Also many times, the video won't play. If I reload the page, then it will play.
Something has really changed to the worse lately. I think it has to do with anti-ad programs as well as AI, like the UI also changed. It is important to point out that while you do not have any issues, other people do or may.
Discord has started to become absurdly aggressive with it too, to the point that they don't even let you load messages whilst logged in if you're on a VPN.
It really makes me feel like there will be an inflection point in a few years, where the internet is cleaved in two. You'll have the 'free' internet that is full of interesting stuff but also full of malware, spam and scams, and you'll have the squeaky clean corporate internet, basically a facsimile of WeChat's super-app, of which you'll only have access with a government ID. No VPNs or anti-fingerprinting allowed.
There a bunch of bad actors doing mass scrape of all public server and history via all of those VPN
Hasn't it been like that for already many years?
arguably, already 90's AOL very much pushed its users to stay within its walled garden.
...of course, free speech and anonymity die with this, but why would that be a problem? You don't want to say anything the current or potential future government wouldn't like, do you?
There are allegations going around that e.g. some platforms are lax on child protection because some high up executives are pedophiles. But I'd still place those platforms in the "heavily sanitised" bucket if they're heavily restricting everything else. Those platforms just have a slightly different definition of "clean" than most of us.
Not only do I get slowdowns and some videos don't load at all at times, but I also get a notification that explains that the reason is using adblockers.
Though it’s mostly good for my addiction since it makes me use youtube less.
It feels like something the FTC should be investigating, or perhaps a European equivalent, but I doubt it will.
I do not enjoy having to troubleshoot “Youtube isn’t working” calls where it’s because of this adblock ‘protection’ bullshit.
It’s just as bad as Ad-Shield’s bullshit “an error occured loading this page” — no, the page loaded just fine until your malware decided to dump the CSS and hijack my pageload to some “error-report.com” website to tell me my adblocker did it.
I wonder if being a YouTube Premium subscriber is also a factor here. I do pay for it so I don't see ads. But maybe the way ads are being served/injected has changed things for the worse for people that get them.
For example I have to scroll down a lot to get to the comment section, the suggestions are all over the place, and so forth. Annoying.
Also due to uBlock Origin, some videos do not start and I have to refresh. It is not much of an issue for me but the fact that apparently I need a huge monitor to see the "old layout" is a problem for me.
When Firefox dies, the last glimmer of hope will go out.
See https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/1id4amh/youtube_ch... and https://discussions.apple.com/thread/255931836
The version in the Arch repos does not include the impersonate feature.
(This may be because I have a whole swathe of adblockers, etc., plus I do a lot of `yt-dlp`ing from the same IP which may have me on a naughty list.)
But eh either 5s of black screen or 60s of ads. I tried watching a 15 min yt video without adblock and it had 5 ad breaks with some unskippable ads.
Yeah - I watch most of my YouTubes on the Apple TV and the ads are a pestilence. Sometimes it'll be 50s pre-roll[1] with multiple 30-50s breaks for a 10m videos.
Luckily there exist[0] many fine technologies that let you view them without ads via something like Infuse with a DLNA server if you're that way inclined.
[0] Currently. YT-DLP is fighting the good fight but I don't know how much longer they'll be able to keep in front. But then I'll just stop watching YouTube, really, because it's a horror show without adblock/circumventions.
[1] The video doesn't appear in your history until the pre-roll has finished which means if you can't be arsed sitting through a 50s pre-roll just that second and - at least on the Apple TV - you've not clicked on the video from your homepage / subscriptions, good luck trying to find it again unless you remember the name + channel etc. (which it also won't properly show you until after the pre-roll!)[2]
[2] I hate YouTube corporate.
Regardless, Google services getting worse over time is becoming a law rather than a tendency.
What else does youtube music get you? I can play on my phone with the screen off with yt vanced ( and I would never pay just for that feature, because I remember when it was free and they took it away )
there's a lot of iphone/ipad users out there.
> Everything's already on youtube and they let you make playlists, and they have playlists of the top charts already
I don't use it but ui probably. ads maybe. plenty of people have money and don't want the inconvenience of trying to get around it.
Also, when playing music you won't be hit with ads.
Your setup can move with you wherever you are, home, travel, in the vehicle. This can be helpful for engaging the audible sensors of small aliens sans screen.
Youtube without ads on every device, anywhere, is quite a different experience.
The company voluntarily decided to serve the content at no charge to consumers, at the company's own expense, to the internet at large, with no reasonable expectation of any obligations from the people they're freely offering the content to.
They're welcome to stop freely offering it the moment they decide they don't want to be the world's most popular video sharing and viewing platform anymore.
Until then, neither I nor anyone else has any obligation to pay them, run any part of their front-end code (includig the ad-serving parts), or view any of their ads.
FWIW, when I use Chromium (logged out/in) on Linux, everything works fine. If I use Firefox (logged in), it works worse. If I change the user-agent to Chromium in Firefox, I get faster buffering than when I use the default user-agent. Make of that what you will.
No. Because even if it might be complicated, any website developer can test their website against a wide array of browsers, in a more or less automated way.
Notably, YouTube these days prioritize AV1 codec even if you don’t have gpu acceleration for it, making lots of systems fall back to CPU decoding and making it completely unusable. Install the h264ify extension to force h264 during content negotiation and get your gpu decoding back.
Even if you can make a matrix of all those combinations, it’s even more complex than that to test in practice. Take my laptop for example, it starts off good and manages the cpu decoding for a while, a few minutes into a video it overheats and throttles, causing stutter.
What YouTube should do on the other hand, and I’m sure they already do, is to collect metrics from all playbacks. That should show black on white how many users struggle with each codec.
I don’t think I’m in any minority here given how many million installations the h264ify extension has. Google simply care more about their bandwidth cost than the user experience.
No, Firefox always been a second-rate guest at Google properties, and I'm not expecting it to change soon either. Why would they make it better when status quo means more Chrome users (in their mind)?
I would expect YouTube managers to pressure the Chrome managers, because YouTube brings in billions of dollars every month. Likewise I would expect the trend to move in favor of YouTube, because the browser loses money at an increasing amount and YouTube generates money at an increasing amount. 70% of YouTube happens on Mobile, and in the US more people are now watching on TVs than phones. Source: Nielsen, the old-school company that has huge influence over ads.
The site pops a literal warning saying "having problems? turn off your ad blocker" so I'm not sure where the mysteries lie here.
They're testing on thousands of devices. And they're probably even testing against ad-blockers on your bro-browser. But they're certainly not motivated to optimize that experience, so you get what you get.
On mobile (Firefox) I frequently have issues with videos freezing or videos crashing when I try to replay a section.
I freely admit to holding google software to a higher standard than e.g. random FOSS tools I use or saas from startups, however I also believe google has the talent, time, and money to where their software should basically be the best on Earth, and it's kinda shocking how often it's not and in what ways it's not. And YouTube is how old now?
The fact alone that I still can't toggle off Google maps "we found a faster route, tap ok to not change the route you change" thing...
Agreed. Shorts about half the time don't display comments, the back button breaks in mysterious ways. And I use Chrome on both Intel and M macOS machines, so the best in class there is, but my Windows Chrome doesn't fare much better. And Adblock ain't at fault, I pay for premium.
And that's just the technical side. The content side is even worse, comments sections are overrun by bots, not to mention the countless AI slop and content thieves, and for fucks sake I get that high class youtubers have a lot of effort to do to make videos, but why youtube doesn't step in and put clear regulations on sponsorship blocks is beyond me. Betterhelp, AG1, airup, NordVPN (and VPNs in general) should be outright banned.
And the ads, for those who aren't paying for premium, are also just fucked up. Fake game ads (Kingshot who stole sound effects from the original indie Thronefall ...) galore.
Google makes money here, they could go and actually hire a few people to vet ads and police the large youtubers with their sponsors.
With that, uBO and Sponsorblock, I never see any ads and have a great YT experience. (I don't have premium either)
I personally use Youtube almost exclusively for my entertainment. I am using Chromium on Raspberry Pi 5. I am running some flavor of uBlock, SponsorBlock, and some Shorts remover extension. It just works.
YouTube barely works in a full-on browser these days, props to the team that keeps it accessible via a Python script!