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."
5sec vs 3x20sec.
Easy choice
YouTube Says New 5-Second Video Load Delay Is Supposed to Punish Ad Blockers, Not Firefox Users
Submitted 11 months ago by stopthatgirl7@kbin.social to technology@lemmy.world
Comments
cosmicrookie@lemmy.world 11 months ago
cooopsspace@infosec.pub 11 months ago
3x20, a bunch of wasted CPU cycles and probably a rare form of malware
theneverfox@pawb.social 11 months ago
Not too mention .01 points off your san permanently
kumatomic@lemmy.dbzer0.com 11 months ago
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.
deleted@lemmy.world 11 months ago
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, 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.
gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
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.
Iron_Lynx@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Infinite growth in a finite world is impossible.
Do we need to start requiring all C-suite managers to learn thermodynamics?
Sheeple@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Welcome to the basic problem of capitalism. It’s unfortunately by design
aesthelete@lemmy.world 11 months ago
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.
This is it and there’s another wrinkle driving it IMO which is the end of QE. When rates were at sub-inflation (so basically negative) and investor capital was everywhere, none of these companies really cared about milking the customers because they were already fat and happy milking the government indirectly. Now the government cheese machine has dried up and so now we’ve gotta get the stock price up a quarter of a point by any means necessary instead.
Kevnyon@lemmy.world 11 months ago
It’s literally like that shit from Ready Player One where the guy suggests that you can fill up the VR screen with like 80% ads before the user gets sick from it. That’s what they are doing now, they will push ads until people either stop watching or not enough people subscribe to Premium. The fact that you can’t even skip ahead in a video without getting more ads, even if you just got the pre-roll ads. It’s completely unacceptable and I think that there should be laws that would prevent that type of consumer abuse.
Elderos@lemmings.world 11 months ago
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.
SnipingNinja@slrpnk.net 11 months ago
YouTube didn’t have ads before it got bought IIRC, not that it would have lasted that way even if it was not bought
Onii-Chan@kbin.social 11 months ago
I'd still prefer to wait 5 seconds then 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.
vxx@lemmy.world 11 months ago
If it were one ad I might be fine with it, but it’s usually 2-3 ads every 5-10 minutes, at a volume twice as loud as the video.
makyo@lemmy.world 11 months ago
And inserted randomly within the content
LesserAbe@lemmy.world 11 months ago
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.
MaximilianKohler@lemmy.world 11 months ago
I won’t pay for Youtube because they keep making their product worse and treating creators horribly.
MysticKetchup@lemmy.world 11 months ago
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
AA5B@lemmy.world 11 months ago
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)
aesthelete@lemmy.world 11 months ago
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.
interceder270@lemmy.world 11 months ago
footage of people pretending to be happy.
Oof, get’em.
obinice@lemmy.world 11 months ago
But wait, wouldn’t a 5 second pause on loading still be way better than sitting through minutes of adverts? :-D
Punishment my arse
blady_blah@lemmy.world 11 months ago
I’ll take a 5 sec delay over ads any fucking day of the week.
Mr_Blott@lemmy.world 11 months ago
5 sec delay
Just now
Anti_Face_Weapon@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Next up will be resetting the volume control every video, or limiting the resolutions you can view at.
Synthead@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Wouldn’t it be neat if YouTube had reasonable competition? You know, so when YouTube adds a five-second delay as a strange style of punishment, a different platform would look more attractive?
Chozo@kbin.social 11 months ago
There will never be a real competitor to YouTube, because nobody else is willing to run at a net loss for a decade before seeing their first profitable quarter, like Google did with YouTube.
Turns out, free video hosting is expensive as fuck.
obinice@lemmy.world 11 months ago
There will never be a real competitor to YouTube
That sounds reasonable but you’re thinking way too small. Lets not forget that Tiktok is already more popular than YouTube with a very, very large chunk of younger people, for example.
But besides that, let’s not forget that absolute giants in the business have been toppled. Look at Yahoo! as one example. Hell, even entire countries can fall within a few decades, whole empires.
So, assuming that there will never be a decent YouTube competitor is a very limited way of looking at it. Who’s to say Google will still exist in any meaningful market leading way in 20 years?
Sure they’re big now, but what if the entire face of the internet and how we use it and what we want fundamentally changes (say with the addition of highly advanced AI that brings changes we can’t even predict right now).
There will absolutely one day be a service that can rival YouTube and eventually replace them, it’s the same with every product from every business, it’s the circle of life I suppose. But whether that will happen within the next 5 years, or 15, or 30, only time can tell :-D
Never say never, though!
reddig33@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Im surprised Amazon hasn’t stepped into the space to advertise their own products. They already own a huge storage cloud backend.
livus@kbin.social 11 months ago
Maybe. But give decentralised federated hosting a few years. I
redcalcium@lemmy.institute 11 months ago
Yet there is a gazillion of porn sites out there. The thing is, once YouTube become shitty enough its users are itching to find an alternative, porn operators like MindGeek might launch a competitor site because they’re already have a scalable video delivery service. I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re actually working on it.
DeathWearsANecktie@lemm.ee 11 months ago
It’s funny too because ads literally are a 5 second delay (at least) that you get when you dont use an adblocker!
Bonehead@kbin.social 11 months ago
I honestly think I prefer the delay over the ad.
cobysev@lemmy.world 11 months ago
I’ve been using Nebula. It’s a subscription-based alternative with no advertising, but I get it for free because I’m subscribed to Curiosity Stream (which is basically Netflix, but for documentaries).
The only downside to Nebula is that there aren’t a lot of content creators on it, so you don’t have the variety of videos that YouTube offers.
CoderKat@lemm.ee 11 months ago
The captions suck too. I subscribed to the same deal as you. I did it mostly to support the creators. But I basically never use it. The creator whose affiliate link I used to sign up? Their own captions are amazing on YouTube (human written with colour and positioning) and auto generated garbage on Nebula.
redcalcium@lemmy.institute 11 months ago
I’m still waiting for MindGeek to launch an SFW version of pornhub to compete with YouTube. If YouTube keeps getting shittier, they might eventually do it.
metaStatic@kbin.social 11 months ago
Turns out people don't want to compete with something that runs at a loss. and as soon as someone figures out how Google will just copy them with a massive infrastructure lead.
pirrrrrrrr@lemmy.dbzer0.com 11 months ago
“supposed to”
Oopsie whoopsy, we accidentally made competing browsers disadvantaged.
Deliberate, disguised as accidental. Disgusting.
Bazoogle@lemmy.world 11 months ago
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.
FeelThePoveR@lemmy.world 11 months ago
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.
Dzeimis@lemmy.world 11 months ago
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.
FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 11 months ago
All of the people saying “I’d rather wait five seconds than watch an ad” seem to be optimistic that it will continue to be 5 seconds and YouTube won’t keep upping it.
xor@lemmy.blahaj.zone 11 months ago
But they can’t extend it longer than the shortest ads, since then it’ll affect users after they watch ads too, which kinda defeats the point
aidan@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Exactly, so this still guarantees a better experience than ad viewers because you will always have the minimum ad length
gh0stcassette@lemmy.blahaj.zone 11 months ago
Honestly, worst case scenario, if YouTube manages to completely eliminate adblockers, maybe by making some kind of cryptographic system where the browser has to provide a token embedded inside the ad video stream in order to access the video, I would still use an extension to mute sound and draw a black bar over the ads while technically playing them in the background, it’s not the wait time that bothers me, it’s how repetitive and obnoxious the ads are, I just don’t want to perceive them.
chiliedogg@lemmy.world 11 months ago
I’ll take 20 minutes of silence over 1 second of ads. I will never willingly watch an ad I didn’t explicitly request. Ever.
Life is short and I won’t devote any of it to advertisements.
That being said, I do pay for YouTube premium because I do use it a lot and understand that the platform has every right to make money. But that makes what they’re doing with Firefox and ad blockers worse.
HowManyNimons@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Ads are psychological abuse. I will not watch them. If YouTube make it too hard to use their service without watching ads, I don’t need to use YouTube.
reverendsteveii@lemm.ee 11 months ago
“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.
Rooskie91@discuss.online 11 months ago
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.
Eylrid@lemmy.world 11 months ago
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.
NewPerspective@lemmy.world 11 months ago
There is no acceptable answer to “why do you make your own services suck?”
T00l_shed@lemmy.world 11 months ago
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.
Bazoogle@lemmy.world 11 months ago
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.
nfsu2@feddit.cl 11 months ago
I do not think Google deserves the benefit of the doubt anymore, people need to stop using their services.
postmateDumbass@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Do No EvilBe A Lil Bitch
ElBarto@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
So 5 seconds of silence… Yeah punish me daddy google.
Duamerthrax@lemmy.world 11 months ago
I’d rather a 5 second pause then see something trying to hijack my freewill.
DeathWearsANecktie@lemm.ee 11 months ago
YouTube says it’s part of a plan to make people who use adblockers “experience suboptimal viewing”
As opposed to the perfectly optimal experience you get when allowing ads
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 11 months ago
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!
prosp3kt@lemmy.dbzer0.com 11 months ago
This is bullshit even being truth lol “is supposed to punish adblockers” such entitlement and normalization.
Knightfox@lemmy.one 11 months ago
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
netchami@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
YouTube can go screw themselves, use Invidious or Piped to access YouTube. You can also combine this with LibRedirect to automatically redirect all YouTube links to Invidious or Piped. There are amazing mobile clients like LibreTube or NewPipe for Android and Yattee with this guide for iOS. All of these don’t have ads or trackers.
Hadriscus@lemm.ee 11 months ago
Bro my position is very clear. I’d rather forget about YouTube entirely than let ads back into my life
simonced@lemmy.one 11 months ago
Lol, I’d rather wait 5 seconds that see an ad lol.
Octavio@lemmy.world 11 months ago
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.
SeaJ@lemm.ee 11 months ago
So they will allow ad blockers now? I’ll take a five second delay instead of shitty ads.
Tom_bishop@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Deliberately and actively try to make user experience worst is shit evil. Now im gonna actively share ubo to all people i talk IRL
reagansrottencorpse@lemmy.world 11 months ago
They forced our hands in creating and using adblockers. Remember how awful the web was getting before we could adblock? Pop ups, force play videos with full sound, entire webpages full of ads with a tiny bit of content in the middle.
M0oP0o@mander.xyz 11 months ago
Hmmm, watch an ad or wait five seconds… Not sure they thought this one out.
JustZ@lemmy.world 11 months ago
YouTube sucks now. Just constant ads.
Zacryon@feddit.de 11 months ago
I don’t mind ads, I understand that websites need to finance themselves to cover their costs (and maybe build up some capital to expand), but I do mind tracking, user profiling, personalization / user targeting, trading this data with dubious companies worldwide, and obnoxious ads, for example pop-ups or auto-play videos with a 1 micron sized close button, or a forced timed ad which is hiding the content.
It’s like having a bunch of people following you around, taking note of everything you do, evaluating that data, making statistics, dicsussing it with other people you don’t know, etc… Then, when you want to make yourself a sandwich, step in between you and your sandwich, taking up a megaphone and scream into your face : “OH, WE NOTICED THAT YOU ARE MAKING A SANDWICH. CAN WE INTERST YOU IN NEW FANCY BUTTER KNIVES FOR ONLY 59,99 €?” [Then going on about it for 3 minutes before they are stepping out of your way].
There are laws against that in real life, and in the digital realm this is missing. Considering how much time a lot of people spend online this is something which needs to be taken seriously.
It’s really scary sometimes. There was a time when I was stupid enough to use facebook, just to stay in touch with friends. Once I talked with a friend about allergies and asthma, and I told them I have a pollen allergy. A short time later an ad showed up on my facebook feed, advertising some nasal spray for allergies. Wtf?! And that’s just the surface. “Harmless” ads. Who knows what else happens with that data?
And then we get stuff like Cambridge Analytica.
LemmysMum@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Trying to monetise the fraction of a percent of users who actively avoid your advertising and wouldn’t engage with it or purchase products from the advertisers even if forced to watch them is the epitome of corporate greed. Pathetic, money grubbing billionaire corporations deserve to burn to the ground rather than be supported by the societies they leech off like the cancer they are.
Desistance@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Google lived long enough to become the villain.
queue@lemmy.blahaj.zone 11 months ago
“They’re the same picture.”
Also, that does not explain why:
Now, if only we knew who made Chrome and YouTube… The mind boggles.
FaceDeer@kbin.social 11 months ago
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.
ElleChaise@kbin.social 11 months ago
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.
ButtDrugs@lemm.ee 11 months ago
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.
flappy@lemm.ee 11 months ago
What really pisses me off is that mv3 is becoming a standard that Vivaldi, Firefox, Opera, Edge, etc. will use.
Frog-Brawler@kbin.social 11 months ago
You’re not sure why Google would want people switching to the browser that it maintains?
barnaclebutt@lemmy.world 11 months ago
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.
thanevim@kbin.social 11 months ago
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.
iAmTheTot@kbin.social 11 months ago
I am a Firefox user who uses adblock and I don't get the issue.
takeda@lemmy.world 11 months ago
I think uBlock might already be blocking that code.
seathru@lemm.ee 11 months ago
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.
tiredofsametab@kbin.social 11 months ago
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.
Ilgaz@lemm.ee 11 months ago
Chrome sends every single website you visit to Google. You already pay with your privacy.
ChairmanMeow@programming.dev 11 months ago
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.
Liquid_Fire@lemmy.world 11 months ago
But then shouldn’t there be a delay when using actual Chrome?
casmael@lemm.ee 11 months ago
What do you mean by change user agent to chrome? Asking 4 a friend
chaogomu@kbin.social 11 months ago
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;
With two or three clicks, this is my new (fake) user agent;
A few more clicks;
And finally;
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?)
thanevim@kbin.social 11 months ago
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.