YouTube Says New 5-Second Video Load Delay Is Supposed to Punish Ad Blockers, Not Firefox Users

"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.

5sec vs 3x20sec.

Easy choice

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.

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.

But wait, wouldn't a 5 second pause on loading still be way better than sitting through minutes of adverts? :-D

Punishment my arse

I'll take a 5 sec delay over ads any fucking day of the week.

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?

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.

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.

"supposed to"

Oopsie whoopsy, we accidentally made competing browsers disadvantaged.

Deliberate, disguised as accidental. Disgusting.

There is no acceptable answer to "why do you make your own services suck?"

"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.

So 5 seconds of silence... Yeah punish me daddy google.

I do not think Google deserves the benefit of the doubt anymore, people need to stop using their services.

I'd rather a 5 second pause then see something trying to hijack my freewill.

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

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!

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

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.

Lol, I'd rather wait 5 seconds than see an ad lol.

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.

This is bullshit even being truth lol "is supposed to punish adblockers" such entitlement and normalization.

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.

Bro my position is very clear. I'd rather forget about YouTube entirely than let ads back into my life

So they will allow ad blockers now? I'll take a five second delay instead of shitty ads.

Deliberately and actively try to make user experience worst is shit evil. Now im gonna actively share ubo to all people i talk IRL

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.

YouTube sucks now. Just constant ads.

Hmmm, watch an ad or wait five seconds..... Not sure they thought this one out.

“People say breaking up Alphabet into heavily regulated entities is supposed to benefit the public, not investors”

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.

https://www.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/17tm9rp/comment/k9i62zu/ for a working fix

Google lived long enough to become the villain.

Freetube, Newpipe, Indivious. All great.

5 seconds of silence vs 30+ seconds of ads. Tough choice Google, tough choice.

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.

Okay. Yeah. Sure.

I feel like the explanation follows a thread of believability, but even then, this feature was terribly coded if it was circumvented via User Agent string manipulation.

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lol, I take back the snark I gave in another thread the other day about Google doing this to fuck with people now. Egg on my face for giving them the benefit of the doubt.

They can't honestly think this will have the desired effect. I also bet the poor sod that had to implement it "strongly advised not to do it". But was over ruled by some know it all shit head MBA.

I wish I could make YouTube "experience suboptimal revenue" in retaliation, but sadly I can't block more than 100% of ads.

Can you say "anti-trust"

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This is hillarious! I didn't even notice that. YT always delayed video loading a little. Is this really a change?

they're so shockingly inept, i can't believe it anymore

Punish?

Huh, I just thought youtube was running slow. Still better than ads.

make people who use adblockers “experience suboptimal viewing, regardless of the browser they are using.”

The sad thing is, I consider this an upgrade. I'll take a moment to breathe and maybe break out of the negative spiral that is modern internet use.

I don't understand why companies still place ads on youtube. I've never ever bought a product or visited a company's website which was advertised on youtube.

Are there really people who listen to youtube ads?

Active enshitification.

It's like when a teacher can't target the bad kid so they punish the whole class instead.

Ads are sub suboptimal viewing.

GrayJay is still working pretty good. I cannot use the YouTube app, or mobile browsers because most of the content I'm interested in isn't highly visual so I like to turn my screen off and listen. I am ok with a reasonable amount of ads but the anti-feature of background play disabled without premium is just stupid.

Google's modus operandi - business as usual. Deploying their dirty tricks on their mass of servers to edge out and destroy competition. When caught out they apologize all surprised Pikachu style, then do it again differently. This is likely in response to news about Firefox mobile finally allowing extensions to work. People are probably trying it out, but their Youtube experience will be crap, so they'll go back to chrome.

Whatever you say Google. Hey EU, Google wants to chat with you.

I feel like all the people running Firefox (most of my friends/family and many colleagues) are just going to say “damn, YouTube sucks. I should look elsewhere” and not “oh, it must be slow because I’m not on chrome.” Heck my parents don’t even know what chrome is.

Still illegal

when are they gonna learn that any client-side restriction or hindrance can and will be defeated? sleep(5000) is kinda like them throwing a fit, not actually trying to punish anyone. obviously we'll find a way to avoid waiting the 5s, do they think we'll just give up?

Cruelty, is Thy name.

Oh wow, I just opened lemmy because a YouTube video was taking extra time to open in Firefox lol.

i never experienced that delay in the first place...

I'll just blame it on my ISP being shit

I haven't noticed this in the browser, but I've definitely noticed it using the YouTube app on Roku. No Firefox or ad blocker there.

I've never seen this fake load thing and I always use Firefox

This delay has happened on Brave browser too, it's not FF specific. But it's pathetic either way.

I mean, if they really wanted to show you ads, they could just switch the returned stream when the video player calls for certain chunk, then when that ad is done playing, switch back to the original stream. The user experience would be basically like watching TV.

I don't know if it makes a difference, but I'm in Canada and I've noticed none of this. No video load delays, no anti ad-blocker pop ups, none of it. I'm not going to stop using Firefox or Ublock Origin though.

It's punishing me and I'm using their app. Their video loading has been spotty as shit lately. And I know it's not my bandwidth, I've got 5Gbps available and 12ms latency to YouTube's closest data center.

I'm not even blocking the ads when I use it.

I will never again use Chrome again (well maybe except YouTube if stops working in non-chromium-based browsers), we need to get Web back into our hands! It is sad that it took me too many years to realize that, I hope others will follow.

Strange then how my Vivaldi browser doesn't have the load time, then. Almost like it's a punishment for non-chromium users.

Youtube be like: "Theyre the same people"

Freetube on PCs, LibreTube on Android. Block that, fuck-o.

I'm not experiencing that issue on Grayjay 👍

How did we function before youtube. besides music videos I rarely like video anything. howto skip skip skip. Used up all my skips on amazon too.

Piped or FreeTube on desktop.

LibreTube on mobile. SmartTube on Android TV.

I haven't had to deal with Google's crap in a while. All of these have no ads and have Sponsorblock built-in. I do miss the algorithm's suggestions but I do discover new content creators through Nebula (and FreeTube has decent related video suggestions in my experience).

More than happy to wait

Does this apply to Freetube, Invidious and other yt mirrors?

Funny, because my ad-blocked vids load just fine in Safari

Tee hee. I don't use UserTuber.

Haven't experienced that so far (but that's probably because I don't log into my YouTube account anymore and mostly use private browsing), but I imagine that's something that adblockers will eventually be able to block?

What's that federated video service that carries a bunch of YouTube videos?

And this right here ladies and gentlemen (and other) is why we need to host our own. Hopefully somebody comes up with a peer2peer based youtube competitor.

I'm using Firefox but is it not possible to block ads in chrome too?

Why? This is weird. Why not enforce a full 30 second delay or some length corresponding to the length of the ad? That would be a sure way to make people who can't circumvent the block turn off the ad blocker. That or they'd just do something other than watch youtube, which is also possible I suppose.

Maybe changing your user agent just let's you reroll whether you are in the group of users that are used for testing the increased loading time

How many of you use YouTube on the actual website, and not just an embedded video on another site?

Nope, still too easy to get around.

It was happening for several days with me but it seems to be fixed now

Little do these companies know that poor people know how to be patient and older people remember the days of free ad supported internet dialup via cds, so this is not new and people will continue where business models fail.

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So what? I have to wait about 5 seconds anyway because I have a slow internet connection. No big deal. 5 seconds of not watching a youtube video is probably good for you.

Everything fine with private DNS and brave 👍👍

Everyone here is bitching and whining about how much YouTube sucks, and yet we all know that no one will stop using the service.

So why do you they’re able to get away with this type of shit time and time again?