YouTube might slow down your videos if you block ads

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Thanks uBO team I don't even know yt is trying anything

Using uBO, but have noticed a slightly longer delay of a few seconds between hitting play and the video starting, but I can deal with that over being forced to watch 30s of ads.

Honestly it just felt like youtube's servers were shittimg themselves again, so I baely even register it as a real interruption.

There have been periods where one of my accounts was getting an ad-length black screen with buffering throbber (I hate that name) and, the most recent time, it was accompanied by a pop-up asking me if I'd like to find out why that was happening. Yeah. I know why that's happening, thanks.

Then that stopped happening again. Either they gave up or UBo have worked around it somehow. Never ending arms race.

This happens to me too, especially when it’s a computer that I haven’t used in a while, which makes me think that yeah it’s the arms race. It stops once my browser is open long enough for uBO to update

It’s the people that make blocking lists that we should thank. I don’t think uBO makes anything themselves

Google will never get a cent out of me, willingly.

If it gets annoying enough, and FreeTube stops working, I'll find something better to do with my time.

Maybe people will start torrenting youtube rips if they somehow manage to kill ad blockers.

I have already started finding peertube replacement channels.

Please share!

I’m happy I am finding some people on Nebula but being a payed service, it’s doomed to eventually show ads.

I now watch Climate Town and City Nerds on Nebula.
I wish Dr Becky would move. I love her videos.

https://video.katehildenbrand.com/w/3PD7HDunumrCR1zJKHUVfo

Kate Hildebrand is a marine ecologist that has a bunch of videos on her peertube instance.

https://peertube.wtf/w/adtBd3vNKKJ7Y5dvWU7ivq

Parker's microbes combine music and microscopy in OC creations.

If they know I’m blocking their ads, why wouldn’t they just block the video altogether? That’s what they currently do.

If it’s already blocked, slowing it down to “blocked… but slower” seems rather pointless?

It's a tarpit. If they simply displayed a blocked "no vids for u" message, you'd get outraged, go complain online, look for workarounds, and eventually find a bypass. If everything still works but poorly, you get annoyed, turn off your adblocker to troubleshoot, possibly blame the adblocker for being "buggy" and keep it off. Their help page solution implies they are hoping for just that. There is no "smoking gun" blocked message to go complain online about, even though it is indeed their servers that are degrading your connection on purpose in secret. Or maybe you give up and leave their ecosystem entirely, which is no big loss for them.

The proper solution is to develop an adblock that they cannot detect is blocking ads. This may require actually downloading the ad video in background, and then lying that the video has played.

I’d be more likely to just assume delivery quality was going downhill and look for another streaming video hoster/provider. Why would someone link slow speeds to a plugin that filters out the stuff you don’t want?

Stripping down to a skeleton of a software is standard troubleshooting procedure. Ever had a plugin crash and consume 100% cpu? I had. Only way to sense is that fans are spinning up and page is laggy, and then look in about:performance and there it is. No one would have ever suspected that the website you're visiting is deliberately introducing bugs in secret if it thinks you're adblocking.

Because the "Why is the video being slow?" pop-up now sends you to the page blaming adblockers instead of the ISP shaming thing it used to do.

I actually wouldn’t mind that. An ad blocking method that just plays ads in the background with the sound muted and not visible on screen.

If google only lets me stream the content I want when I stream content I don’t want, that’s fine, I just don’t want to watch it as it’s my eye balls, not theirs so it’s my choice at the end of the day

I've been wondering about that, also perhaps a browser where your mouse position has seperate client and software side states? I know a lot of data can be gleaned from mouse movements so if the browser only updated its internal cursor position when you actually clicked that would potentially cut out that source of information?

In the ultimate, you'd need to do something like run a headless browser in a virtual machine, have it play out and record the entire video, then use something like AI to splice out the ad segments and distracting elements (a souped-up sponsorblock will work for a while, but eventually ads will be injected into the raw video stream at random intervals), and present the pristine finished content to you. Basically we are going to re-invent TiVo all over again xD.

In worst case, you can't start watching until the pre-roll ad timers expire. This is how adblocking works on Twitch streams currently - you can only see a purple screen even if you block the ads.

And yes, the headless browser will need to use AI for human-like mouse movement and to solve captchas - basically whatever state-of-the-art technologies spammers and scrapers are already currently using.

Google is anticipating this future and is trying to implement and force hardware-based DRM for web video before then.

AI might be overkill? I recall back in the day people working out which images where manipulated by the way the underlying flow of colour and pixel layout didn't line up, each image ends up with a kind of grain of different size and direction. You could spot ads by detecting which image data doesn't line up with the majority and cutting it out that way.

I know Lemmy hates AI, but this actually would be a perfect use for it. The problem is the idea of what an ad is. Yes, you could try to use secondary characteristics like image color or sound normalized volume (WhyTF do youtube ads still sound 3x louder than content? are we living in cable era again?), but they would be error-prone for any content more visually intense than a podcast. They would also not capture sponsorblock content like "I love showing you all these foreign countries but what I love even more is having my internet connection secure" that match the video flow. A crowdsourced lookup table of all known ad clip fingerprints would go a long way, until ad videos themselves start being AI-generated on the fly for that sweet personalization revenue.

No, what I really want is to distill the idea of what I want to see into an AI and have it filter out what I don't want to see for me. I know an ad when I see one, so AI can too. Pre-roll/mid-roll ads? Gone. Sponsorblock content? Gone. Like and subscribe? Skipped as if it didn't exist. Virtual billboards on the sidelines of sporting events? Overlayed with kittens. Idiocracy banners squeezing the video from either side? Cropped and rescaled. Watermarks? Excised and content-aware-filled.

The last frontier is when the content itself is secretly an ad, imprinting upon you some idea or point of view. You'll have to watch out for that one on your own.

They are probably trying to find that spot where it's just slightly more annoying to block ads than leave them unblocked.

Currently blocking ads consists of keeping uBlock Origin up to date. Not blocking ads generally means going to a different platform after a single ad roll.

I have no issues with pre-roll ads; it’s the interstitial ones that drive me away.

I have an issue with pre-roll ads. Some of them are extremely long and can't be skipped

Remember 10 years ago the YouTube app only showed ads on every 3rd video and often only a single 5 second ad, and everything longer could be skipped.

Like a frog in a pot I could tolerate that amount, a few years later they started the ad ramp-up and what finally drove me to install vanced were 3 unskippable ads you had to endure just to watch something.

Absolutely the same for me. The only reason I block their ads is because of how frequently they interrupt the content. It’s just unacceptably greedy. Pre-roll ads is fine, I get they have bills to pay too.

i added 2-3 other adblockers. and i use UBLOCK origin to bypass facebooks login popup to look at posts. because making a fake acct for fb is extremely difficult, one of the few places on the internet that i can download new maps of old rpg game(linked to thier drive).

i added 2-3 other adblockers

Never run multiple adblockers at the same time. You gain nothing except broken websites, performance issues, and an increased chance of triggering anti-adblocks.

If they give you what you want, but harass you enough, you may just stop using an ad blocker to watch the video and might just forget to turn it back once you are done.

If you had to unlock your bathroom door to enter or exit, you will either put forth effort to correct the problem or you will take the lazy route and just prop the door open.

If you went somewhere else their competition is winning (directly as another video site and indirectly as anything else you would do with your time).

So you don't find something else to do.

i have been blocking them fro 10+years with none other than UBO. only recently i added more adblockers, to block other stuff the ubo wouldnt.

That's probably a bad idea, as it makes it more likely YouTube will detect the ad-blocking. Better to add your own custom rules to UBO instead.

Oh no! You are going to make your platform work like ass? And you expect us to do mental gymnastics in such a way that instead of blaming you (you know the one that has control over the platform) we blame uBlock? The same uBlock that has made using your platform bearable for many years, to the point that I will sit in silence with the screen off instead of watch with ads?

I think even if you make us wait a min before playing the video most would take that over an ad.

I would prefer an ad 🤷 if it doesn’t last a stupid amount of time

That's what they're banking on, but we know that eventually they will f* it up and lose everyone.

Unless we have some serious alternatives, that won't happen anytime soon

Video hosting is really expensive. Every service running for free will eventually enshitify and turn out similar, because there's no such thing as free massive servers

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People have been saying this for years now.

Peertube has already delivered the sustainable model: creators host their own videos and viewers assist distribution.

Who pays for the servers? Because if even big platforms like Signal sometimes struggle to pay the bills, in part because they spend a lot on their servers, then it’ll be dozens of times worse with video hosting

Content creators. It's hard to host everyone's videos, and it benefits monopolists to imply that doing so is necessary, as it prevents new entrants. It's not nearly as hard to host your own server (or pay for it to be hosted). It becomes harder when you suddenly become popular, a situation which Peertube explicitly compensates for by sharing the distribution effort between viewers, which scales with popularity.

Signal makes it's own bed like YouTube by being a single centralised server for everyone. Nobody ever asks "who pays for the servers" when it comes to Matrix or XMPP

Don't care, still better than the ads.

I'll sit for 2 minutes in front of a black screen and it'll still be better than 45 seconds of ads.

Did exactly that early days of hulu.

Same. That ole "You seem to be using a proxy service" text served as a nice break 🙌

They've been doing this for close to 20 years. Ever since shortly after google bought them.

You know the people who created youtube are all part of the same OG corp/group that gave rise to the monsters who have created the hell we currently live in.

The PayPal mafia.

Thiel, musk, howry, Chen(yt), wong(reddit),Hoffman(LinkedIn)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PayPal_Mafia

If it takes too long to load I just use yt-dlp to download the video or whole playlist and watch it later. Do I care that it's putting additional strain on YouTube's servers? Indeed, I'm devastated and overtaken with guilt 😂 These are tears of regret, I swear 😂

yt-dlp is fucking awesome and it will be a sad day if it ever gets taken down or blocked.

And as an added bonus yt-dlp defaults to maximum quality! Even more strain on YouTube servers!

Stop feeding me dog shit AI videos about a condom delivery boy who has to deliver some to a hotel only to find his girlfriend cheating on him and maybe I’ll stop blocking ads you fuck sticks

Condom delivery service you say? 🤔

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I already do this. There are several apps for it but I really like Pinchflat because it has metadata settings for Jellyfin.

All I have to do is add a video to a playlist and it gets automatically downloaded. I use it for archival but there's nothing stopping you from making it the only way you consume YouTube content.

Yeah, I download whatever I want to watch and fire up vlc. 0 ads, 0 buffering.

Technically that's 100% buffering.

Technically VLC buffers 1.5 seconds by default which actually broke streaming over SSHFS (phone's filesystem mounted via KDE Connect) for me, had to increase buffer to 10 secs

I had a time, when i had frequent internet disconnections, and connection speed was slow in general, so while i had the internet connection, i just downloaded a bunch of videos, to then watch offline. Suprisingly, downloading video even with slow internet is faster than streaming it, despite when streaming it, videos was always buffering.
Now i have stable internet and i can just stream videos without the problem, even by using third party app with no ads and without account.

Wait, you think all YouTube content is available in torrents?

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You specifically said BitTorrent. Do you know how that works?

Not only that but the bit-rate as of late seems horrendous, 1080 looks more like 720 or lower with artifacts all over the place.

Yes, some video have a 1080p Premium high nitrate quality option that you need to pay for. It's just the standard quality, but the free 1080p is now shitty.

It's very sad there isn't anything that can even remotely compare to YouTube at this time. All the content is there, can't get it elsewhere. At least with Firefox, ublock and SponsorBlock, it's bearable.

Oh, did you not pay for YouTube Extra Premium Plus for the enhanced bit rate?

Bloody peasant...

And really you're just paying extra for the original 1080 bitrate. What a fucking scam, like I'd pay for that crap.

Artificial scarcity so you'll pay their dumb subscription fee

YouTube can die in a fire and take its fucking premium with it.

I mean if they get forced ads I would understand, but at the current state I would say there are too many.

If YouTube premium was less expensive it would be a great in-between

I personally use YT premium and music by faking my country. Getting it for like 3.50€/month feels like a great deal

YouTube might just go fuck itself!

I was paying for a whole family (premium). But I will not pay and send money to a fascist state. We've cancelled all our us based services.

That's a lot of effort for a website that mostly offers background noise.

They will never be happy with how much money they squeeze out of it. When people are watching videos that are 99% ads and the content is limited to two alternating pixels they will still find a way to further optimize their profit-taking. Nothing is ever good enough for the hyper-capitalist; product managers are a disease.

Eventually they'll start demanding you run their crypto-miners in order to watch a video.

Can't slow down videos I've downloaded to my Plex server. 👍🏽

No, but Plex can. I'd migrate to Jellyfin if you can as Plex is paywalling more of their services.

Never used Plex, but as a proprietary software aren't they just requesting money for functionality and usage of servers/traffic? Isn't it just normal business practice?

If you reach the frequent limitations like X codec is premium only, then yes. Else, no, you’re free to go

As it currently stands, my Plex setup costs me nothing because all I do it stream from my server to my Apple TV. So it works well enough for me.

"Might"... it's introducing an artificial delay when loading videos.

That explains the "are you experiencing interruptions" message I keep getting these days, though I kinda expected this.

If you press on the "learn more" button, it brings you to a page that ends with "try disabling extensions, such as adblockers".

Nebula's getting better and I spend more time there now than on YouTube. Happy that YouTube is working hard to encourage this transition.

I wish the videos were longer than 8 min on nebula.

Philosophy tube and jet lagged are both longer than 8 minutes, I think nilered is on there as well and is definitely longer than 8 minutes.

There's a ton of content that's much longer. There's no 8-minute limitation.

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So you prefer ad supported content?

It's not for everyone, but I think it's reasonable to pay for a platform that pays its content creators fairly. I spend a lot of things watching videos, and even though my income is limited, some kind of payment for the service makes sense.

I don't mind blocking ads on YouTube because they used unfair practices (endless resources from Google) to destroy the competition and become the only video provider. They put us in a corner and deserve to be put in one too.

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I mean that's fair : value is relative.

The main value of Nebula is no ads. I have YouTube on Firefox with uBlock Origin, so no ads either, but shitty performance due to YouTube fighting the AdBlocker. But more importantly I don't think the ability to watch YouTube with no ads is a given, so I want to have a viable alternative.

And secondly, I want to support the creators and a platform that sees me as a customer, not as a data-cow to be milked.

I'm sure Nebula will eventually have a free tier, but that can incur high costs and degrade the experience for paying users. They'll do it when they feel comfortable.

"I want endless curated content for FREE! NO ADS. NO PAY. ONLY CONTENT."

This guy, probably.

Probably also thinks the minimum wage is theft.

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so you'd pay if there was a free trial?

You clearly have absolutely no idea what infrastructure costs to run.

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Uh, it's called a "library".

Libraries are paid for with taxes.

you think libraries are free?

most public libraries and librarians spend a great deal of their time applying for grants, asking for donations, and parsing out the meager state and federal funds they receive. You can tell that a lot goes on in a public library besides what patrons see!

Did you know that staff salaries, books, other library materials, office supplies, and utilities are funded primarily by city and county taxes? (link)

Taking this chance to say support your local libraries! Even just being a patron will show that it's a necessary resource that needs to continue. My partner and I just were talking about the library today and how we both used to go at least once a week back in the day but we've fallen off in the past decade.

meh, its still not inconvenient enough to pay 10+ dollars a month. The state of adverts online is so egregious that I would probably sooner stop watching Youtube than pay or put up with ads.

YouTube was lagging to play vids the other day now i wonder if it was A B testing. screw off YouTube. 10 ads for a 20 minute video isn't normal and never will be. also the ads pause if you aren't watching them. wtf? as always I expect uBlock Origin to get around this

And this is different from the usual YouTube jank how, exactly? I can't block ads on the YouTube TV app and it's a buggy mess and I have no idea why one of the major tech companies in the world allowed that to happen.

You can block ad on tv by side loading smarttube

On LG WebOS, the Homebrew Store has an Ad-free YouTube app that works well too.

For about the last 3 years I've been hearing about YouTube cracking down on ad blockers. Not once has it affected my. Ublock still stops ads on the browser. Revanced stops em on the phone.

Their attacks are never a global rollout, you somehow dodged them all! Lucky.

FWIW, I've been using ublock origin, too, and it's mostly worked fine.

Until a few days ago, when Youtube started detecting it and showing down the site and telling me I can only watch 3 more videos before it cuts me off. That hasn't happened yet, but I definitely feel the slowdown. I'm hoping a ublock upgrade will fix it soon.

I've been getting them over the last week or so on both Chrome at work (Ublock lite) and Firefox at home (UBlock Origin). It's just a popup telling me adblockers aren't allowed and then a second smaller popup saying something to the effect of "loading issues?" with a link as the video delays playing for a few seconds.

They've already tried this.

We've already sidestepped it.

It's just going to keep on going like this till a viable alternative shows up.

How? I've been noticing buffering the last few days with 1080p60 videos and up even using the suggested app version in Revanced.

Having to wait with a black screen before the video starts is completely acceptable to me.
Having to watch Ads is not.

How desperate can you be to put yourself out of business?

That’s great! I spend too much time on yt, it’ll break me of my addiction and I’ll do something else besides passive consumption.

"Might"? They're already doing it.

YouTube in Firefox with Ublock Origin is getting throttled down to 1500kbps. I can't watch anything above 720p on my desktop anymore (with gigabit internet).

YouTube ReVanced on mobile and SmartTube Next on the TV still thankfully work without issues.

I was watching 4k yesterday. 🤞 Ublock has it sorted by the time they find me.

where do you get your YT Revanced from?

https://revanced.app/ is the only official source (along with the GitHub, of course.)

This does not happen on my Firefox. 4k no problemo with 3rd world country internet.

They do it to groups of people at a time to prevent mass anger and hysteria. Don't worry you'll eventually get throttled too.

Please support peertube sites - here's a list of instances to find something matching your interests: https://joinpeertube.org/instances

Relevant as well:

They've added two more days to the current donation request
https://support.joinpeertube.org/en/

I'm trying very, VERY hard to pound the correct knowledge into my brain to be able to switch my freelance business services away from Google to something like Proton Unlimited.

Leaving the Google ecosystem will literally make me lose work, but man, this shit has gotta stop

The problem is, nothing short of NA and EU governmental intervention will force Google to stop being such a nefarious, monopolistic, antitrust piece of shit. They're just so utterly ubiquitous for Western businesses. You cannot have a small business* and hope to be successful without partaking in either Google or Facebook/Meta's ad services. TikTok was becoming a huge threat to both those companies and look how viciously they were attacked.

The whole thing is beyond fucked, man. Kudos to you for trying to break free for your business, but I feel like you'll just be fucking yourself in the long run.

Edit in advance: I should clarify that there will of course be exceptions where a small business can be successful just fine without advertising, but for those that rely on being discovered on a larger scale versus purely local, it is essential.

Agree with this. For my business, and most customer facing ones honestly, Google is how people discover you. They are the modern day Yellow Pages. You don’t exist on Google and you may as well not exist. It sucks but they have that much of a stranglehold. This is why everyone is shitting themselves over Google using AI (it’s harder/unknown how to game).

Depending on which services you want to replace, Nextcloud might also be worth a look. There are quite a few hosted options available by Hetzner and others.

FYI: Depending on your politics, you may also want to avoid Proton.

Seems like its already happening.

Yeah, for at least 6 months.

Now you'll actually get a pop-up claiming "click here to find out why" in regards to the slowness.

We need to find ways to pressurize the content creators to upload to alternative platforms like Odysee, Rumble, Nebula, Peertube, Misskey etc...

Nebula is an invite basis

Wait what ?? Damn

Yeah, they curate their service with people they specifically invite. At least for a while, no idea if it’s still this way, every channel owner on Nebula was a part-owner to the service and had a vote in major platform decisions.

I think this rules, personally. It makes me feel great about subscribing knowing that everyone there has a vested interest in the platform as a whole succeeding and producing worthwhile material. On the flip side, there are really good channels on YouTube that I wish were on Nebula, and I think would be a good fit, but there’s not really a process for suggesting them to the platform for invitation.

Only thing I'm getring at the moment is waiting up to like 30s until the video starts, I'il take that over an ad that long any day.

they also slow down videos if I use Firefox.

YouTube can eat my ass.

Really? Guess it hasn’t hit me yet. I use Firefox and haven’t noticed any slowdowns.

I use an old outdated version of FF because the new v3 google bullshit isn't supported for my os version.

it was working fine one day and then a week after the official "cut off" it just slowed down and dropped quality.

it's ok though. I don't mind switching the quality and waiting for videos to buffer.

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I'm using windows xp, is that bad?

Youtube works a lot better for me after switching from Firefox to Librewolf.

Ads on youtube are getting even more stupid. Does anyone get those ads about "procastinations" and "ADHD"? It starts off with some songs like "Procastination isnt your fault....." and some dolls dancing? So annoying

Haven't seen ads in 10 years, people actually use the internet without ublock?

So annoying

Those two words describe about every ad on youtube.

Oh they already do as of this week. But I am sure it‘s only temporary like last time and even then it‘s better than being served an ad. Google won‘t win this feud.

we live in a neoliberal gorgon dystopia

Time to pin Odysee and Peertube in my browser even though I pay for YT Premium (only $2 per month here in BD).

Holy crap that’s cheap! Honestly, I’d pay that.

Yeah. Spotify also has similar pricing. I bought YT Premium as it includes both YouTube and YouTube Music.

I pay for YouTube premium so that I can leave the app and listen to videos. I still get ads even though I’m paying. I don’t think there’s a single surefire way to avoid them.

Get Revanced or Newpipe or something like that. You get the same benefits you're paying for, plus many that you aren't, and it's all for free. Not only that, but you're not giving you're money to Google.

Newpipe may be of interest to you.

Use Firefox + ublock origin.
Start the video, get out of the app/lock you phone, then swipe down and click on 'play' on the media controls.

This works on andriod, unsure about ios.

and i might just stop using youtube. does youtube think there aren't other options?

What options?
Where can I find stuff about fixing my motorcycle? Oceanliners? Deep Space documentaries? Fixing dieselinjectors in my car etc?

one option

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x5bbdku

hell of a lot less censorship, and better video quality there as well.

I tried using the Daily Motion Chromecast app the other day, until it served up an hour-long lecture as an advert with no “skip” button.

There exists a massive, global network of websites that are all easily searchable through various means.

I look up and view similar topics to you and never use YouTube for them.

Try searching the internet as a whole!

Reddit and Discord killed that, sorry, the Internet you're referring to is dying and almost dead.

Youtube acting like it has anything to offer aside slop and people who think they're philosopher kings because they play video games.

Stop using it completely then, and we’ll see if that’s the case

there's tons on there, just because you haven't found it doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

The amount of people in this thread willing to go to bat for a corporate-owned entity is fucking weird.

Youtube acting like it has anything to offer

This is weapons-grade copium, there is no other platform with even 1% of the content on YouTube.

Sounds like projection but hey, you do you, it's not as if we can learn from video games right

Ai slop and right wing propaganda, copaganda and military propaganda . The MSMs are considered rw propaganda

A previous version of uBlock Origin (1.64.1b4) seems to work perfectly on Firefox, just in case.

Reminder, Newgrounds is still here.

USE PORNHUB, Start uploading your content there.

it already happened, it takes few seconds to star the video, a popup comes upa nd says, "whats slowing your video down"

Dang, thanks. I read the post, thought it wasn't happening to me, and I just realized that the start of some videos is being throttled. The more ya know 🌈

The banned my ip. Been looking at alternatives

How they ban you? They aren't like reddit Nazis

They probably overused yt-dlp and are now required to fill a captcha + log in to an account.

Must have been temporary. Pipepipe displayed a message saying ~"youtube has blocked this ip", but it's working now.

Jokes on you, I already watch them at 0.5x speed

There will be a solution for the adblocking side, there always is

makertube.net, youtube is mask off at this point

I have revanced on my phone and adblock on my laptop so I don't see ads on youtube on them, but I can't get rid of the youtube ads on my smart TV so I'm forced to deal with the ads for now... and the contrast shows just how insufferable youtube has become. They're so fucking aggressive with the ads now. I'm starting to get a full minute of unskippable ads for a 2 minute meme video. It's completely ridiculous. Not only that but the number of skippable ads, short ads, or videos with just one ad are quickly decreasing. Youtube is destroying itself.

But I don't have adblockers installed and I still get told to turn my blocker off. I have no extensions and YouTube randomly stops my video to tell me I'm doing it wrong.

Edit: I guess this is the result when dealing with the kind of users who refuse to watch ads, but also can't fuck off like decent human beings. Just millions of people who will climb your fence, pick your locks, smash your window, because they deserve to watch content, but they won't pay or watch ads.

Umm.... Maybe. Let's take a look.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/267606/quarterly-revenue-of-google/:

In the first quarter of 2025, Google's revenue amounted to over 89.52 billion U.S. dollars, up from the 79.97 billion U.S. dollars registered in the same quarter a year prior.

... They'll survive.

I guess the content creators take the hit when users block ads or refuse to use premium.

Edit: your addendum is false. Technically YouTube freely delivers (answers http gets and posts), the user just refuses to watch all of their content or take part in the tracking. No broken windows or climbed fences.

It’s the same mentality of, we shouldn’t mute ads or go to the bathroom when they come on. That’s the advertising businesses problem, not mine. They haven’t made life better for most of us and I refuse to feel guilty of depriving them of money.

If I thought that way about YouTube, why not just be a sovcit about laws in general? I don't want to cherry pick philosophy. Let's go all in on technicalities and loopholes and definitions and wording. Life is a video game where X leads to Y because that's the rules. YouTube is merely answering requests, and I'm merely watching a curated selection of data. They have a TOS but I never agreed to it. For I'm not a user or customer, but a Netizen, and we have rights.

about laws in general

Terms of Service aren't laws. Breaking them is not illegal. It's like using the waterslide while sitting and not lying on your back. In fact, it's explicitly legal to use an adblocker and control what happens on your device in both the EU and the US. There are ongoing debates whether the surveillance required for blocking adblockers is legal in the EU.

Google does break laws all the time by the way, and is holding a monopoly. If people had to pay for Youtube, alternatives would spring up overnight, but since you can still watch Youtube free, they can't.

Also, I'd be the happiest person if Google finally figured out how to block people with adblockers completely, so that the majority of people would wean themselves off of one of the world's biggest disinfo peddlers.

I learned the term sovcit. Interesting concept, it isn't mine though.

You sound angry because there are multiple point of views for a thing and I don't agree with your pov. I think i get the gist of your reply. But without arguments this discussion is bound to go nowhere.

You say I'm wrong by using adblocking. You didn't tell why.
- depriving content creators of their revenue. Yes. One should think about supporting them through donation platforms like Patreon. They get money from direct marketing (holy...) - I'm fine with that (no JavaScript, no tracking, I can skip ahead since I got the message the first time).
- depriving YouTube of the money they need to run their CDN. Partially. Bandwidth usage, maintenance costs. Should I mention that youtube sells/ licenses servers to ISPs... So they get paid by me, indirectly.
- TOS I didn't sign anything, there is no contract between me and YouTube. Or is there one?

Edit: this is not about me wanting you to take my view or wanting to be convinced by you. You may disagree or even despise me. That's fine.
Everyone has to decide for himself what's right and wrong and life with it. And maybe I have to rethink my decisions if there are aspects I didn't take into account or if I lied to me to justify my decisions.

Comments from other communities

When will people get the idea to start building their fanbase outside of YouTube and uploading to another location? I mean, we have nebula and dropout but it needs to be a more mass movement.

Peertube!

100%

But that's up to creators being willing to do the extra work to lose money.

You should just pay them if you love the service so much.

I'd sooner sit through 5 minutes of buffering than watch your finest 10 second ad

Oh no!

[updates uBlock filter lists]

Anyways...

Good thing I have Peertube to fall back to.

I wish the channels I followed also uploaded to Peertube 🫤

Just make YouTube log-in and subscription only, at this point, Google. It's clear that's what you want to do.

google free youtube video downloader and watch any youtube video ad-free with zero buffering.

Downloading the whole thing before watching it is literally buffering and literally the worst kind of buffering.