How desperate can you be to put yourself out of business?
YouTube might slow down your videos if you block ads
Submitted 18 hours ago by moe90@feddit.nl to technology@lemmy.world
https://www.pcworld.com/article/2814755/youtube-might-slow-down-your-videos-if-you-block-ads.html
Comments
Darleys_Brew@lemmy.ml 52 minutes ago
suswrkr@discuss.tchncs.de 39 minutes ago
makertube.net, youtube is mask off at this point
MITM0@lemmy.world 2 hours ago
We need to find ways to pressurize the content creators to upload to alternative platforms like Odysee, Rumble, Nebula, Peertube, Misskey
SplashJackson@lemmy.ca 8 hours ago
YouTube might just go fuck itself!
kadaverin0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 hours ago
Youtube acting like it has anything to offer aside slop and people who think they’re philosopher kings because they play video games.
MITM0@lemmy.world 2 hours ago
Sounds like projection but hey, you do you, it’s not as if we can learn from video games right
Guidy@lemmy.world 4 hours ago
YouTube can die in a fire and take its fucking premium with it.
DarrinBrunner@lemmy.world 17 hours ago
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.
shortwavesurfer@lemmy.zip 17 hours ago
I have already started finding peertube replacement channels.
cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.de 16 hours ago
Maybe people will start torrenting youtube rips if they somehow manage to kill ad blockers.
shortwavesurfer@lemmy.zip 17 hours ago
I have already started finding peertube replacement channels.
Pirate@feddit.org 13 hours ago
Yep, lol. Same mindset here. Although I doubt YouTube will ever do a hard cut on piracy. That would lead to a major decline in viewership and wouldn’t look good to shareholders.
MemmingenFan923@feddit.org 10 hours ago
If you are Content Creator please consider upload your content on other video platforms.
bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de 6 hours ago
The trouble with that is that there is barely any money outside of YouTube.
atlien51@lemm.ee 6 hours ago
They can upload to multiple platforms at once and still keep their YouTube money + grow an audience on a different website??
atlien51@lemm.ee 6 hours ago
Bro those Mf should’ve started doing that YEARS ago like…
moseschrute@lemmy.ml 8 hours ago
Idk how one gets content on Nebula, but I wish more creators would join. Ik nebula isn’t Fediverse like PeerTube, but I still really like it and think it’s worth the $30/year to not get ads.
MITM0@lemmy.world 2 hours ago
Then support them monetarilly
Kekzkrieger@feddit.org 10 hours ago
And i stop using youtube when my adblock doesnt work. fuck em
DJDarren@sopuli.xyz 8 hours ago
Can’t slow down videos I’ve downloaded to my Plex server. 👍🏽
DFX4509B_2@lemmy.org 3 hours ago
No, but Plex can. I’d migrate to Jellyfin if you can as Plex is paywalling more of their services.
Ratte@lemmy.world 54 minutes ago
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?
Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world 18 hours ago
They’ve been doing this for close to 20 years. Ever since shortly after google bought them.
masterofn001@lemmy.ca 12 hours ago
You know the people who created youtube are all part of the same OG corp/group that gave eise to the monsters who have created the hell we currently live in.
The PayPal mafia.
Thiel, musk, howry, Chen(yt), wong(reddit),Hoffman(LinkedIn)
gwilikers@lemmy.ml 10 hours ago
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.
RexWrexWrecks@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
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.
Sixtyforce@sh.itjust.works 7 hours ago
Their attacks are never a global rollout, you somehow dodged them all! Lucky.
CmdrShepard49@sh.itjust.works 5 hours ago
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.
adespoton@lemmy.ca 18 hours ago
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?
TauZero@mander.xyz 17 hours ago
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.
CheeseNoodle@lemmy.world 2 hours ago
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?
adespoton@lemmy.ca 17 hours ago
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?
Grandwolf319@sh.itjust.works 7 hours ago
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
Sibshops@lemmy.myserv.one 17 hours ago
They are probably trying to find that spot where it’s just slightly more annoying to block ads than leave them unblocked.
adespoton@lemmy.ca 17 hours ago
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.
Death_Equity@lemmy.world 17 hours ago
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.
tabular@lemmy.world 15 hours ago
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).
queermunist@lemmy.ml 17 hours ago
So you don’t find something else to do.
Ledericas@lemm.ee 16 hours ago
i have been blocking them fro 10+years with none other than UBO.
grue@lemmy.world 16 hours ago
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.
throwawayacc0430@sh.itjust.works 13 hours ago
I mean, when I want to watch TV or Movies, I load it into my torrent program 🏴☠️ and let it download in the background. I could do the same with youtube videos.
ayaya@lemdro.id 10 hours ago
I already do this. There are several apps for it but I really like [Pinchflat] (github.com/kieraneglin/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.
gegil@sopuli.xyz 7 hours ago
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.
SmokingCookie@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
Yeah, I download whatever I want to watch and fire up vlc. 0 ads, 0 buffering.
jaupsinluggies@feddit.uk 9 hours ago
Technically that’s 100% buffering.
jungle@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
Wait, you think all YouTube content is available in torrents?
throwawayacc0430@sh.itjust.works 10 hours ago
I mean like the downloading aspect. There are a lot of youtube downloading tools available for practically every OS desktop or mobile (well except iOS)
p_kanarinac@retrolemmy.com 12 hours ago
That’s a lot of effort for a website that mostly offers background noise.
umbraroze@slrpnk.net 12 hours ago
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.
themoonisacheese@sh.itjust.works 10 hours ago
You can block ad on tv by side loading smarttube
c10l@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
On LG WebOS, the Homebrew Store has an Ad-free YouTube app that works well too.
mhague@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
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.
SaharaMaleikuhm@feddit.org 6 hours ago
Haha, I would see Youtube go bankrupt before I ever watch a single ad or pay for it. Stay mad. Google is a massive corp, I owe them nothing.
hsdkfr734r@feddit.nl 7 hours ago
Umm… Maybe. Let’s take a look.
www.statista.com/…/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.
QuarterSwede@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
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.
mhague@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
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.
Ulrich@feddit.org 16 hours ago
Jokes on them, I already watch videos at 0.5x
Little8Lost@lemmy.world 16 hours ago
Thats a good one for 0.5x (soup store)
youtube.com/watch?v=fNcYtcVn-8k
tymon@lemmy.zip 16 hours ago
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
bassomitron@lemmy.world 15 hours ago
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 literally 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.
QuarterSwede@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
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.
domi@lemmy.secnd.me 10 hours ago
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.
mitexleo@buddyverse.one 12 hours ago
Time to pin Odysee and Peertube in my browser even though I pay for YT Premium (only $2 per month here in BD).
QuarterSwede@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
Holy crap that’s cheap! Honestly, I’d pay that.
CosmoNova@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
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.
Ledericas@lemm.ee 16 hours ago
it already happened, it takes few seconds to star the video, a popup comes upa nd says, “whats slowing your video down”
Psythik@lemm.ee 1 hour ago
“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 anymore.
YouTube ReVanced on mobile and SmartTube Next on the TV still thankfully work without issues.