- cross-posted to:
- hackernews@lemmy.smeargle.fans
- hackernews@derp.foo
- cross-posted to:
- hackernews@lemmy.smeargle.fans
- hackernews@derp.foo
You must log in or register to comment.
A new wave of slowdowns is hitting users, with the only resolutions being disabling the ad blocker or upgrading to premium.
Or just switching to ublock origin.
Or just switching to newpipe.
Or just switching to freetube.
etc
etc
etc
I have ublock origin on firefox and it’s really bad for me currently. This has traditionally been the good combo I believe.
Not just slowing down, but stopping, then restarting after skipping a few seconds that you cannot access no matter what.
For now the best solution I’ve found is to copy the video url, open potplayer and just hit the paste command and the video runs flawlessly.
So they’ll have to close that loophole eventually, which means enshittifying the video streaming protocol for everything that isn’t the native web viewer, which will inconvenience more people who were used to something working, leading to another workaround, leading to…
Youtube is gradually accelerating their enshittification. I’m looking forward to when it comes to a real head. Too many serious interested parties rely on it. I don’t know if peertube will be the first fallback, but I’m sure it’ll get a big bump.
Change your useragent to Chrome.
It breaks the detection of your adblocker… for now.
Is it possible to change the user agent just for specific websites? Do you have a recommendation?
yes, I use User-Agent Switcher by Erin Schlarb
how do those youtube clients work? i thought YouTube was very closed source
AFAIK NewPipe parses the regular YouTube website and only extracts the useful bits.
No expert but I believe they access the API directly.
No,it’s exactly parser. https://github.com/TeamNewPipe/NewPipeExtractor
Some probably use an API of some sort, because SmartTube for Android TV even synchronises your watch history, subscriptions, you login with your google account etc…
Or downloading videos to watch later? Does Plex recognize YouTube videos?
Plex does not recognize them in terms of pulling down metadata but you can still organize them in folders and browse that way. I find the Plex route is a healthier way to engage with video content than platforms that just keep serving you whatever the algorithm thinks will keep you peeled to the screen. It’s more intentional and less of a passive consumption kinda thing.
tl;dr: Yes, but probably takes some effort for most content.
Plex will play the files, but metadata is hit or miss. If it’s something that’s on thetvdb or themoviedb, it can be matched as a series or movie, respectively. With some effort, you could also probably include all the relevant metadata when downloading the videos, then have plex use local metadata, which could cover anything not big enough for the big metadata providers.
I think it’s also possible to find plug-ins/scripts that will pull metadata directly from youtube, but I’ve had bad luck relying on that stuff and then development stopping, so I avoid it these days.
but won’t it be hassle to follow that?
YouTube revanced has also been working for me
And still, I’m more likely to stop using YouTube than to stop using an ad blocker.
That’s what they want. Get all the users they aren’t able to monetize off the platform to lower their costs.
I mean, I like a good Google hate train as much as the next guy, but that’s kind of a legitimate thing to want.
Follow the damn train, CJ!
Ooooooh my dawg
It’s YouTube’s fault for setting the wrong expectations when they benefited from wild growth and success by being free all these years. I dare they go 100% paywalled. I know they won’t. Otherwise they can’t double dip on both premium and advertiser money. Even if they manage to go 100% paywall, it’s inevitable that they will start introducing adverts to paying customers as well.
Then I’mma leech HARDER
That’s a double edged sword though, lose viewers and you lose appeal to advertisers. Lose users and they’re going to go somewhere else. That somewhere else will eventually grow and be competition. The bigger it gets, the faster it will grow.
They used the “You” as in the people, during their growth years to build their platform. Now they are going against the people since they no longer need us.
Way ahead of you. Recently got Nebula, which has dramatically reduced the amount of time I spend on YT. Besides, this way I can help also the people who make the videos. They don’t need to be so dependent on the whimsical and unpredictable nature of the algorithm and the ever changing landscape of what is or isn’t advertiser friendly on the platform.
If YT feels like further cranking up the enshittification dial, I say, bring it on. I’m ready to drop my watch time even lower than it currently is.
Good news: you can have the best of both by watching everything for free through piped video!
I really wish government would just come in already and shatter google into a million pieces with the anti-monopoly hammer already.
Google is far worse than AT&T ever was when it was shattered into the baby bells.
Just gotta learn from AT&T to not let them re-congeal back together like somekind of fucked up liquid metal terminator 20+ years down the line.
Frankly, I’d stop using YouTube entirely before I’d start using it without an adblocker. At least there are no signs of it slowing down for me, yet.
I’d consider paying a few bucks a month, but not $10 or more
Get rid of shitty YouTube music and give me a tier that’s no ads only
That is precisely why Premium Lite was killed off, it did exactly what you are looking for.
I don’t think that was ever available in my country
That’s just leaving money on the table
Watching YouTube load slowly is better than watching ads.
“We’ll make our service worse, that’ll show them!”
Ok google, good luck with that.
I will download videos then. I refuse to not use an adblocker on the modern internet.
Pirate everything, it’s the only way to show greedy corporations the content should be free.
It would be really cool to be able to download YouTube videos withour the sponsorship segments, I wonder if there is a way to do his already?
My worry with all this is that they might say fuck it and put DRM for all YouTube videos which would block attempts to download the videos. Not make it impossible as seen with streaming services but not as trivial as now…
Time to quit YouTube then
Heck yeah let’s all go to break.com
Didn’t know this was still a thing haha. It brings me back
I already subscribed to someone on Floatplane. If it gets much worse on YouTube, it might be time to switch fully.
The day they go 100% paywalled, is the day their dominance ends. They will never do this because, contrary to the corporate dickriders in this thread they rely on bait and switch tactics to draw the crowd in the first place.
I didn’t say anything about paywalled.
Google’s plan is to DRM the web
Well the good news is Widevine is very expensive, and doesn’t work. It’s not as simple as right click / save target as, but Widevine decryption is why you can torrent any of the shows/movies on those streaming services.
Everytime someone requests a video on those services, the service pays a fee to Widevine. $0.50 USD per request for the first 30k requests/month. How much you think Google is willing to pay someone for you to watch cat videos for free?
Google owns Widevine, they would be paying a fee to themselves
You’re right. But then it’s also their cost incurred. Their decryption keys to revoke on exploited devices, and their engineers to try and come up with a software patch for their hardware-level CDM. It’s costly was my point.
I wish we can fast forward to the part where Youtube completely destroys itself and a new platform takes its place so we can enjoy it for 10 years before the enshittification cycle restarts again.
So I have YouTube premium but also have ad-blocker, for the first time yesterday I was noticing absolutely abysmal speeds on YouTube and I suspect this is why. I thought my computer was starting to shit the bed initially it was so brutal.
I have YouTube premium
Wow, so you pay them and they still screw you? Glad that’s a product I’ll never buy then!
I know, right? But I suppose their reasoning is that my ads are also blocked across the rest of their ecosystem, my subscription isn’t covering those losses.
Still though, a model that requires that customers look at something they don’t want to nor will engage with smells like failure.
I’m generally okay with the idea of “you can get it for free and we’ll include ads to pay for it, or you can pay instead”.
Where I’m definitely not okay is “you can pay, and we’ll include ads anyway.”
The sick twist is that I use Ublock Origin and won’t ever pay for YouTube premium and I haven’t experienced even the slightest issue streaming videos on YouTube. 😂
Anecdotally at best. I know it’s not what you want to hear, but you’re making a conclusion based on something one person said.
I have YouTube premium and an adblocker and I don’t have this problem. I’m skeptical that it’s related.
I have YouTube premium and an adblocker and I don’t have this problem. I’m skeptical that it’s related.
I too am a YouTube premium customer, and my video performance is horrible lately.
Funny enough, on my living room smart TV YouTube app my performance has been bad as well, even though I am logged in to my premium YouTube account.
Something is going on, and it does effect some (at least) premium customers.
Wasn’t that exactly how the adblock blocks went out in the first place? Only a few areas at a time were affected.
Same, YT Premium, Firefox, ad blocker, no issues with streaming.
So, since writing the above I’ve been having issues with YouTube. I’ve been connected to my VPN, so perhaps that’s part of it (by which I mean Google slowing it down, the VPN doesn’t noticeably slow down any other sites).
I tried deactivating my ad blocker, but it hasn’t made a difference. I’ll try more stuff to see if I can figure it out.
I was wondering if this was coming. I don’t use YouTube in-browser much if at all, so I don’t see this. But I am not surprised. The fact that they’re slowing down people who pay for premium is kind of an act of war. It shouldn’t be a thing, and the fact that it’s happening at all is a misstep on Google’s part. Not that the whole slowing down people who use ad blockers isn’t. But this will detrimentally affect adoption of premium subscribers which I thought was the last thing they’d want. Because they obviously don’t make enough off ad revenue to support the platform. That’s part of why they push premium so hard. They need more premium subscribers. This is idiocy.
I can’t remember what video I watched that talked about the unsustainabilty and likely the late stages of an ad revenue driven internet content model, and this situation reeks of that.
I don’t know what new paradigm might replace it if this is the case, but the current model feels like it’s absolutely failing.
I have premium, uBlock Origin, and Mullvad VPN. In Firefox the other day, the stream was dying every 10-30 seconds. Like it would just stop and give me a spinner. I would have to “Copy URL at current time”, open a new tab, and paste it in to get it to go any further. I do have bad internet, but this was nuts. And then I gave up and used Duck, and it played flawlessly in their embedded player.
Good job, Google.
If it happens again, I’ll try disabling uBlock Origin on YouTube and see if it improves.
After getting premium I just switched the adblocker off for YouTube. Premium would be far too expensive if it didn’t also include YouTube Music :-/
uBlock Origin works on YouTube Music, too.
If you want to throw a few bucks at the people providing you a service, then donate to an ad blocker for helping make the Internet a safer, better, and more user-friendly place. …not the big fuckers like YouTube who are contributing to the enshitification of the entire web.
Ublock doesn’t accept donations
While uBlock would be most deserving of a donation imo, there are others that do accept. Even if it’s an ad blocker you don’t actively use, you’d still be supporting a developer who’s using their time and skills to improve the web.
Donating to no one would be better than paying YouTube.
YouTube already has ways to block users with adblock. They just haven’t fully rolled it out yet.
Lately they blocked playing videos when I had uBlock Origin running, but it was just a warning I could click away. They might also slow down page loading and playback.
YouTube has the ability to lock users with adblock out, they are just very careful about using it. Mostly starting with trials in smaller countries and getting more bold over time.
Ha! Serves you right
Oh no (continues to watch on freetube) anyway…
Revanced Extended ftw!
Alternative front ends are a god send.
What is freetube? (Sorry for the stupid question)
One of many different “third party frontends” for YouTube which, amongst other things, cut out ads and avoid performance throttling.
Personally I use one called NewPipe, and previously one called LibreTube. There are others too.
One of the few uYou+ users on iOS.
I dusted off an old laptop, put debian on it, put an SSD and now I have my own invidious instance, among other services…
No ads, no throttling, no bullshit. Google is very welcome to suck it. I’d gladly stop using youtube, but there’s no competition.
That’s why Invidious exists.
I don’t have an ad blocker, I just have the standard strict tracking protection enabled in Firefox. What’s more, I pay for YouTube Premium. But still they add a five-second delay every time I visit a web page. It’s infuriating.
Might as well just stop paying for premium then if they’re going to ding you anyway.
there is no way the 5 second sleep before loading isnt anti competitive, because last i heard, unless they changed it, it only checks for the firefox user agent.
Actually insane that someone would willingly implement that.
Why pay when you can watch it for free without ads through piped video! Pirate everything, live for free!!
If I were to guess, non-android smart tv. There are very few options if any for these TVs. Since I got my TCL google tv I just put smarttube on it and that was it, no more ads and cast still works. But can’t do that with parents’ old chromecast or lg TVs
If anyone is curious about the reason, my primary motivation for having Premium is that I don’t want my kids to see more ads than necessary, and they’re on YouTube on their phones, on the Chromecast (connected to a dumb projector) and on the computer.
The YouTube app has a lot to offer them that they won’t get in other apps and I can’t realistically force them to use other alternatives everywhere. Especially since I have shared custody and they’ll be using YouTube at their mom’s place as well.
Don’t worry, YouTube, I won’t be using your website anymore. But my yt-dl will be ripping max quality videos by the hundreds, just for shits and giggles.
Yarr harr, it’s the pirate life for us!
Apparently this seems to be mainly affecting Chrome users, lol.
Well, yeah! Google controls Chrome
Yeah but what I find funny is that if people had already jumped from Chrome they probably wouldn’t be having problems.
