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YouTube begins new wave of slowdowns for users with ad blockers enabled

118 points by Hary06 3y ago

paulpauper 3y ago
This is mostly due to an artificial timeout written within YouTube’s code to act as a laggy internet connection. While this action taken by YouTube isn’t brand-new, more users are starting to see the tactic in use. Crazy. The ad blocker wars are reaching new levels. If this implementation is client-side the fix should be trivial. Thwarting ad blockers and optimizing ad delivery is the main focus at google and other ad-supported tech businesses such as Meta, not Ai or anything else even if Ai is getting all the media attention now. Also, if I were an advertiser, I would not want my ads shown by people using ad blockers, no? These are viewers who are least inclined to buy anything. Google should take this as feedback that the ads are bad.
- giraffe_lady 3y ago
  > These are viewers who are least inclined to buy anything. How do you figure? No one likes ads and everyone thinks they are personally immune to them. But they are still effective, somehow. I seriously doubt whether someone has an ad blocker installed is indicative of some characteristic about them that makes them not worth advertising to. In fact we can gauge from advertiser actions that probably the most relevant fact about them is simply the ad blocker, which is why they want to get rid of the blockers and advertise to them. They know ads work on us, even when we believe otherwise.
  - nottorp 3y ago
    You think so? What if the ad industry is stuck in a bubble and has no idea what works and what doesn't? All they need to do is keep their customers (not us) convinced that ads do something for them, and push to maintain the status quo (anti ad blocker solutions). There was this article on HN in the past few days [1] about a company that gave up on the use of cookies on their site. Go look how full of jargon and dubious inferences it is. Even if they're trying to do a good thing, they still seem isolated in their own marketer's bubble. There was also an article about some new Google anti email spam protections (lol, Google protecting us from marketing). I'm not going to try and link to that one. Edit: surprising but i found it [2]. If you look at the comments here on HN you'll see some people either honestly believing or pretending to believe that their email newsletters are something that people want. Again, bubble. [1] https://blog.sentry.io/we-removed-advertising-cookies-heres-what-happened/ https://blog.sentry.io/we-removed-advertising-cookies-heres-... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38935048 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38935048
    - giraffe_lady 3y ago
      Honestly I do waffle between these two views of it. That they do work and so we should avoid them or they don't work and the entire internet is a bubble built on top of a fake idea and so we should avoid them. I don't see how both can be true and I find both equally compelling, with comparable explanatory power of different things I see. But for the specific purpose of deciphering the actions and motivations of ad companies I think assuming they work is a more useful view. Presumably ad companies are acting as if ads work, and are assuming they work equally well on people running ad blockers, if they can get them past the ad blockers. I find them corrosive to my soul and culture either way, and ad companies are acting towards me as if they work. So in this context I think it makes sense to also act as if they do.
- rosmax_1337 3y ago
  Unfortunately ads work even if the person is very disinclined to the purchase when viewed. When faced with a decision in store many months later, even years, whichever brand you recognize more will be more likely to be purchased. Ads are a very effective form of brainwashing. One might recall the adage that "there is no such thing as bad PR".
  - the_af 3y ago
    I know this is often repeated and believed, and to be honest I sort of believe it can work, but my belief is unsupported. Are there serious and conclusive studies showing that ads affect purchasing decisions "subliminally" like this? Even when you are not interested in the ad, or even irritated by the fact you're not allowed to skip or hide it?
    - imran-iq 3y ago
      If you want a N=1 "study" https://blog.imraniqbal.org/advertising-works/ https://blog.imraniqbal.org/advertising-works/
  - jorvi 3y ago
    I have automatically started to discount companies that need to ram ads in my face. If you are that desperate for me to buy your product instead of your competitors’, and I don’t see them aggressively advertising, I assume it is because their product is superior and you need to make up the difference with ad dollars. Even if that wasn’t true, a small part of me won’t want to buy your product out of sheer spite.
  - dexterdog 3y ago
    Then explain why I refuse to go to Burger King in reaction to their commercials this football season with that god-awful song.
    - qbrass 3y ago
      A bunch of people who didn't watch their commercials and don't have that feeling about Burger King just got a reminder that they still exist. In spite of your hatred for them, you just provided better advertising than they did for free.
- lukewrites 3y ago
  > Also, if I were an advertiser, I would not want my ads shown by people using ad blockers, no? This is a good point that marketers will never accept because their livelihood depends on the proposition that what they push down the trough will seem so delicious that the hogs will slurp it up. I’m an ad blocking zealot and feel a big FU towards ads that slip through. Much less likely to trust the brands or their products, especially the scummy junk that pops up on yt. (“I bet you think doing cardio is the best way to lose weight…”)
Deukhoofd 3y ago
This is a bug in AdBlock (Plus). uBlock Origin is not affected. https://gitlab.com/adblockinc/ext/adblockplus/adblockplusui/-/issues/1576#note_1727415603 https://gitlab.com/adblockinc/ext/adblockplus/adblockplusui/...
- aloisdg 3y ago
  Time to invite again people to replace any adblock with uBlock Origin
  - _flux 3y ago
    Or not. Google probably targets the most popular adblocking solutions first.
    - KTibow 3y ago
      uBO has the most people working on providing fixes though, and they get them out pretty fast. I've never ran into a situation where I couldn't get YouTube working again by clearing my filter cache so far.
      - ikt 3y ago
        The interesting thing is that they removed that option in the latest version
    - gorhill 3y ago
      It's perfectly fine and valid to question the pile of JS code executing in Youtube webpages, but in this specific instance the performance issues are caused by ABP/AdBlock. The issue has been acknowledged by the developers[1]. It affects only the latest version of both blockers, not previous versions, so it makes no sense to keep speculating Google is at the root of that specific issue. Out of curiosity I investigated these performance issues myself using profiling sessions[2] and the faulty code is definitely in the latest versions of these extensions. * * * [1] https://gitlab.com/adblockinc/ext/adblockplus/adblockplusui/-/issues/1576#note_1725604837 https://gitlab.com/adblockinc/ext/adblockplus/adblockplusui/... [2] https://twitter.com/gorhill/status/1746543688975581604 https://twitter.com/gorhill/status/1746543688975581604
angelbroz 3y ago
Even if you have YouTube Premium subscription the web becomes slowly asf if you have an Ad Blocker extension enabled.
- uhmwhat_ 3y ago
  This couldn't be more false.
  - eks391 3y ago
    Angelbroz is not an outlier, nor out lying. Several premium payers who use adblock for other sites and dont disable for YT have the same issue
    - sccxy 3y ago
      Yeah, because slowdown was caused by bug in adblock software...
kryptiskt 3y ago
For me it has been lagging and terrible the last few days without any adblocker in Firefox and has worked perfectly with uBlock Origin in Opera. So I guess they are missing the target, whatever they are trying to do.
greesil 3y ago
"Focus on the user and all else will follow." https://about.google/philosophy/ https://about.google/philosophy/ To be fair they didn't state this in the positive or negative sense.
- izacus 3y ago
  People who refuse to pay for a service and just drain expensive resources, aren't really "users" in terms of being worth focusing on.
  - whythre 3y ago
    You mean ‘people who refuse to participate in time destroying corpo-brainwashing.’
    - izacus 3y ago
      Whatever makes you sleep at night. YouTube Premium gives you the service without the ads. You just need to pay for it as it should be. Or pay for Nebula. Or any others.
  - piva00 3y ago
    What about people that were willing to pay Premium Lite and got fucked by YouTube when they summarily ended that subscription tier to push people into the more expensive Premium with unnecessary features? Are those paying users getting shafted or do those end up in "not being worth focusing on"?
    - izacus 3y ago
      The service costs X. You do not have a right to use someones service without paying that X. Support Nebula. Support PeerTube. Pay them.
      - piva00 3y ago
        I pay Nebula. I paid YouTube Premium Lite to get rid of ads, I will not pay 2x for the same feature since I do not need offline, Music, nor background play, if they decided to cut my use case from their offering by forcing me to pay extra rent then I can decided to not pay them and use an adblocker. I do not need to bend over for a digital feudal lord.
arthur_sav 3y ago
It's a feature, not a bug. I've been meaning to cut my youtube consumption anyway.
neom 3y ago
They should disable this for people who use Premium. Although I'm happy to now know why my YouTube fell to bits starting on Friday... I uh.. pay for YouTube Premium so they shouldn't care.
- jonwachob91 3y ago
  The article suggests YT Premium users are unaffected by the slowdowns. If you are getting slowdowns, you should message the article author so the article can be updated and YT can be shamed. I have refused to pay for premium b/c they frequently wrap up paying members in their silly antics, and don't have the foresight to exclude paying users from their ad-block efforts.
  - neom 3y ago
    According to this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39002083 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39002083 It might be an AdBlock error. As soon as I disabled AdBlock, YouTube returned to normal. (Brave, AdBlock, Youtube Premium)
    - Eisenstein 3y ago
      Why use AdBlock with Brave? That functionality is built in.
      - neom 3y ago
        It could be redundant. My logic is AdBlock does this full-time time so it should be more up-to-date and generally better vs the Brave blocking stuff. I may very well, be wrong, but that's been the logic. :)
- TechSquidTV 3y ago
  You aren't loading any ads if you have premium, you can't be affected
afandian 3y ago
I use Firefox on iOS (which as we all know is mostly not Firefox). I don't have a google account. Nothing else exotic. YouTube serves me an ad every 3 minutes or so (I've not timed it). If I ever seek in a video, again, an ad. Even if it didn't play any video yet. I can't figure out why they think is is a good idea. I've seen the same iPhone ad so many times.
- ImHereToVote 3y ago
  It's to make you a paying user. Ad dollars aren't worth what they used to be.
  - afandian 3y ago
    From the beatings-will-continue-until-morale-improves school of marketing. No thanks. (And I wonder if advertisers know how their ads are being played? That ad is worth a lot less to Apple on the 5th play, and negative on the 10th).
    - rapnie 3y ago
      When I owned an Apple table I saw this beer ad about 20 times in a row, while watching a conference video. It had an annoying song. And I made a solemn oath to myself I will never buy a beer with that brand again in my life.
      - lacrimacida 3y ago
        I wish your response was more generalized and people would punish brands for intrusive/abusive or advertising in bad taste. In Europe and perhaps other parts of the world advertising is a bit more bearable as compared to what’s the norm in the US.
      - dylan604 3y ago
        The sad thing here is I doubt the beer company is intending this to occur. They just offer Google $X spending, and they are ensuring they get every one of those $s. A similar thing happens in a lot of the streaming platforms. The same ads are shown relentlessly. Advertisers aren't stupid, and they are aware of ad fatigue. I can't imagine they are possibly happy about the situation. OR...I have no clue what I'm talking about and they are quite tickled about the situation and this is why it continues
TechSquidTV 3y ago
I hope YouTube finds a way to just fully stop working for all ad blockers. Creators deserve to be paid, YouTube deserves to exist. 55% of revenue goes to creators. Support content creators and get YouTube Premium.
- wredue 3y ago
  30 unstoppable seconds of ads every 1 minute of video, as well as ads that are inappropriate, scams or outright illegal. People do deserve to get paid for their work. But the only way to safely browse is to block this shit. If Google did a halfway decent job of managing their ad network to keep the scum off, I’d consider turning off ad blocking.
- joelhaasnoot 3y ago
  Not when Google is just doing a money grab and is doing a terrible job at filtering ads. They have some ads that are 1.5 hours long. That shouldn't be possible. I also recently reported an ad that was clearly AI generated content of Elon Musk doing a crypto scam. Report was ignored.
  - varjag 3y ago
    To be fair Elon Musk crypto scams are ignored even on Elon Musk's own platform.
  - 55555 3y ago
    Regardless of whether an ad is 5 seconds or 8 hours, you can skip it after the first 5 seconds.
    - joelhaasnoot 3y ago
      On Android TV that's not always true - you sometimes get a batch of unskippable ads for 15 seconds or so
- teeray 3y ago
  I do, but the creators still insist on adding sponsorships and putting other content on private platforms for yet an additional fee. I respect and support the work that goes into it, but my support has limits.
agumonkey 3y ago
I started using Dailymotion again. And was already leveraging invidious/piped proxies for a while.
Lendal 3y ago
I wonder how much of my $14/mo Premium subscription is paying for YouTube Music, which I have never used.
- amf12 3y ago
  Probably not much because they still have to license the same Music for YouTube. I know some people hate bundled Music. But I doubt unbundling it will reduce the prices.
- BoxOfRain 3y ago
  This is what puts me off paying the Danegeld for YouTube more than anything else, I already pay a fair amount of money for Tidal which I'm perfectly happy with. It's bad enough Apple insist on incessantly hawking Apple Music at me with a popup every time I open the music app on iOS for my offline music collection, I don't want a third music service trying to crowbar its way to my life whether I want it or not. What Youtube does is pretty much the infamous U2 album but with an entire streaming service, forced bundling like that is never not obnoxious in my opinion.
- endisneigh 3y ago
  YouTube music is simply a different front end for YouTube. Removing it would not make it any cheaper.
ChrisArchitect 3y ago
[dupe] More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38987489 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38987489
dissident_coder 3y ago
I started using Baking Soda on iOS/Safari and it's a game changer and it doesn't seem like YT can do anything about it.
throwaway4aday 3y ago
Going to drop this here for others who haven't heard of it https://invidious.io/ https://invidious.io/ Now, how do we fix this? YouTube's ad model sucks. Their algorithm sucks. Their front page sucks. They've captured a bunch of creators though so often YouTube is the only place you can find someone. I want those creators to benefit from me viewing their videos. I want the fact that I view a video and like it to help other people find that video in their recommendations. I want an algorithm that shows me things that are interesting and relevant not one that promotes the spammiest and most ad heavy videos that barely have anything to do with my watch history. Having an alternative front end is nice but I don't want to rob YouTube of the money they spend on hosting the videos. So, how do we do this? Peer to peer fails when there is little interest in something or when most people leech and it sucks for archiving old content. Hosting it all in one place is super expensive and hard for a small group to manage without turning into YouTube. Maybe we could find a way for the creators to host their own content and get paid when people view it while being part of a large federated network for easy discoverability? Please list any projects you know of, I'm sure there are a lot of people here who would be willing to contribute or donate.
- Eisenstein 3y ago
  Publicly funded archive?
- myself248 3y ago
  Isn't that basically what Nebula is trying to do? It's a company not a project, but it pays creators and some of my favorite creators do publish their stuff there first. I've subscribed because I think it's important that they succeed.
  - izacus 3y ago
    Yes, Nebula is exactly that. But HNers here prefer to continue supporting Google instead of the service that explicitly wants to cater to their supposed wishes.
    - birracerveza 3y ago
tentacleuno 3y ago
I wonder if this is due to YouTube's www-tampering.js script, which scans the JavaScript environment for patched DOM methods and "suspicious" style / script URIs, and then collects that information into separate arrays. It isn't entirely clear where that data's going yet, but they are definitely scanning the DOM to check for anything suspicious (read: ad-blocking) added by the user. It's worth running "ytbin.polymer.shared.lib.tampering.info()" in a YouTube tab and checking the results if you get a minute. Never seen this level of persistence from them before.
areoform 3y ago
What if I told you that for a decade there has been a separate service where the largest content creators on YT upload their videos without sponsorships + add extras for a monthly subscription? And this site has had issues building + shipping features at scale? It is, in general, a very poor substitute for the player + server experience YT offers. Yet 10+ years later, no one at YT has sat up, taken notice and said, "Hey, maybe people don't want to pay for YT directly, but what if they want to support their favorite creators?" "What if we really doubled down on the creator experience? What if we made it possible for them to post uncensored, subscriber only videos? What if we made it possible for their most loyal fans to ALWAYS see their video without clicking a bell?" "What if we made it easy for them to sell merch? What if YT channels were actual channels and way more focused on the creator?" "What if we made a better editing suite? And what if we AGGRESSIVELY paid the largest creators on this other platform to switch to us exclusively for X years?" And then rolled these features out across the world at insane Google scale. Something this languishing feature-as-a-company can't compete with. I'm willing to bet that would make far more money than YT driving off creators and users. Creators are the future of content. With some ads mixed in. Viewers spend billions supporting their creators. Apparently that languishing competitor has a GMV of $2B. It's fair to say that with Google's scale + resources to invest initially, they could easily 10x that. There's one creator on their platform that has launched a multi-billion dollar brand off of it. An individual creator. And YT gets (almost) none of that sweet sweet upside. It seems that Google doesn't want to make more money by building a better mousetrap anymore. That kind of thinking clearly isn't welcome at Google/Alphabet/Soup. edit — "Channel Memberships" and "Subscriptions" are Google's half-hearted version of this, but it's not a serious attempt. It's the usual Google Allo, Google Messages, Google Chat, Google Spaces, Google+, Google Messenger, Google Duo style of product execution. So half-hearted that you probably didn't notice that Google Messenger doesn't exist. They've never given a serious monetisation strategy a shot. It could be far more valuable than the ad driven market they're serving right now.
- globular-toast 3y ago
  I actually think at this point Google is scared to try any business that isn't ads. It's the only thing that's ever worked for them.
- 3y ago
mtsr 3y ago
FreeTube (standalone client) and LibRedirect (browser extension) nicely replace YouTube.com completely for a much cleaner experience and no shorts.
drivingmenuts 3y ago
I don't block the ads any more, but I also don't watch the ads. I watch that little block showing how long the ads have to run, waiting for the Skip link.
- whywhywhywhy 3y ago
  Your brain still ingests it even if you're pretending not to watch it
bragr 3y ago
I found out this Christmas that it's impossible to give Premium as a gift, which stings hard with this ongoing crackdown. There's no gift card mechanism so you'd have to log into their account and buy it for them.
nottorp 3y ago
Last time i used YouTube without an ad blocker I had 1 minute of ads every 5 minutes. I'm not sure that's even legal where I am. At least for regular TV. Unfortunately for them, I don't watch talking heads or other kinds of "influencers". My main use was background music. I am now a happy subscriber to ... Spotify :)
whywhywhywhy 3y ago
This just seems a completely pointless exercise, you could make me wait 5 minutes and I'd either just wait or watch my videos elsewhere. I can't stand the ad format and find the ads on YouTube annoying and stressful. But you know we can't be that huge of a % of your viewership so maybe just deal with the fact we're unprofitable and focus your engineering efforts on making your ad viewers more profitable and less time on doing things that might just push me away. You think you're irreplaceable but TikTok will launch long form in the next 2-3 years and in 5 years from that you'll be Facebook. So like maybe just be happy you have my eyeballs at all.
burntalmonds 3y ago
For me YouTube is unusable without Premium. But they keep raising the price, and at some point I'll balk.
mrd999 3y ago
I haven't switched from Android to iPhone solely due to lack of ublock origin in Firefox.
peter422 3y ago
I find it very funny that everybody bemoans the ad supported ecosystem of the internet, then Google gives an ad free alternative with a monthly cost, and everybody complains that the cost is too high. I pay for YouTube premium, I see no ads and the content creators are supported. I’m glad Google is going to war with ad blockers in this context where there is a paid alternative.
- jfghi 3y ago
  Will you maintain the perspective in the midst of eternal incremental price increases and eventual ad placement?
  - endisneigh 3y ago
    What is the alternative?
  - HDThoreaun 3y ago
    I dont understand this perspective. "Will you still like the product if all its functionality is removed?" Obviously not, but so what? When that day comes you can easily get rid of it.
    - turkeypedal 3y ago
      The point is that paying YouTube now is encouraging them to do that in the future. The whole thing is enshitification. YouTube is now making their product worse in order to push people to pay them more for it. Those who go along with this are likely to keep on paying as they gradually increase prices while reducing functionality. Those who choose refuse to pay more to avoid having hour long unskippable ads and other nonsense are telling YouTube that this whole process will not be better for them in the long run. That they are fighting an unwinnable battle. I get it when people were willing to pay before. Maybe they actually care about having YouTube Music, and they liked it as a convenient way to pay creators, and also chip in a bit for YouTube. What I don't get are those who choose to pay now that YouTube has started deliberately making their service worse by adding a ton more ads and now trying to keep you from blocking them. And I very much do not understand anyone who is okay with any company going after adblock users, as you're just encouraging the Internet to get worse--either showing more ads or having to pay to access.
endisneigh 3y ago
I’d be interested to hear a creator’s (more than 100K subs) perspective. Folks keep whining about ads but don’t pay, there’s always an excuse it seems. You literally don’t have to watch ads, if you don’t watch the videos to begin with. YouTube premium is bad because it supports Google. It’s bad because it includes other things. Fundamentally anll YouTube music is, is a visual wrapper around YouTube. All of the “music” is literally just YouTube videos. Ads put in by the creator themselves are bad too because reasons. It’s very simple. Do not watch. Done. Folks on here got the message with Facebook, but not yet with YouTube.

118 points by Hary06 3y ago

This is mostly due to an artificial timeout written within YouTube’s code to act as a laggy internet connection. While this action taken by YouTube isn’t brand-new, more users are starting to see the tactic in use. Crazy. The ad blocker wars are reaching new levels. If this implementation is client-side the fix should be trivial. Thwarting ad blockers and optimizing ad delivery is the main focus at google and other ad-supported tech businesses such as Meta, not Ai or anything else even if Ai is getting all the media attention now. Also, if I were an advertiser, I would not want my ads shown by people using ad blockers, no? These are viewers who are least inclined to buy anything. Google should take this as feedback that the ads are bad.

giraffe_lady 3y ago
> These are viewers who are least inclined to buy anything. How do you figure? No one likes ads and everyone thinks they are personally immune to them. But they are still effective, somehow. I seriously doubt whether someone has an ad blocker installed is indicative of some characteristic about them that makes them not worth advertising to. In fact we can gauge from advertiser actions that probably the most relevant fact about them is simply the ad blocker, which is why they want to get rid of the blockers and advertise to them. They know ads work on us, even when we believe otherwise.
- nottorp 3y ago
  You think so? What if the ad industry is stuck in a bubble and has no idea what works and what doesn't? All they need to do is keep their customers (not us) convinced that ads do something for them, and push to maintain the status quo (anti ad blocker solutions). There was this article on HN in the past few days [1] about a company that gave up on the use of cookies on their site. Go look how full of jargon and dubious inferences it is. Even if they're trying to do a good thing, they still seem isolated in their own marketer's bubble. There was also an article about some new Google anti email spam protections (lol, Google protecting us from marketing). I'm not going to try and link to that one. Edit: surprising but i found it [2]. If you look at the comments here on HN you'll see some people either honestly believing or pretending to believe that their email newsletters are something that people want. Again, bubble. [1] https://blog.sentry.io/we-removed-advertising-cookies-heres-what-happened/ https://blog.sentry.io/we-removed-advertising-cookies-heres-... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38935048 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38935048
  - giraffe_lady 3y ago
    Honestly I do waffle between these two views of it. That they do work and so we should avoid them or they don't work and the entire internet is a bubble built on top of a fake idea and so we should avoid them. I don't see how both can be true and I find both equally compelling, with comparable explanatory power of different things I see. But for the specific purpose of deciphering the actions and motivations of ad companies I think assuming they work is a more useful view. Presumably ad companies are acting as if ads work, and are assuming they work equally well on people running ad blockers, if they can get them past the ad blockers. I find them corrosive to my soul and culture either way, and ad companies are acting towards me as if they work. So in this context I think it makes sense to also act as if they do.
rosmax_1337 3y ago
Unfortunately ads work even if the person is very disinclined to the purchase when viewed. When faced with a decision in store many months later, even years, whichever brand you recognize more will be more likely to be purchased. Ads are a very effective form of brainwashing. One might recall the adage that "there is no such thing as bad PR".
- the_af 3y ago
  I know this is often repeated and believed, and to be honest I sort of believe it can work, but my belief is unsupported. Are there serious and conclusive studies showing that ads affect purchasing decisions "subliminally" like this? Even when you are not interested in the ad, or even irritated by the fact you're not allowed to skip or hide it?
  - imran-iq 3y ago
    If you want a N=1 "study" https://blog.imraniqbal.org/advertising-works/ https://blog.imraniqbal.org/advertising-works/
- jorvi 3y ago
  I have automatically started to discount companies that need to ram ads in my face. If you are that desperate for me to buy your product instead of your competitors’, and I don’t see them aggressively advertising, I assume it is because their product is superior and you need to make up the difference with ad dollars. Even if that wasn’t true, a small part of me won’t want to buy your product out of sheer spite.
- dexterdog 3y ago
  Then explain why I refuse to go to Burger King in reaction to their commercials this football season with that god-awful song.
  - qbrass 3y ago
    A bunch of people who didn't watch their commercials and don't have that feeling about Burger King just got a reminder that they still exist. In spite of your hatred for them, you just provided better advertising than they did for free.
lukewrites 3y ago
> Also, if I were an advertiser, I would not want my ads shown by people using ad blockers, no? This is a good point that marketers will never accept because their livelihood depends on the proposition that what they push down the trough will seem so delicious that the hogs will slurp it up. I’m an ad blocking zealot and feel a big FU towards ads that slip through. Much less likely to trust the brands or their products, especially the scummy junk that pops up on yt. (“I bet you think doing cardio is the best way to lose weight…”)

Deukhoofd 3y ago

This is a bug in AdBlock (Plus). uBlock Origin is not affected. https://gitlab.com/adblockinc/ext/adblockplus/adblockplusui/-/issues/1576#note_1727415603 https://gitlab.com/adblockinc/ext/adblockplus/adblockplusui/...

aloisdg 3y ago
Time to invite again people to replace any adblock with uBlock Origin
- _flux 3y ago
  Or not. Google probably targets the most popular adblocking solutions first.
  - KTibow 3y ago
    uBO has the most people working on providing fixes though, and they get them out pretty fast. I've never ran into a situation where I couldn't get YouTube working again by clearing my filter cache so far.
    - ikt 3y ago
      The interesting thing is that they removed that option in the latest version
  - gorhill 3y ago
    It's perfectly fine and valid to question the pile of JS code executing in Youtube webpages, but in this specific instance the performance issues are caused by ABP/AdBlock. The issue has been acknowledged by the developers[1]. It affects only the latest version of both blockers, not previous versions, so it makes no sense to keep speculating Google is at the root of that specific issue. Out of curiosity I investigated these performance issues myself using profiling sessions[2] and the faulty code is definitely in the latest versions of these extensions. * * * [1] https://gitlab.com/adblockinc/ext/adblockplus/adblockplusui/-/issues/1576#note_1725604837 https://gitlab.com/adblockinc/ext/adblockplus/adblockplusui/... [2] https://twitter.com/gorhill/status/1746543688975581604 https://twitter.com/gorhill/status/1746543688975581604

angelbroz 3y ago

Even if you have YouTube Premium subscription the web becomes slowly asf if you have an Ad Blocker extension enabled.

uhmwhat_ 3y ago
This couldn't be more false.
- eks391 3y ago
  Angelbroz is not an outlier, nor out lying. Several premium payers who use adblock for other sites and dont disable for YT have the same issue
  - sccxy 3y ago
    Yeah, because slowdown was caused by bug in adblock software...

kryptiskt 3y ago

For me it has been lagging and terrible the last few days without any adblocker in Firefox and has worked perfectly with uBlock Origin in Opera. So I guess they are missing the target, whatever they are trying to do.

greesil 3y ago

"Focus on the user and all else will follow." https://about.google/philosophy/ https://about.google/philosophy/ To be fair they didn't state this in the positive or negative sense.

izacus 3y ago
People who refuse to pay for a service and just drain expensive resources, aren't really "users" in terms of being worth focusing on.
- whythre 3y ago
  You mean ‘people who refuse to participate in time destroying corpo-brainwashing.’
  - izacus 3y ago
    Whatever makes you sleep at night. YouTube Premium gives you the service without the ads. You just need to pay for it as it should be. Or pay for Nebula. Or any others.
- piva00 3y ago
  What about people that were willing to pay Premium Lite and got fucked by YouTube when they summarily ended that subscription tier to push people into the more expensive Premium with unnecessary features? Are those paying users getting shafted or do those end up in "not being worth focusing on"?
  - izacus 3y ago
    The service costs X. You do not have a right to use someones service without paying that X. Support Nebula. Support PeerTube. Pay them.
    - piva00 3y ago
      I pay Nebula. I paid YouTube Premium Lite to get rid of ads, I will not pay 2x for the same feature since I do not need offline, Music, nor background play, if they decided to cut my use case from their offering by forcing me to pay extra rent then I can decided to not pay them and use an adblocker. I do not need to bend over for a digital feudal lord.

arthur_sav 3y ago

It's a feature, not a bug. I've been meaning to cut my youtube consumption anyway.

neom 3y ago

They should disable this for people who use Premium. Although I'm happy to now know why my YouTube fell to bits starting on Friday... I uh.. pay for YouTube Premium so they shouldn't care.

jonwachob91 3y ago
The article suggests YT Premium users are unaffected by the slowdowns. If you are getting slowdowns, you should message the article author so the article can be updated and YT can be shamed. I have refused to pay for premium b/c they frequently wrap up paying members in their silly antics, and don't have the foresight to exclude paying users from their ad-block efforts.
- neom 3y ago
  According to this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39002083 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39002083 It might be an AdBlock error. As soon as I disabled AdBlock, YouTube returned to normal. (Brave, AdBlock, Youtube Premium)
  - Eisenstein 3y ago
    Why use AdBlock with Brave? That functionality is built in.
    - neom 3y ago
      It could be redundant. My logic is AdBlock does this full-time time so it should be more up-to-date and generally better vs the Brave blocking stuff. I may very well, be wrong, but that's been the logic. :)
TechSquidTV 3y ago
You aren't loading any ads if you have premium, you can't be affected

afandian 3y ago

I use Firefox on iOS (which as we all know is mostly not Firefox). I don't have a google account. Nothing else exotic. YouTube serves me an ad every 3 minutes or so (I've not timed it). If I ever seek in a video, again, an ad. Even if it didn't play any video yet. I can't figure out why they think is is a good idea. I've seen the same iPhone ad so many times.

ImHereToVote 3y ago
It's to make you a paying user. Ad dollars aren't worth what they used to be.
- afandian 3y ago
  From the beatings-will-continue-until-morale-improves school of marketing. No thanks. (And I wonder if advertisers know how their ads are being played? That ad is worth a lot less to Apple on the 5th play, and negative on the 10th).
  - rapnie 3y ago
    When I owned an Apple table I saw this beer ad about 20 times in a row, while watching a conference video. It had an annoying song. And I made a solemn oath to myself I will never buy a beer with that brand again in my life.
    - lacrimacida 3y ago
      I wish your response was more generalized and people would punish brands for intrusive/abusive or advertising in bad taste. In Europe and perhaps other parts of the world advertising is a bit more bearable as compared to what’s the norm in the US.
    - dylan604 3y ago
      The sad thing here is I doubt the beer company is intending this to occur. They just offer Google $X spending, and they are ensuring they get every one of those $s. A similar thing happens in a lot of the streaming platforms. The same ads are shown relentlessly. Advertisers aren't stupid, and they are aware of ad fatigue. I can't imagine they are possibly happy about the situation. OR...I have no clue what I'm talking about and they are quite tickled about the situation and this is why it continues

TechSquidTV 3y ago

I hope YouTube finds a way to just fully stop working for all ad blockers. Creators deserve to be paid, YouTube deserves to exist. 55% of revenue goes to creators. Support content creators and get YouTube Premium.

wredue 3y ago
30 unstoppable seconds of ads every 1 minute of video, as well as ads that are inappropriate, scams or outright illegal. People do deserve to get paid for their work. But the only way to safely browse is to block this shit. If Google did a halfway decent job of managing their ad network to keep the scum off, I’d consider turning off ad blocking.
joelhaasnoot 3y ago
Not when Google is just doing a money grab and is doing a terrible job at filtering ads. They have some ads that are 1.5 hours long. That shouldn't be possible. I also recently reported an ad that was clearly AI generated content of Elon Musk doing a crypto scam. Report was ignored.
- varjag 3y ago
  To be fair Elon Musk crypto scams are ignored even on Elon Musk's own platform.
- 55555 3y ago
  Regardless of whether an ad is 5 seconds or 8 hours, you can skip it after the first 5 seconds.
  - joelhaasnoot 3y ago
    On Android TV that's not always true - you sometimes get a batch of unskippable ads for 15 seconds or so
teeray 3y ago
I do, but the creators still insist on adding sponsorships and putting other content on private platforms for yet an additional fee. I respect and support the work that goes into it, but my support has limits.

agumonkey 3y ago

I started using Dailymotion again. And was already leveraging invidious/piped proxies for a while.

Lendal 3y ago

I wonder how much of my $14/mo Premium subscription is paying for YouTube Music, which I have never used.

amf12 3y ago
Probably not much because they still have to license the same Music for YouTube. I know some people hate bundled Music. But I doubt unbundling it will reduce the prices.
BoxOfRain 3y ago
This is what puts me off paying the Danegeld for YouTube more than anything else, I already pay a fair amount of money for Tidal which I'm perfectly happy with. It's bad enough Apple insist on incessantly hawking Apple Music at me with a popup every time I open the music app on iOS for my offline music collection, I don't want a third music service trying to crowbar its way to my life whether I want it or not. What Youtube does is pretty much the infamous U2 album but with an entire streaming service, forced bundling like that is never not obnoxious in my opinion.
endisneigh 3y ago
YouTube music is simply a different front end for YouTube. Removing it would not make it any cheaper.

ChrisArchitect 3y ago

[dupe] More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38987489 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38987489

dissident_coder 3y ago

I started using Baking Soda on iOS/Safari and it's a game changer and it doesn't seem like YT can do anything about it.

throwaway4aday 3y ago

Going to drop this here for others who haven't heard of it https://invidious.io/ https://invidious.io/ Now, how do we fix this? YouTube's ad model sucks. Their algorithm sucks. Their front page sucks. They've captured a bunch of creators though so often YouTube is the only place you can find someone. I want those creators to benefit from me viewing their videos. I want the fact that I view a video and like it to help other people find that video in their recommendations. I want an algorithm that shows me things that are interesting and relevant not one that promotes the spammiest and most ad heavy videos that barely have anything to do with my watch history. Having an alternative front end is nice but I don't want to rob YouTube of the money they spend on hosting the videos. So, how do we do this? Peer to peer fails when there is little interest in something or when most people leech and it sucks for archiving old content. Hosting it all in one place is super expensive and hard for a small group to manage without turning into YouTube. Maybe we could find a way for the creators to host their own content and get paid when people view it while being part of a large federated network for easy discoverability? Please list any projects you know of, I'm sure there are a lot of people here who would be willing to contribute or donate.

Eisenstein 3y ago
Publicly funded archive?
myself248 3y ago
Isn't that basically what Nebula is trying to do? It's a company not a project, but it pays creators and some of my favorite creators do publish their stuff there first. I've subscribed because I think it's important that they succeed.
- izacus 3y ago
  Yes, Nebula is exactly that. But HNers here prefer to continue supporting Google instead of the service that explicitly wants to cater to their supposed wishes.
  - birracerveza 3y ago

tentacleuno 3y ago

I wonder if this is due to YouTube's www-tampering.js script, which scans the JavaScript environment for patched DOM methods and "suspicious" style / script URIs, and then collects that information into separate arrays. It isn't entirely clear where that data's going yet, but they are definitely scanning the DOM to check for anything suspicious (read: ad-blocking) added by the user. It's worth running "ytbin.polymer.shared.lib.tampering.info()" in a YouTube tab and checking the results if you get a minute. Never seen this level of persistence from them before.

areoform 3y ago

What if I told you that for a decade there has been a separate service where the largest content creators on YT upload their videos without sponsorships + add extras for a monthly subscription? And this site has had issues building + shipping features at scale? It is, in general, a very poor substitute for the player + server experience YT offers. Yet 10+ years later, no one at YT has sat up, taken notice and said, "Hey, maybe people don't want to pay for YT directly, but what if they want to support their favorite creators?" "What if we really doubled down on the creator experience? What if we made it possible for them to post uncensored, subscriber only videos? What if we made it possible for their most loyal fans to ALWAYS see their video without clicking a bell?" "What if we made it easy for them to sell merch? What if YT channels were actual channels and way more focused on the creator?" "What if we made a better editing suite? And what if we AGGRESSIVELY paid the largest creators on this other platform to switch to us exclusively for X years?" And then rolled these features out across the world at insane Google scale. Something this languishing feature-as-a-company can't compete with. I'm willing to bet that would make far more money than YT driving off creators and users. Creators are the future of content. With some ads mixed in. Viewers spend billions supporting their creators. Apparently that languishing competitor has a GMV of $2B. It's fair to say that with Google's scale + resources to invest initially, they could easily 10x that. There's one creator on their platform that has launched a multi-billion dollar brand off of it. An individual creator. And YT gets (almost) none of that sweet sweet upside. It seems that Google doesn't want to make more money by building a better mousetrap anymore. That kind of thinking clearly isn't welcome at Google/Alphabet/Soup. edit — "Channel Memberships" and "Subscriptions" are Google's half-hearted version of this, but it's not a serious attempt. It's the usual Google Allo, Google Messages, Google Chat, Google Spaces, Google+, Google Messenger, Google Duo style of product execution. So half-hearted that you probably didn't notice that Google Messenger doesn't exist. They've never given a serious monetisation strategy a shot. It could be far more valuable than the ad driven market they're serving right now.

globular-toast 3y ago
I actually think at this point Google is scared to try any business that isn't ads. It's the only thing that's ever worked for them.
3y ago

mtsr 3y ago

FreeTube (standalone client) and LibRedirect (browser extension) nicely replace YouTube.com completely for a much cleaner experience and no shorts.

drivingmenuts 3y ago

I don't block the ads any more, but I also don't watch the ads. I watch that little block showing how long the ads have to run, waiting for the Skip link.

whywhywhywhy 3y ago
Your brain still ingests it even if you're pretending not to watch it

bragr 3y ago

I found out this Christmas that it's impossible to give Premium as a gift, which stings hard with this ongoing crackdown. There's no gift card mechanism so you'd have to log into their account and buy it for them.

nottorp 3y ago

Last time i used YouTube without an ad blocker I had 1 minute of ads every 5 minutes. I'm not sure that's even legal where I am. At least for regular TV. Unfortunately for them, I don't watch talking heads or other kinds of "influencers". My main use was background music. I am now a happy subscriber to ... Spotify :)

whywhywhywhy 3y ago

This just seems a completely pointless exercise, you could make me wait 5 minutes and I'd either just wait or watch my videos elsewhere. I can't stand the ad format and find the ads on YouTube annoying and stressful. But you know we can't be that huge of a % of your viewership so maybe just deal with the fact we're unprofitable and focus your engineering efforts on making your ad viewers more profitable and less time on doing things that might just push me away. You think you're irreplaceable but TikTok will launch long form in the next 2-3 years and in 5 years from that you'll be Facebook. So like maybe just be happy you have my eyeballs at all.

burntalmonds 3y ago

For me YouTube is unusable without Premium. But they keep raising the price, and at some point I'll balk.

mrd999 3y ago

I haven't switched from Android to iPhone solely due to lack of ublock origin in Firefox.

peter422 3y ago

I find it very funny that everybody bemoans the ad supported ecosystem of the internet, then Google gives an ad free alternative with a monthly cost, and everybody complains that the cost is too high. I pay for YouTube premium, I see no ads and the content creators are supported. I’m glad Google is going to war with ad blockers in this context where there is a paid alternative.

jfghi 3y ago
Will you maintain the perspective in the midst of eternal incremental price increases and eventual ad placement?
- endisneigh 3y ago
  What is the alternative?
- HDThoreaun 3y ago
  I dont understand this perspective. "Will you still like the product if all its functionality is removed?" Obviously not, but so what? When that day comes you can easily get rid of it.
  - turkeypedal 3y ago
    The point is that paying YouTube now is encouraging them to do that in the future. The whole thing is enshitification. YouTube is now making their product worse in order to push people to pay them more for it. Those who go along with this are likely to keep on paying as they gradually increase prices while reducing functionality. Those who choose refuse to pay more to avoid having hour long unskippable ads and other nonsense are telling YouTube that this whole process will not be better for them in the long run. That they are fighting an unwinnable battle. I get it when people were willing to pay before. Maybe they actually care about having YouTube Music, and they liked it as a convenient way to pay creators, and also chip in a bit for YouTube. What I don't get are those who choose to pay now that YouTube has started deliberately making their service worse by adding a ton more ads and now trying to keep you from blocking them. And I very much do not understand anyone who is okay with any company going after adblock users, as you're just encouraging the Internet to get worse--either showing more ads or having to pay to access.

endisneigh 3y ago

I’d be interested to hear a creator’s (more than 100K subs) perspective. Folks keep whining about ads but don’t pay, there’s always an excuse it seems. You literally don’t have to watch ads, if you don’t watch the videos to begin with. YouTube premium is bad because it supports Google. It’s bad because it includes other things. Fundamentally anll YouTube music is, is a visual wrapper around YouTube. All of the “music” is literally just YouTube videos. Ads put in by the creator themselves are bad too because reasons. It’s very simple. Do not watch. Done. Folks on here got the message with Facebook, but not yet with YouTube.