Firefox users are reporting an ‘artificial’ load time on YouTube videos. YouTube says it’s part of a plan to make people who use adblockers “experience suboptimal viewing, regardless of the browser they are using.”
“They’re the same picture.”
Also, that does not explain why:
- Chrome users who use an adblocker don’t get the issue
- Firefox users who do not use an adblocker get the issue
- FIrefox users who use an adblocker, but change User Agent to Chrome, don’t get the issue
Now, if only we knew who made Chrome and YouTube… The mind boggles.
Given that Google’s been talking about switching Chrome to a new plugin format that would limit the ability of adblockers to function on Chrome, and given that Google owns Youtube and profits from the ads Youtube displays…
Nope, I’m not connecting the dots. Not sure why Google would be wanting people switch from Firefox to Chrome at this time.
It’s more obvious than that even; their SEC paperwork states that adblockers are a risk to their profits. That’s more than enough info to assume they’re going to go to war in the near future (now) with them.
Dear God, won’t anyone think of the shareholders?
Just for clarity, they already switched protocols (Manifest v3), they just have continued to support the old format (v2) that allows unlock origin to work. They are discontinuing support for v2 next year.
What really pisses me off is that mv3 is becoming a standard that Vivaldi, Firefox, Opera, Edge, etc. will use.
Mind you that Firefox will adjust it to be able to fully support ad blocker.
You’re not sure why Google would want people switching to the browser that it maintains? Really?
I know several websites consider firefox’s built-in privacy settings an adblocker in certain configurations. I get notices on many sites and use no adblocker. Not sure if it’s the case here.
Also, that does not explain why:
Chrome users who use an adblocker don’t get the issue Firefox users who do not use an adblocker get the issue FIrefox users who use an adblocker, but change User Agent to Chrome, don’t get the issueI am a Firefox user who uses adblock and I don’t get the issue.
Same here. Firefox, ublock origin, privacy badger. Videos start playing in under 2 seconds. I’ve also never got the adblock warning.
Lucky I guess.
They just haven’t rolled it out to you yet.
Chrome sends every single website you visit to Google. You already pay with your privacy.
What do you mean by change user agent to chrome? Asking 4 a friend
For a specific how to, there’s a bunch of firefox addons that do it, but the mozilla recommended one is this
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/user-agent-string-switcher/
It’s super easy to use, just open it and it gives a bunch of options.
This is my current (fake) user agent;
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/118.0.0.0 Safari/537.36
With two or three clicks, this is my new (fake) user agent;
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; CrOS x86_64 14541.0.0) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/114.0.0.0 Safari/537.36
A few more clicks;
Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 10; HLK-AL00) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/104.0.5112.102 Mobile Safari/537.36 EdgA/104.0.1293.70
And finally;
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 10.0; Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_7_3; Trident/6.0)
Now, that last one is making it look like I’m using internet explorer… Youtube videos will not load with that last one active. Claims my browser is too old and not supported.
I don’t know why they all start with Mozilla/5.0 but the apparently a lot of websites will block your requests if you don’t have it (or a valid browser strings like it?)
Just a reminder to not use user agent switcher unless it’s absolutely necessary, and if you do, limit it only for certain sites that need it. If enough people change their user agent, website operators will be like “See, no one use Firefox anymore. We shouldn’t bother to support it anymore”.
Almost all user agent strings start with that Mozilla prefix because Mozilla made the first browser with “fancy” features, so in the early internet many websites checked for that string to determine if they should serve the nice website or the stripped down version. Later when other browsers added the features, that also had to add that to their user string so users would get the right site. Which just cemented the practice.
When you browse to a website, your browser passes info about itself to the server hosting that site. This info is intended to help the server provide the best rendering code for your browser. This is called your User Agent.
However, Google is using it here to identify Firefox users, and is apparently choosing to lump them all in a box called “adblock users” instead of trying to identify an ad blocker more accurately.
That’s because they may use code to detect as blockers that is not legal in the EU, so they might have thought that they’re super crafty and used markers such as user agent for their cool coercion delay code thingy
To add on
You can spoof this user agent to see if a website does something shady depending on which browser you’re using.
So if you keep all other variables the same, and just toggle the user agent value, YouTube behaves differently
How can we do that?
I haven’t tried it in a while, but I think there are browser extensions for it. Might need to ask someone else for how to do it these days
Supposedly Firefox users spoofing the Chrome user agent don’t get the issue because the script tries to execute the 5s delay in a way that works on Chrome but not on FF. Because the Chrome method doesn’t work on FF, it just gets skipped entirely. But I’m not sure if that’s entirely accurate, just read about it.
The last scenario is clearly a breach of anti-trust laws. It is time for alphabet to be broken up. Their monopoly is way worse than AT&T every was.
Alphabet’s monopoly is bad, make no mistake.
But they aren’t controlling all electronic means of communication for 90% of the continental United States, as AT&T did in the ma’ bell and pa’ bell days.
Uh… Gmail, Ad sense, search?
They’ve got like a dozen duopolies going on, they have far more control and ability to leverage it than Bell ever did
This is why I refuse to pay for YouTube. They are literally actively making the experience worse, rather than trying to make the paid experience better. This is laughable.
Anything to justify your stance. The experience is better without ads, but people just don’t want to pay.
Guess they’ll have to do a better job at convincing me that I should pay for what’s historically been free. I’ve never tolerated ads and I’m not about to start. At this point they’re encouraging me to carry on out of spite, underhanded tactics are just giving me more reasons not to do what they want.
You realize that they are only able to pay for “what’s historically been free” because of advertisements right? Google might be able to sustain Youtube even without ads because they have other revenue sources, but the vast majority of their revenue are from advertisements, and it would be a massive loss of money to keep Youtube up without it generating ad revenue. Hosting videos is one of the most expensive things a website can do. If we are to ever hope for other companies to compete with Youtube, we should expect for it to not be free. All that said, Google can still go fuck themselves though - I cannot possibly endorse their methods.
Yes, I do realize how terribly expensive hosting videos is. It doesn’t change my stance as a customer/end user, however.
Make you pay for “what has historically been provided in exchange for a fee or advertisement for the past 17 years, one year after the service launched”.
You’ll do what you want of course, but that fake outrage and righteousness is just pitiful. Just stop pretending and own that you just don’t want to pay for it as long as you’ll be able to.
Dude you are the product. Or do you think that they didn’t build your profile based on your experiences and tastes and then sold it to other companies…
Wow someone hasn’t understood how the internet works
Copium copium.
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Salty from the sound of it.
Damn I was gonna say that.
No, I think it’s a reasonable stance. I pay for Crunchyroll and Hidive because I like the paid service they provide, it’s a good experience that they are providing and I find value in it. Why would I pay for something that I don’t find value in, something where a company tries to actively downgrade the experience of its users rather than try to upgrade the experience of its paid service? I like services where they don’t try to actively screw over their users. I pay for Lastfm and Trakt too, because again I like the paid service that they provide.
It’s hard to provide something extra when all their content comes from users. They tried with
redtubeYouTube Red originals but those were pretty lame.You pay for those because you can’t watch them for free without ads by using an extension or something like that. They’re not “convenient enough to bypass” for you.
animepahe
Same holds for YouTube. They just got rid of the only no ads subscription here. Which was half the price of premium. So they kick people out of that, and afterwards going to war with ad blockers… If they really wanted as much people as possible to pay, they would have kept that abbo. But probably it’s better for them financially to have a bit more with ad blockers and ads and convert some to the premium tier
Look, I think YouTube is one of the few major “social media” sites that net positive for social good. And it loses Google money every year with saving everyone’s videos forever and hosting 4k and even 8k content…
But you can’t withhold the carrot and use the stick. They’re eroding trust with the people that have liked and supported YouTube throughout the years. There are plenty of people like me, that would gladly pay some amount of money. Just not THAT amount of money. Create some payment tiers and decent benefits for climbing up it.
“supposed to”
Oopsie whoopsy, we accidentally made competing browsers disadvantaged.
Deliberate, disguised as accidental. Disgusting.
Hanlon’s razor - “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”
This is not only adequately explained by stupidity, but it makes the most logical sense to be explained by stupidity. They are actively fighting a war with AdBlockers. They are trying to block AdBlockers, and AdBlockers are working as quickly as possible to fight those changes. Then Google has to fire back as quickly as possible. This is resulting in rapid published changes to counteract AdBlockers and their retaliation. It makes all too much sense that their fight against AdBlockers did not work as intended. The people making these changes are Google software developers, and I really do not think any of them have an issue with Mozilla.
I don’t know how stupid YouTube devs would have to be to:
-
Tie the delay that was supposed to fight AdBlock to user-agent (changing it to chrome fixes the issue)
-
Ignore Youtube Premium users that pay for ad-free experience
For those reasons I think it’s pretty safe to say that this goes beyond stupidity and into malice territory.
What evidence is there of this being user-agent based? I’ve heard people make this claim, but I have not seen evidence of it and when testing on my own machine there was no delay at all.
I’d wager Googles only releasing it to some users at first like they do with most things.
-
Unless you consider fighting adblockers a futile stupidity, you should first apply Occam’s razor - explanation requiring least amount of assumptions is probably the correct one.
In this case spoofing user-agent string of Chrome is enough to fix all the performance issues on Firefox, meaning there is no fancy anti-adblock code or anything like that.
Right, they got caught doing some hot button issue shit with the FCC talking about renewing the NN rules and they didn’t want to reignite the debate themselves. Google owns YT. Google makes money on ads, yeah, but they are also dominating the browser game with more people switching to firefox. Both explanations make sense, but only one of them calls for covering up/lying. Also, when any company gets caught doing something that they have some other excuse for, I’m liable to believe the appearance rather than the PR response.
And basing it on user agent doesn’t even make any sense for fighting adblock, that only makes sense for targeting browsers, which their devs know because (I’m assuming) they’re not stupid enough to not understand a core part of their technology stack
This is under the assumption that the user agent change is real. I have seen this spread time and time again, and every time I ask if there is any evidence. So I will ask you as well: do you have evidence for it, or have you experienced it first hand? I have yet to have someone prove that this is true, and I have not been able to create it myself (I tried, but never got a delay to begin with). So until there is evidence that this is true, and not just a rumor being spread, than Occam’s razor cannot apply.
I saw this myself when this was news. Created empty firefox profile, installed only userscript changer plugin.
Default user agent - rotating loading circle before video starts playing. Windows/Chrome user agent - video starts immediately.
Tried with multiple videos, changing first user agent that opened the video to make sure it’s not cached somewhere.
Didn’t bother to install Chrome for reverse test though.
Now it’s back to loading at the same speed regardless of user agent though.
Except Google has done the exact same thing to numerous other products and have multiple anti competition cases against them specifically related to Chrome. Hanlon’s Razor doesn’t apply IMO if there is a track record of the behaviour, as that clearly shows intent and premeditation.
The degree in which corporations engage in psychological warfare against customers is astounding. Not surprising, just outrageous. Don’t want notifications on? We’re going to ask you to turn on notifications in the the program every single day until you do it. Don’t want to watch ads because our infinite greed has destroyed what used to be a good platform with a reasonable number of ads before we bought it? Then we’ll make the experience less pleasant until you comply. They already make multiple parts of YouTube disagree with ad blockers on purpose to break the sites features. Not that I use anything other than NewPipe and Piped anymore anyway. I’m just sick of shitty corporations acting like we’re children who can be punished.
Don’t you just love being fed plausible deniability BS over and over and over again. I’ve lost friends over this bs. People who always argue in bad faith, always invoke plausible deniability, always min/max each interaction with hidden motives - should be given no attention and credibility. Unfortunately, those people strives in corporate environments, and as you would expect, they’re often responsible for marketing, PR, sales, and corporate strategies. Corporations are the annoying lying friends you don’t want around.
We are in a war indeed.
I think it’s a new trend with CEOs and investors. They want infinite growth so the strategy is aquire / create, grow, squeeze, throw away, while creating new products to migrate fed up customers. Rinse and repeat.
Investors goal: maximize ROI this year.
CEO goal: infinite growth and/or increase share price to keep funds flowing.
I believe the current economic behavior isn’t sustainable. Some day things will go south.
The idea that the only real duty of corporate leadership is to drive shareholder profit is apocalyptically naive and ultimately nihilistic, and it has been since the words dribbled from Milton Friedman into the NYT magazine back in 1970.
short term. The problem is driving short term profit. In the short term, you profit by abusing your customers. If you considered long term profit, you need to also consider customer satisfaction
No, I stand by what I said.
If you build something well, it will sell itself. You won’t need financial gymnastics to make your company or the product look good.
Stupid financial tactics like stock buybacks (which, as a result of how the stock market works, have a direct positive impact on stock price) should be illegal.
The problem is the focus on profit over and above the focus on literally anything else. That’s what modern corporate leadership has come to understand as the true meaning behind Friedman’s words. And it’s killing our society, our environment, and in many cases, the companies themselves (because the tactics are obviously unsustainable).
YouTube didn’t have ads before it got bought IIRC, not that it would have lasted that way even if it was not bought
It’s been many years, but I remember a small banner ad below the video and maybe one to the side. It was so reasonable though it’s hard to remember for sure.
That was after it got bought IIRC, but it’s possible I’m misremembering.
At least we know for sure neither of us is confident about our memories.
“We know you didn’t do anything wrong. We meant to hurt someone else.”
Normally this is when I’d go all yar har fiddle dee dee, and don’t get me wrong Imma do a lot of that too, but a lot of my favorite video essay nerds are also on a platform called Nebula that’s dirt cheap, ad free and owned outright by the people who make the content. It’s a good way to balance the whole “people need to get paid for the content they make” thing with the whole “these platforms are predatory and abusive” thing.
Nebula will also sell lifetime subscriptions for $300 occasionally. When you compare it to netflix’s standard price of $15.49/month, it pays for itself in less than 2 years.
I admire their mission. Giving the power to the video creators is great. I’m all for coops. But, as a user I find it lacking. If you want to watch anything outside of educational videos and video essays you have to go elsewhere. It doesn’t have very good content discovery. I know creators don’t like chasing an algorithm, but as a viewer I like having recommendations based on what I watch.
I bought a one year membership, because I support what they are trying to do, but I rarely watch anything on it.
There is no acceptable answer to “why do you make your own services suck?”
Because we need go punish those who have the GALL to not want to have consumerism shoved down their throat 8 times in a 5 minute video.
I know I have not be a very good echo in this echo chamber, but you don’t think it’s a tad ridiculous to say YouTube is forcing it down anyones throat? Nobody is forcing anyone to watch YouTube, yet you say it as if they are.
Not to mention they literally have a legitimate option to remove the ads, so they REALLY aren’t forcing it down your throat. Which means if the service isn’t worth it enough to you to pay for it or watch ads, don’t use it?
No you’re right, it’s no one is forced to use YouTube, however if you like any of the content creators it’s the only place you can find them. And the issue with ads, is that it’s not a few, it’s unskippable ads every few minutes so that there is so much being shoved at you. YouTube of 10 years ago was a much more enjoyable experience.
Do you think using adblockers to watch YouTube for free is stealing? It is, after all, getting a paid service for free against the services permission. If that is enough of a definition to be considered stealing (I think it is), then it’s quite easy to understand why they might make their own services suck.
Walmart has implemented plenty of inconveniences to combat shoplifting. Things locked behind glass. I’ve had to wait 15+ minutes for a Walmart employee to unlock a door for me to grab a $20 power tool. If that isn’t make services worse, idk what is. I am not saying it is right, but rather pointing how the double standards in the way we think. If you are going to be up in arms for ad blockers, I think you should also be up in arms about commercial retailers inconvenient anti-shoplifting measures. Both are means to stop users from obtaining the good/service without proper payment, even if it means legitimate customers get a worse experience.
And even if you agreed with the Walmart analogy, and also think the measures Walmart takes are on the same level as AdBlocker blockers, I think we can agree most people would not.
And if you do not think using adblockers to watch YouTube is stealing, I’m curious what your definition of theft is.
It clearly isn’t theft to use an adblock. It is simply electing what contents are played on your own machine. If it was theft to not download ads, it would be theft to grab something from the fridge during TV ads. Ad-absurdum we would end up in that black mirror episode where they force you to watch ads and lock the room.
That being said. I believe it is within googles rights to make the life of not paying customers hard. Whether it is a smart decision, is another question.
The difference is the content is being delivered to the TV. YouTube cannot advertise if you simply block adverts. It’s still advertising even if you walk away from your computer or close your eyes. It’s the same thing for junk mail. If you never get the junk mail, then it’s never actually delivered. But if you immediately shred it without ever looking, it was still delivered even if you didn’t bother to look. That delivery of advertisements is how Google funds YouTube. To prevent that delivery is to stop the transaction you agreed to. You are not holding up your end of the agreement for a non-free service.
To “simply elect what contents are played on your own machine” would mean not using YouTube. It wouldn’t mean using YouTube on YOUR terms
So do u believe its theft to turn your TV off everytime an ad comes on and turn it back on a few minutes later? I mean its a bit strange but I wouldnt go as far to call that theft
That’s the equivalent of just turning off your monitor when you get an ad. There isn’t any great comparison to cable TV and streaming services. Because you can consume streaming services while stopping the delivery of all ads. even using sponsorblock for in video ads. You cannot for cable TV. The best you can do is turn it off while they play, but they will play nonetheless.
The closest you get to it with cable TV is DVR and skipping the ads (some going so far as to auto skip) but you’re literally paying for cable TV. The fact cable TV as so many ads with how much it costs is absurd anyway. So of course you aren’t stealing because you’re already paying an inordinate amount of money for the service.
So I guess if one day YouTube has a paid service with ads, and you block the ads, the debate of whether its stealing or not could get pretty murky. The scebario is closer to tag switching at Walmart, which is still stealing, but I guess arguably less? But right now, while you aren’t paying anything at all for a paid service, it’s pretty cut and dry.
Your argument hinges on technical limitation: Since it cannot be confirmed whether snail mail advertisement was looked at, the delivery person gets paid for putting in the letterbox. Since the TV station does not know exactly how many people watch their commercial breaks, they get paid for broadcasting. Since streaming services can relatively accurately check how many times an ad was played, they only get paid for the exact number and it is stealing to not download it.
TV stations nowadays have much more advanced capabilities and they do know rather accurately how many devices are watching their signal. So if an advertiser wants access to this data and sees that people turn off their devices during commercials as @Dontfearthereaper123 described - should the advertiser be allowed to pay less? If the advertiser pays less, does turning off your TV become stealing?
If YouTube started to (legally) access your webcam. Would closing your eyes and plugging your ears during ads become stealing?
the delivery person gets paid for putting in the letterbox
This is precisely what I am saying. It is the delivery of advertisements that matters, not how many people actually see it (which is impossible to know in any advertising situation). Your TV analogy is not very good. During a broadcast, there is a live stream of data being sent to the TV. You cannot control what data is being streamed to that TV, you can only control if it’s being displayed on your TV or not. Therefore, you cannot stop the delivery of the ads. If you are watching a show live, you cannot skip past the ads. If there are 5 minutes of ads, the best you can do is turn off the TV or walk away for 5 minutes. If the ad wasn’t put in the broadcast to begin with, so never delivered, there’s no way in hell the advertiser is paying for it.
So to answer your last question, it has nothing to do with seeing it or not. Purely delivery. The moment the mail is in your mailbox, the content is delivered. But if you put a lock on your mailbox, it cannot be delivered. If someone puts up a billboard, it doesn’t matter how many people see it, the billboard is up. If you put your commercial in a television broadcast, it will indeed be broadcast. Though with the internet, people now have the ability to stop the delivery of ads altogether. Therefore, if you say you will pay for this service by receiving advertisements, and then the advertisements don’t get delivered, that would be stealing.
I back channels and projects I like on Patreon because yeah, I’d rather not steal if I don’t have to. But YouTube needs to know they are BETWEEN the content I want and me. I bought into Google Music and stuck with it through its change to YouTube Music, and it’s always come with YouTube Red/Premium. The kicker is I’m paying for a lot of my video content twice but I’m happy with it because it’s on my terms and not a PENNY of it goes to Jake Paul.
You’re right, a lot of companies suck and I wish most of them behaved differently.
I’d still prefer to wait 5 seconds than have to watch a fucking sanitized corporate advertisement trying to sell me bullshit I don’t want and won’t buy with annoying fucking music, voiceover, and footage of people pretending to be happy.
Fuck off, Google. Good thing this will be easily bypassed anyway.
footage of people pretending to be happy.
Oof, get’em.
I hate ads too. Would you consider paying for a service so it’s user supported instead of ad supported? I do, pay for YouTube, Spotify, Hulu no ad tier. It gets old because it starts adding up. I’d rather pay for a user owned platform like a coop of some kind, but still, these things do cost money to run.
I won’t pay for Youtube because they keep making their product worse and treating creators horribly.
I won’t pay for YouTube because the executives are literally thousands of times wealthier than I am.
Why the fuck would I give money to people who are already obscenely rich?
People don’t have issues paying. As you said, if it was a user-run co-op, people would be fine with it. But as it stands right now the services keep raising their prices just because they can while all the money goes to the bosses and shareholders while the actual people who do most of the work get whatever is left over
deleted by creator
I do pay for some services, where there is reasonable value.
However I rarely use YouTube so was fine with dealing with the devil of ads. Was. The inexorable march of enshittification will likely make me either never use that service or try technical workarounds for some of the enshittification (excessive ads)
Hulu no ad tier.
I won’t be shocked when they eventually get rid of this altogether. They shouldn’t be shocked when I switch to 100% piracy when they do.
Fuck ads.
I do not think Google deserves the benefit of the doubt anymore, people need to stop using their services.
Do No EvilBe A Lil Bitch
No one’s going to unless someone recreates YouTube, which isn’t happening anytime soon.
It’s already been recreated (vevo, peertube, etc.) it’s just that those services don’t have anywhere near the content Youtube has.
Thanks fot saving my time answering for all of us
Sadly, the problem is that the small platforms tend to attract all the scum that was blocked on YT. You know… all the racist anitisemitic nazi conspiracy theory ridden brains.
- they don’t have Alphabet’s backing
The ad funded model is dying AKA endless free money is dying, it doesn’t work because there’s no real business there it works based on the empty promise of making money elsewhere on the products they are selling without any guarantee that the advertisement is what’s making them the money. The analytics are starting to tell them that it’s not as good of an investment as they once thought. Advertisement has become overvalued, that’s why people are saying that there is a bubble and that it’s going to burst, just like it happened before with the dotcom crash.
In other words a platform like YouTube is already very flawed. Sure you can make alternative video sharing platforms and you can get them by on donations (or maybe even nationalize it in some places) but that money making component for creators isn’t something that can be as easily replicated. They can do sponsorships, they can ask for donations, but donations are hardly anything to live by unless you’re famous, and sponsorships can have the same problem as the aforementioned over-inflated ad revenue.
Idk, this one is pretty easily explained by Hanlon’s razor. I’m sure others will disagree, which is fine, but it seems not only plausible, but likely that they intended for this to target all ad block users and not just FireFox. Google has waged a war with adblockers, and they are making quick retaliatory changes as the adblockers block the adblocker blockers. It’s literally Google making changes and people changing the adblockers back. It genuinely seems more realistic for them to have tried to target all adblockers than just FireFox…
Yeah except changing your user agent to chrome bypasses the load slowdown lol
Thanks to HTTP being a complete mish mash and meme of protocols and standards, there’s no way for google to easily target ad blockers without either significantly changing the entire youtube API, or trying to enforce stupid DRM bullcrappary by updating or pushing for a new web standard.
Even crunchyroll doesn’t crackdown on ad block even with DRM playback enabled.
Yeah except changing your user agent to chrome bypasses the load slowdown lol
Did you test this yourself? Rather than just ask your source, I was going to test it myself. However, I cannot get a slow down at all. Everything is loading instantly and ad-free. Perhaps the servers providing my instance of YouTube don’t have the change, I’m not sure, but I have not been able to personally create this. So without a reliable source or evidence, I cannot just take your word for it that changing the user-agent alone fixed the issue.
Rossmann tested it in latest video. No difference between browsers. And that dude is strong ad block and none Google browser supporter.
I’d rather a 5 second pause then see something trying to hijack my freewill.
No ads or delays > No ads with delays >>>>>> ads
Honestly, as long as the video itself doesn’t have interruptions, I’m okay with the ad-free experience having a small delay or even lower video resolution. I don’t have to have 4k 120 FPS video on everything.
What I don’t want is constant interruptions, wild changes in emotional tone or volume, obnoxious and manipulative ads, politically sponsored bullshit, or constant pestering to disable my ad blocker and tracking protection. In short, once the video starts, leave me alone.
I can appreciate that Google has spent its entire existence trying to find another revenue stream beyond advertising, and largely failed, but I don’t care. If my choices are to continue being manipulated and lied to by companies and politicians paying for the privilege, and not using YouTube, I’ll just stop using YouTube. I’ve done it before with other services I used much more frequently.
Either they shut up about using ad blockers, or they give me an alternative.
And yes, I realize this is a very selfish and entitled response. If I get value out of something that costs other people time and money to provide me, it is fair that I give back in some way. Traditionally, that was done via companies serving ads and spying on its users.
But enough is enough. Modern advertising and tracking keep getting worse, and trying to enforce them is not the way to move forward.
5 second ad delay in blessed silence
5 seconds of someone screaming into my ear “BUY! BUY! BUY!”
Oh, no! Better disable my ad blocker quick!
Yeah, not sure what they are expecting to happen…
If you’re on desktop and open several videos at once (such as getting home from work/school and opening all the new videos on your subscriptions tab) you really don’t notice.
What I do notice are the ads at the beginning, quarters, middle, and end of a video
Bro my position is very clear. I’d rather forget about YouTube entirely than let ads back into my life
Freetube? It’s an app, look it up
None of these alternate options allow me to watch on my TV without ads. I almost never watch anything on my phone, and when I do I have YouTube revanced for that
Brave on android lets you watch youtube with no ads. As long as the adblocking and fingerprint blocking is set to aggressive
While I think Google is a monster that needs to be destroyed, it’s silly to me that your two options are either block ads or leave. The third option would be pay for the service. If your only problem is the ads and not the tracking (which probably isn’t true, but it’s the only complaint you made in the comment), then paying for it is a valid solution. It shouldn’t be controversial to say video hosting costs money to run, which obviously includes YouTube. So giving it out for free is simply not a realistic option. You’re free to leave, but you won’t have anywhere else to go that meets the “free and no ads” requirement. If you realistically don’t want ads, you will have to pay. And if you’re fine with paying, YouTube is currently the platform with the most content to offer.
Honestly, I’m thankful paying is an option. I wish Google would offer a paid package overall to stop the tracking/data collection. I would literally just give them my money for actual privacy with their services.
The problem is that the paid option eventually gets ads anyway. See cable TV and soon Netflix.
Furthermore, the price of YouTube Premium is increasing.
Gotta ensure the greedy corporation makes record profits quarter over quarter.
https://9to5google.com/2023/07/19/youtube-premium-price-increase/
The problem is that the paid option eventually gets ads anyway.
The problem is that YouTube hasn’t done something, but you think they will? Cable television has basically always had commercials. When it started, it was mostly just government broadcasts, but when it got popularly commercialized, adverts were introduced. Netflix has a paid option with ads, but they also still have an ad-free option, so that still doesn’t really substantiate your argument either.
There is no real evidence to think they will add ads to their paid service. Of course it’s possible, but we don’t need to make up things Google might do in the future to call them evil. There’s plenty of things they’re currently doing.
The pressure of ever-increasing profits demands it.
Your comment assumes two things.
- Companies try to make more profit
- YouTube will make more profit by having ad contained paid tiers
The fist point is a fact of life.
The second one is simply not fact. It could be profitably, but it is far from guaranteed. They could just as easily make far more money by keeping the paid tier ad-free to avoid the loss of subscribers.
I would pay for the service if it weren’t an absolutely ridiculous price.
$14 a month is bonkers.
I value YouTube, at most, at about $5 a month. I can easily do without it.
I value YouTube, at most, at about $5 a month. I can easily do without it.
There you have it. If the cost of the service is not worth it, then users won’t buy it. Either enough users will pay for it that the service will stay as it is for the price it is, they will decrease the cost of the service, or improve the service they are offering. Or, given Google’s track record, just kill of the service entirely.
I will also point out that many users pay for Spotify for $11 USD a month. YouTube premium includes YT Music, which is a direct competitor to Spotify. So for users who pay for Spotify, it would be virtually $3 for ad-free YouTube. Of course this doesn’t work if you don’t pay for a music streaming service, but as far as services go it certainly isn’t unreasonably priced. Sure, it may be unfair that they don’t offer just a YT ad-free package, perhaps with all this backlash they will. Or perhaps not. It’s Google, they’ll do whatever they fuck they want.
do you know what makes them even more money? Making you pay, and then selling your data anyway!
You CANNOT opt out of data collection from youtube. Just pay them or they’ll put an absurd amount of ads to the point it’s not usable anymore.
You CANNOT opt out of data collection from youtube
Right, and that’s exactly what I said. Though Google specifically doesn’t really need to sell your data. They just use it themselves to advertise to you.
Honestly, I never bothered to install an ad blocker before today. I just figured ads were tolerable. This move by YouTube got me to switch to firefox and install ublock origin and oh my is it glorious. I can wait 5 seconds for my video to start since I am used to ads anyway.
I hate ads so much that I typically would start a video on YouTube with my phone/PC muted and then put the phone face down or turn off the monitor for ten seconds before going back to the video and rewinding to the start.
They honestly never bothered me too much but I have to say if they ever succeed in defeating the ad blockers it will be hard to go back now that I’ve seen this side.
People have been conditioned into viewing ads as a normal every day part of life. It’s actually kind of scary, since it’s basically mind games to convince people to hand their money over.
You can spoof it as Chrome because it’s a bias towards other browsers that aren’t chrome, regardless of whatever bullshit statements they put out to avoid getting sued or otherwise in trouble.
This is bullshit even being truth lol “is supposed to punish adblockers” such entitlement and normalization.
Ah yes, because ad viewers get to enjoy the video immediately with zero delay whatsoever. You sure showed those adblock using scum by… Still having a better experience with adblock enabled by virtue of only subjecting them to silence instead of an ad while still not making any money.
Even assuming what they’re claiming is truely their intention, it’s still dumb as hell.
Not to mention the ad would almost certainly be longer than 5 seconds anyway
