This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Wish they could use Gemini to generate ad clicks instead.
I also think they slowed it down for firefox users.
If you get a user agent switcher and change your user agent for youtube to chrome then that slowing down goes away.
Ok so im not crazy. I was wondering why videos kept buffering every minute this past week.
I'll wait.
HA! Jokes on them! I'm running a budget dell PC from 10 years ago! The PC itself is slower than any delays they cause! I'm talkin' 3-5 minutes to load each video. Sometimes the whole PC freezes, and you need to unplug it. Sometimes the browser crashes right at the end, so you gotta relaunch the browser, and then wait 20 minutes for all the tabs to populate. Then you gotta end task on all the individual windows. Then you gotta reload just the tab you're looking at, and THEN you can wait 5 minutes again.
You think I'm even going to notice your 10 second delay?
Good, kill your product
I use adblockers, but I'm confused how this would hurt google if people using adblockers stopped using youtube.
Less views = less relevancy of the platform. For live streams they have always played second fiddle. For short videos there is even more competition. Just wait for China to open up Billie Billie or instead make a separate version for the west.
uBlock Origin->gear icon (settings)->My Filters->add this line:
||googlevideo.com/videoplayback$xhr,3p,method=get,domain=www.youtube.com
I saw something that might be this happening last week where every video took an extra 20 seconds to load and presented a popup that took you to the support page where the first thing listed to troubleshoot your problem was disabling ad blockers, but this week the videos are perfect and load normally; but the rest of the page is absolutely fucked. Like the "playables" section last night was tripping balls and looked like a slot machine as the entries randomly changed around at light speeds. The comments, related videos section on the right, description, etc all just refuse to load now on Firefox for me.
Considering these issues for me have only happened recently, and coincidentally around the same time an issue with Google services took a shitton of the entire Internet down for almost a whole day, I suspect it's not about blocking ad blockers so much as it is Google just fucking sucks at implementing any changes across the board of their products.
Ublock origin (if your using it) "fixed" the issue shortly after. Im convinced someone at google works on adblock lol. Probably not true but the timing was really fast.
Spy vs spy
As much as I hate dealing with their shenanigans, I can’t really blame them either. As long as I can get away with using an adblocker, I will - but honestly, YouTube gives me more value for free than a lot of services I actually pay for. I have no moral argument for why YouTube should let me watch videos for free, even though I like free stuff just as much as the next guy.
YouTube gives me more value for free than a lot of services I actually pay for
That's the really annoying part.
I've been considering swapping to other services for a long time, but to follow the creators I want to follow I'd have to subscribe to Nebula and Floatplane and I'd still miss out on quite a few creators.
I've got 500Mb fiber internet and YouTube refuses to stream above 360p unless i manually change it. Which each update becomes harder and harder to do as they hide the video quality button somewhere else.
It's a good thing I'm patient when it comes to when the videos load. If they keep doing this, I'll just find another platform. Nebula seems like it has the same types of videos I like to watch.
Of course, I can get into PeerTube as well.
Nebula seems like it has the same types of videos I like to watch.
I mean, Nebula is commercial service and I assume that they'd profile, the same as YouTube. Like, if you're okay with that, you can get YouTube Premium.
Of course, I can get into PeerTube as well.
I'm still skeptical that this is going to scale sufficiently either in bandwidth or in amount of content.
https://peertube.fediverse.observer/ for people who want to try it, though.
I mean, at least Nebula is owned by the content creators. Eliminate the middle man and all that.
