang 3y ago
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- deadfece 3y agoJoke's on them, I'm from the dialup era and don't even notice.
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- boc 3y agoI might be a sucker but I bought YouTube Premium about a year ago and it's definitely been worth it for me. I love watching those 10-20min length YouTube videos instead of watching TV shows, so skipping the ads is really clutch and has saved me probably 24+ hours of my life lol.
- ilc 3y agoThere is nothing wrong with paying for a service you use. If you are a normal techie. Ask yourself: How many hours will I spend circumventing this, then having to deal with when it breaks etc. Vs. paying the bill. For me, it was an easy call, and one I don't regret.
- FalconSensei 3y agoAlso: I watch Youtube on my TV. So circumnavigating ads is not as simple as installing adblocker. Also 2: I got rid of Spotify because of that so that's a win. (Considering the payment changes they are making now + Joe Rogan and anti-vax stuff from during the pandemic, not going back there)
- gkbrk 3y agoI haven't tried this; but if you have an Android TV, NewPipe might work on it.
- FalconSensei 3y agoLG WebOS
- kzhe 3y agoSmarttube fir Android TV?
- ilc 3y agoI do also. I wish the LG had Nebula. I'd gladly pay the fee.
- deleted 3y ago
- randomdev3 3y agoBlocking ad-blockers on a public website is going to be hard...
- petre 3y agoThey'll make it login only like Facebook, Instagram and now Twitter. It's the only option that the MBAs can come up with. That will also be the end of Youtube.
- blahyawnblah 3y agoI have firefox with ublock origin, privacy badger, and a pi-hole. I haven't noticed any slowdowns. Though, last week one day youtube woldn't play videos at all for a couple of hours for me.
- ranting-moth 3y agoThere's been a lot of "all working for me" during this YT fiasco. YT is most definitely either doing an A/B testing or rolling this out incrementally.
- blahyawnblah 3y agoYeah, that's my guess.
- ranting-moth 3y agoUsing my (very blurry and limited) vision into the future, I see the outlines of an EU fine of biblical proportions.
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- dschuetz 3y agoIf I was a stakeholder in YT I would be worried about users and creators leaving the platform, because YT has become increasingly and more aggressively anti-consumer. I do not mind if the creators incorporate sponsor ads into their content, but what YT does to the user experience is just awful. Inserting multiple, low quality, loud, long unskippable ads into one video, who the heck would want to watch that?! It's clear to me that Google is pressing on to make users buy subscriptions. It's basically a dark pattern, closely resembling coersion.
- ErneX 3y agoLeaving to where? That’s the thing.
- nostromo 3y agoMaybe people aren't actively leaving YouTube, but they are using a lot less of it for other platforms like TikTok.
- Hooray_Darakian 3y agoNebula for one
- shadowgovt 3y agoNebula's great for long-form content creators, but it's not a place where an amateur can put up their hobby tutorials.
- kspacewalk2 3y agoUntil one day it becomes just such a place by developing a free tier.
- redwall_hp 3y agoThe EU, since they actually give a damn about antitrust, needs to look long and hard at: * YouTube running at a loss for years until they achieved overwhelming market dominance. We might all be using Vimeo or something else. * The forced bundling of YouTube Music. Leveraging a monopoly for a foothold in another market is also not okay.
- spullara 3y agoIf they weren't cheap about it they would just serve a video that has the ads built into it. Instead they try and play them separately because that is cheaper. It would also be a better user experience because there wouldn't be these sharp edges between playing the ad and the content that are separately buffered.
- overstay8930 3y agoThere are hundreds of reasons why this wouldn't work, mainly the fact that almost nobody watches the same ads, meaning you're just rendering 100,000+ different versions of the same video depending on who watches it.
- civilitty 3y agoYou don’t need to render the whole video, just the frames between the last keyframe of the content and the first keyframe of the ad. The rest can just be cached as is.
- Nifty3929 3y agoYoutube doesn't produce the videos. Are you suggesting they should re-encode them with the ads inserted into that particular video file? That seems worse, with little gain. Plus think about all of the additional storage and streaming cost required for that, because you'd have to duplicate that ad in all the videos now. Meaning each 15sec ad would add a tiny bit to each of 1B videos, instead of just being a separate 15sec video all by itself. And separate cached in all the places where that video is cached. This is a bad idea.
- packetlost 3y agoI'm fairly certain you could inject ads directly into the video stream at the protocol layer (HLS/DASH) without too much difficulty. Both operate by sending self-contained chunks of encoded media at a time. The real issue there is then preventing the user from skipping those parts of the video.
- dim13 3y agoI would rather watch 5s white screen, then ad.
- Nifty3929 3y agoI find it weird that so many people think they should be entitled to everything for free. Who's paying the creators for the content they watch? Who's paying Google for delivering that content? Instead of an ad-blocker, try a YT premium subscription. Or use a different platform that doesn't serve ads. Or sign up for some other subscription service. Whatever. Do people also get mad at barbers that don't give free haircuts?
- rychco 3y agoPossibly a hot take, but youtube premium is too expensive. I don't care about youtube music, I don't care about offline use, I don't care about background play/queue on my phone. I just want to watch ad-free video, which I don't believe is worth $14/month. Ideally the offline/background play/queuing should be included because they're unrelated to the cost of serving video, but any other features like music/4K/etc should be an extra purchase. However, I strongly doubt enough people would even bother with those to justify having as separate features.
- 05 3y agoJust use an Argentinian/Indian/Turkish VPN to buy it for (much) less then..
- Auracle 3y agoWhile I largely agree with you, I think a lot of people are in an annoying in-between when it comes to buying a Youtube subscription. I maybe watch 5 minutes a day, averaged out. That's not nearly enough to make it worth it to me to buy a subscription. On the other hand, the ads have gotten really annoying. Being able to skip after 5 seconds on most is nice, but I'd almost rather they were just 10 seconds long and unskippable. It's frustrating to watch 5 seconds, skip, and then immediately need to do that again, especially if it's something you have on 'in the background.' If they had one based on a scale of how many videos you watch, I'd be much more keen. Of course, I expect they wouldn't do that for multiple reasons. I once had a website that would have been profitable if not for ad blockers, so I definitely get it. I don't know what the real solution is. Ideally they could block ad blockers and then keep the number of ads under control, but I doubt they'd actually reduce the numbers if they did manage to stop ad blockers.
- Waterluvian 3y agoEver since that executive email about reverting some change in Chrome because people aren’t going to meet quotas and get their bonuses, I imagine that conversation happening every time they crank up the ad volume on YouTube.
- ShadowBanThis01 3y agoGoogle crossed the line and pissed off users who were previously willing to watch ads, by implementing NEVER-ENDING ads that require the user to continually press Skip to herd the program along... over and over and over, while they're trying to do something else (in my case, it's usually cooking, with stuff all over my hands). I watched YouTube ads when they were normal blocks of short ads. But now they aren't, and I watch YouTube with no ads at all. This punishes content creators, and the blame lies firmly on Google. Per societal norms today, the perpetrator of the offense is now whining about people fighting back. And in doing so, Google has popularized ad blockers among people who would never know they existed. Morons getting what they deserve.