Google is intentionally throttling YouTube videos, slowing down users with ad blockers
Google is waging war on ad blockers — throttling YouTube to force users back in line
I've started bulk downloading videos with yt-dlp and watching them locally. No ads or throttling to deal with.
If Google really wants to, they can crack down on yt-dlp, and I assume that if enough people are using it, they're likely to do such a crackdown. Like, this works for the moment, but...
I'm sure they could. Other methods will crop up. All else fails, I ditch YT altogether.
It will happen eventually. All they need to do is start new/rotating keys on wildvine and put the ads at random times right in the stream, then disable fast forward if you use it to skip ads. It'll be a UX hit, so it'll need to be worth it to them.
In the end, they can't stop us from HDMI capturing and using comskip to detect / remove but there are a million ways to play tag between where we are now and that which don't require people posting videos to pirate bay :)
Virtual desktop program that watches videos and uses sponsorblock and adblock after the fact to pick it clean and re-encode it.
I'm that level of anal
My ip was blocked a LONG time ago by google for using yt-dlp. Works with VPN but nothing else. Fun times. I think I only pulled a couple of videos off for archival services. On my own channel non-the-less.
This is the way.
When YouTube wanted to throw me some entertainment and a couple ads, very conveniently, I was down for that.
Now that it's an all out technology knowledge battle - well, I'm quite good at that.
So I spend the time I would have laughed at their ad instead working around their bullshit.
I haven't seen an ad in years, but I still enjoy the same content. 🤷♀️
To me, it seems like they're working really hard, just to fail to serve me ads.
Me too. I'm up to 3TB locally. Had to do that slowly though. Hit some temp bans a few times.
I’m new to yt-dlp. Care to share your flags? I’m a little confused on which ones I actually need.
I mean, you don't need anything; it'll work with no flags. I have these:
$ cat ~/.config/yt-dlp/config
--embed-subs
--embed-metadata
--embed-chapters
--embed-thumbnail
--sponsorblock-mark=all
$
That'll just embed some useful metadata in the file.
I'm a filthy Windows user that's too lazy to migrate my main PC to Fedora.
> Path\to\yt-dlp.exe -P <target directory> <URL>
Multiple URLs can be separated by spaces. Put any URLs with ampersands in quotes or remove the ampersand and following arguments.
You can find a list of all the arguments on the yt-dlp github page
I like https://github.com/ArabCoders/ytptube gui. Only started using it yesterday, so far for indovidual videos. However it looks like it can also watch new videos being uploaded, thought not tried it myself.
Use docker compose for quick deployment
DVRs are back in 2025. Who would have thought?
I've been doing this with band love videos and storing them on a hard drive. One I love got taken down and almost lost a while back and it's made me paranoid ha
I'd sooner spend five minutes waiting for the video to buffer than five seconds watching an ad
Too true
Truth
Welcome back to 2007
Make me wait 5 mins on a black screen and I'll do that before watching an ad.
A wild YouTube appeared!
Go, uBlock Origin!
Wild YouTube used Throttle!
It's not very effective...
uBlock Origin used Evolve!
It's super effective!
YouTube fainted!
This made me laugh. I wonder which one will prevail in the end
Piracy always prevails
Ive been commenting on creators videos asking them to upload elsewhere as well. I doubt it will work, but we could try
A lot of my favorites are already on Nebula. I'd ask the rest to follow but that would require a google account.
I also asked some creators, but they can’t because of the Google partnership Programm, it prohibits reupload on other platforms
Great idea. Eventually, and if enough ask, it could be a thing.
I love how you’re just doing your bit lol
Very good news!!
I watched videos on Newgrounds using dial-up
They are going to have to slow ad blockers by a lot for me to consider it slow
My wife and I were discussing this. This isnt "slow" to us, its just a tiny bit inconvenient. We were used to the old AOL pictures taking a good minute or two to load.
We would get rid of Youtube before we get ads.
I've been seeing this for a couple weeks now along with a popup telling me "ad blockers aren't allowed" at work where I'm forced to use Chrome. I have UBlock Lite installed. Typically a refresh takes care of the popup and a 10 second delay later, the video loads.
uBlock Lite is simply not as potent, so it's understandable it can be beaten. Almost like Google is abusing their monopoly
I run portable Firefox on my work PC. I refuse to use chrome. some of our apps require Edge, but outside of that, I don't touch chrome.
I switched to Firefox basically as soon as ublock origin didn't work on chrome. It was easier than I thought it would be.
So it's wait a few seconds and watch a black screen or watch a minute of ads? What a choice...
We can live without YouTube, they can’t live without us.
This is their way to try and get you into their money making fold.
Oh hey I ran into that issue, fixed it by blocking the element on ublock and spoofing my user agent
Edit: I put more details under nameisnotimportant's comment, I was about to head to bed so I didn't really provide details LOL
fixed it by blocking the element
Which one? That'd certainly help to know how to do that
www.youtube.com/##.paper-toast-open.yt-notification-action-renderer.style-scope.toast-button
I believe it was this one, just add it as part of the filter list in ublock
The extension I used for user agent was this one. I don't think it matters what you spoof as, but I chose to spoof as chrome. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/user-agent-string-switcher/
So far it worked and I'm back to no ads and no interruptions
Lemme know if they ever reply.
I have ublock, with sponsor block and some others, and don't have any issues on yt as of yet. Just in case though, how do I block an element and spoof a user agent?
YouTube does a shit ton of A/B testing so they probably didn't roll that change out to everyone yet. I currently don't have any issues either but they will eventually hit us with that shit.
Also interested in how you can do this.
“Do evil.” Google’s official new slogan.
You're right, but also They get alot more from the deal than you acknowledge. The service has never been free. They already had a profitable model, and now they want even more. I call it evil, but in a sense it’s standard corporate behaviour.
They can get fucked. A while ago O was like you know what let's give them money, seems only fair. So I finally subscribed, and then like a month later they sent me an email they're raising the prices effective immediately - basically changing the deal on me without any delay.
So I unsubscribed, because fuck that.
More recently I looked into sharing the family plan with ...my family, but it turna out they consider family only in a single household, and I'm not gonna try to give them money while also potentially having to prove how much of a family we are, so yeah...
Fuck them, either take my money when I'm actually trying, or I guess they didn't need it that bad. I'm over YouTube, and would probably ditch it earlier than ever watching an ad there.
I'll wait.
I also think they slowed it down for firefox users.
If you get a user agent switcher and change your user agent for youtube to chrome then that slowing down goes away.
Wait I can do it just for YouTube? Never occurred to me. I'll have to look into this
Yo I pay for premium and it’s been fucking slow. Cancel my subscription? Guess I might need to.
I had to turn off privacy badger and ublock for it to not be slow. It's stupid I'm paying for the service to be ad free it should be ad free without complaints.
Your premium tier has been upgraded to the basic plan with ads at no extra charge for you yet, Dear Customer! Aren't you happy?
"Is your video not loading ? Check out why, you fucking ad dodging commie" is the feeling i got from youtube's newest message while my video was unexpectedly taking 10s to load
Why do i feel like this happened a while ago? Like, isn't this old news? Or "olds" as it were?
It was previously a "thread.sleep(5000)" in the client code IIRC.
It was reported a decent amoint of time ago and i thought i felt a difference...turned out my isp was sending air bubbles through the internet cable.
After the internet stabilized i noticed exactly zero, just an occasional "restart browser because video's stopped playing alltogether"
I’ve been dealing with this forever.
Some issues I have that I only deal with when I’m not signed in without an adblocker:
If I try to skip back to a spot in a video, I get the loading circle and sometimes it doesn’t come back until I refresh the page. I have to make a mental note of the time and do that pretty often.
In safari and Firefox I will get a black box for about 40 seconds, no play button, and sometimes I have to refresh the page a few times just to get it to work at all.
Comments will not load sometimes until I refresh the page, sometimes more than once.
The video will sometimes stop and start “loading” while I’m watching it. The solution is always a page refresh or two.
Signed in with an adblocker, the problems drop by about 50% (pulled that number out of my ass, but I’d be willing to bet it’s close). Signed in with no adblocker on Firefox or Safari and the issues become significantly less noticeable, with exceptions from time to time. Signed in with no adblocker on chrome or edge, I experience none of this.
I believe they purposely throttle it on non chromium browsers too.
Sorry if this comment is jumbled. Woke up in the middle of the night with a stomach ache, got bored waiting for it to pass, so now I’m here and barely conscious.
Yep, for me it ha been "fixed" for about a week now.
Oh no, where will I get my AI slop?
Like it or not, YouTube still has a fuckton of good, informative tutorials and advice on how to fix things or make things made by individuals with a phone camera and no script, who make them not for money but for the pride in sharing their knowledge. I shared some fix it videos for my van and a very obscure phone, and consumed a lot of fix it videos for washing machines, motorbikes and furniture.
This. YouTube is extremely helpful for anyone who can't afford to take their stuff to a repair service or hire someone to fix something at their home. Just a few months ago, I thought my washer was done for, but it turned out to be a super simple fix that no website mentioned except for a super obscure YouTube video with only a couple hundred views. Saved me hundreds of dollars. There's countless other anecdotes like that over the years.
This is what sucks so much about Google's monopoly. I truly wish a cooperative of governments and/or academia created a publicly funded alternative as well as hosting an archive of YouTube on it. It would of course need to be administered by a non-partisan committee made up of representatives from multiple countries that had numerous safeguards against governmental political censorship. Hoping for a grassroots alternative is a lost cause, as the hosting and administrative expenses are just way too cost prohibitive, so publicly funded is the only solution I can see as being plausible
Give it a couple of years. AI is just getting started.
Been using revanced for months and haven't noticed a difference other than no ads or sponsors on bigger channels.
I'm finding I'm using youtube less and less that I can't actually remember the last time I used it for anything. Youtube has so much crap now.
Because of their monetisation scheme for content creators, it was profitable for creators to drag 15 mins of information out to one hour, and then to include shock faces as thumbs to get more clicks, and then to get more viewers just to watch a bit of the video as viewership dwindles into just mindlessly watching suggestions.
I feel sorry for those creators who have gone balls deep with youtube content and who have no "plan b".
I think that says more about the channels you watch and your viewing habits. I enjoy STEM and STEM related channels; I don't experience the same as what you've described.
Remember when videos would buffer all the time on non-chrome browsers lol
Aha I'm not crazy! There was about a week where YouTube videos were so slow and we mainly use SmartTube on the shield TV, the fucked up part is I pay for YouTube premium, I just like the UI and options available on SmartTube better then the default app.
It did seem to get better, so maybe they realized I fucking pay for this service.
Or it was just a weird network issue. A week is a long time, though.
Good, kill your product
I use adblockers, but I'm confused how this would hurt google if people using adblockers stopped using youtube.
They cannot kill Adblocks, because if they would — a lot of html5 embedded YouTube videos would be coming worthless and so would youtube (discord for example)
Nebula seems like it has the same types of videos I like to watch.
I mean, Nebula is commercial service and I assume that they'd profile, the same as YouTube. Like, if you're okay with that, you can get YouTube Premium.
Of course, I can get into PeerTube as well.
I'm still skeptical that this is going to scale sufficiently either in bandwidth or in amount of content.
https://peertube.fediverse.observer/ for people who want to try it, though.
Yeah Peertube is awesome. It already scales very well with its tech. Its been growing too. I think its good to have multiple alternatives. Its a good free option.
Ultimately the platform is the last important part of watching a video. If the creators can get more $$/activity going somewhere else they will. It happened to Vimeo, it will happen to Youtube.
HA! Jokes on them! I'm running a budget dell PC from 10 years ago! The PC itself is slower than any delays they cause! I'm talkin' 3-5 minutes to load each video. Sometimes the whole PC freezes, and you need to unplug it. Sometimes the browser crashes right at the end, so you gotta relaunch the browser, and then wait 20 minutes for all the tabs to populate. Then you gotta end task on all the individual windows. Then you gotta reload just the tab you're looking at, and THEN you can wait 5 minutes again.
You think I'm even going to notice your 10 second delay?
I know times are hard, but you could build/find a PC for <$300 that doesn't run that badly. Hell, even a ~$150-200 tablet would be way better than that.
I saw something that might be this happening last week where every video took an extra 20 seconds to load and presented a popup that took you to the support page where the first thing listed to troubleshoot your problem was disabling ad blockers, but this week the videos are perfect and load normally; but the rest of the page is absolutely fucked. Like the "playables" section last night was tripping balls and looked like a slot machine as the entries randomly changed around at light speeds. The comments, related videos section on the right, description, etc all just refuse to load now on Firefox for me.
Considering these issues for me have only happened recently, and coincidentally around the same time an issue with Google services took a shitton of the entire Internet down for almost a whole day, I suspect it's not about blocking ad blockers so much as it is Google just fucking sucks at implementing any changes across the board of their products.
Ublock origin (if your using it) "fixed" the issue shortly after. Im convinced someone at google works on adblock lol. Probably not true but the timing was really fast.
Spy vs spy
So here's what happened recently:
Guess who missed ad money?
But of course, maybe they got the ad money and the only losers were:
I feel like I understand why they removed the "Do no evil" sign. Because now, they are messing with both, the product and the customers, only providing as much as is required to take their money, instead of the full, advertised service.
Freetube works pretty well, there's a cat and mouse game with youtube changes though.
Wish they could use Gemini to generate ad clicks instead.
uBlock Origin->gear icon (settings)->My Filters->add this line:
||googlevideo.com/videoplayback$xhr,3p,method=get,domain=www.youtube.com
Thanks I will try this
I didn’t know if I’m crazy or of YouTube is genuinely slow for me (with adblocker)
Turns out I was not crazy
I mean, you can never really rule it out..
Ok so im not crazy. I was wondering why videos kept buffering every minute this past week.
I've got 500Mb fiber internet and YouTube refuses to stream above 360p unless i manually change it. Which each update becomes harder and harder to do as they hide the video quality button somewhere else.
If you use Firefox:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-video-quality/
I've noticed occasional "buffering" before playback starts through the past week or so. Takes like ten seconds before the video starts playing. Hasn't been worse than that so far, knock on wood.
Youtube feels like an impossible service to actually compete with, whether through the enormous and complicated setup required or amassing creators/users. It's basically a monopoly and it sucks. One will just have to resist Google's bullshit using whatever means available for as long as possible.
Still I prefer buffering over the inane noises of commercials
Yeah, I'd genuinely rather watch whatever amount of seconds forced ads are of black, silent screen than see an ad. It sucks and is awkward, but whatever.
Yeah, I run multiple ad-blockers and haven't noticed any slowdown or other degradation.
I've noticed a lot of videos give me a still ad and make me click "skip" at the very start of videos through my ad blockers.
Sample size one but I'm on Fedora with Firefox and uBlock. Not seeing any issues yet.
I'm on Android w/ PipePipe & GrayJay and have been experiencing issues with videos loading a little then buffering for like 5 minutes
Same with Piped. Pinchflat downloads it so even if it were throttled when it fetches, it will play at local speeds
Same setup, same results. I do intentionally keep the resolution low though.
Same on FireDragon with Garuda.
Then I suppose it's a good thing they're limiting non-premium users from using the "high bitrate" quality options?
^ that was sarcasm. HARSH sarcasm. With both middle fingers pointing toward a Google logo and spitting.
yeah I had some blender visuals I made that only look good high quality because of the detail and it looks sick as my desktop wallpaper with hidamsri but horrible and blurry viewing it on youtube at the highest quality
I feel like this has been happening for a while, but maybe it's just that YouTube's website is shite.
Grayjay :)
YT's blocked on it. Fuck you, Google.
https://github.com/futo-org/grayjay-android/issues/2351
If Google's going to be further tightening YT to the degree where they might roll out DRM platform-wide as opposed to just limiting it to movies on the platform, I'm about to seriously start looking for stuff to watch on PeerTube because YT is not long for the world and will probably start pushing away anything that isn't AI slop at some point in terms of content.
UPDATE: A workaround has been released for this issue.
Bless you.
Revanced is fine so far
Why aren't you using another platform?
Because I don't watch random videos, I watch people I'm subscribed to and they don't exist on other platforms. I would love to switch, really. The very fact I'm on Lemmy tells you that I'm open to doing that kind of thing.
If the people you subscribe to are not ones who monetization is important you may want to consider reaching out to them and asking if they'd consider cross posting to PeerTube or another YouTube alternative. They may appreciate not putting all their eggs in one basket and reaching new potential fans.
Because YouTube is where shit happens dude. Yeah sure theres peertube and others, but frankly, nobody that people care about are uploading to them. Not to mention they don't offer the monetization opportunities for creators that YouTube does.
Ad block and sponsor block and call it a day.
Exactly. I dont mind a little extra buffering. I mostly watch things in 720 or 1080, and I've barely noticed the change.
I have no issues at all, once a vid is running. Choosing a vid takes much longer these days though, because the goddam stupid fucking algorhythm serves up 95% slop these days. Already viewed vids, ones expressly blocked, "news" stories that are YEARS old, or those in weird foreign languages, make up most of the garbage I get offered....
Oh no! What will I—Video Downloader. I'll just watch offline at my leisure.
fine by me i listen to audio of videos i watch and i dont mind the lower resolution because it means im using less internet
ublockorigin etc... 5 second unnecessary delay, very annoying . that's my experience
Is google’s company motto still ‘Don’t be evil’?
They removed that from their official code of conduct in 2018.
I've been using this
Down with google
Daniel Suelo for CEO of YouTube!
So this is it. The enshittification has reached slowlorris levels.
That's a relief. I've been dreading the day when they introduce server-side adsm but it seems we're not there yet 😅 I'm not sure what they think they'll accomplish with this when it's A LOT less painful than turning off your adblocker and dealing with the ads, though. Maybe they're just trying random things to see what works.
I mean sure I guess but I can just like download them for later?
I haven't noticed on Tubular.
I had to allow a bunch of stuff in pihole because I wasn't able to use Google flights or Google News and some functions in Gmail, the sites never finished loading
You might need a little bit of degoogleizer.
In a small dose, it eases the pain, but with the right treatment, your life will become yours again.
As much as I hate dealing with their shenanigans, I can’t really blame them either. As long as I can get away with using an adblocker, I will - but honestly, YouTube gives me more value for free than a lot of services I actually pay for. I have no moral argument for why YouTube should let me watch videos for free, even though I like free stuff just as much as the next guy.
oh i absolutely can blame them, because they made a choice. either you take my money and respect my privacy, or you sell all of my data and won’t get my money. however you can’t sell all of my data and take my money, nono, f u alphabet, that’s not how this works.
I did not always use an ad blocker. Frankly my stance is they've made their bed, now they get to lie down in it. If it wasn't for YouTubes ad quality being so poor I would have never bothered taking the 30 seconds it takes to install an adblock those 10 or so years ago
How about: they're a major factor in the rise of post truth and in ruining the Internet. And in hacking democracy itself
Their control is endangering the human race. They've crushed countless innovations to keep a stranglehold on technology. They proactively helped fascists get into power
They don't deserve to make ever increasing money off us. They're not content creators - they're bad stewards of a public forum they bought and expanded through monopolistic practices.
I'd say it's not only moral to deny them ad revenue, I think watching their ads is a danger to society
YouTube gives me more value for free than a lot of services I actually pay for
That's the really annoying part.
I've been considering swapping to other services for a long time, but to follow the creators I want to follow I'd have to subscribe to Nebula and Floatplane and I'd still miss out on quite a few creators.
I’m curious what people would prefer for revenue generation models. Just subscription fees? A lot of folks also seem resistant to that as well.
I would happily pay for yt premium, if that also meant that google does not violate my privacy and sell my data.
That’s my problem, you have to be logged in if you pay and that’s just more data for them to suck up. I watch not logged in. If I want to comment I use a different device.
Direct sponsoring has worked in the past with many open source projects (including lemmy.world). Could be closer to what Patreon does.
might be brain damaged but haven't noticed a slowdown or seen any ads in occasional use.
Yeah the moment you open invidious on the same machine it stops. Curious huh.
I watch ad free, and screen off through the Brave browser. All good for now.
Same here, but do you notice how bad the algorhythm has become, at offering useful, interesting, or relevant vids..?
Yes I have actually. I thought it was a trump thing. Like you watch one news item featuring him, then they push a hundred reaction videos of some guy playing newsman in his home.
I can't tell an honest difference between 1080p and 720p from across a room. On a monitor, sure, but I grew up in the 90's. Anything 480 and above is tolerable to me.
I'm pirating it, should I demand my money back for poor service? Lmao
Did you comment in the wrong place?
Your comment is talking about resolution, and the post is about YouTube throttling speeds, not resolution of videos.
I suspect you were trying to respond to a comment instead of making your own top level comment, though I'm not certain.
In any case, if the comment is in the wrong place, now you know. If it isn't, well, it may help to know that it's out of place thematically.
Edit: I think this comment https://midwest.social/comment/18120563 is where you intended to respond
No longer working for me on Firefox, Win11. Now what?
Yeah they are, I noticed it get really, really bad this week. It's an awful experience. But they'll leave my browser before my adblocker does.
100%. Half the time I get blocked due to VPN or whatever I just close the tab and go with my life. The rest of the time I try all known workarounds. If those fail, I just go with my life.
My hatred for monopolisation and enshittification is stronger than my desire to watch content on any platform.
So say we all.
Lol, this is exactly why I use Lemmy. Sure there might be less engagement than reddit. But I'd rather gargle a bucket of diarrhea than go back to that shitty place.
Amen.
The thing is, their anti-adblocking measures are still less unpleasant than actually watching ads.
just use invidious instead
This is also a good beginner way to learn about self hosting in docker.
Freetube can make a great backup for when google inevitably breaks something.
And for thise videos you really cant miss there is always yt-dlp scripted to download a channels latests video on a schedule straight to jellyfin of course.
I have not visited the youtube website in more then a year.
It's not perfect, but I use grayjay. They have an android app and a desktop client, and are usually pretty quick to make updates that will sidestep Google's anti-adblocking measures (within 1-2 days.) Again, not perfect, but I don't mind a slightly worse experience to avoid having to see an ad. Plus it has sponsor block support built right in
This doesn't seem very straightforward...
Same. When I opened the Stats for Nerds pop-up, I noticed that I was being throttled to 1500kbps. Anything above 720p was unplayable this week.
But apparently the Ublock Origin devs yet again figured out another workaround, because streaming speeds are back to normal for me as of yesterday.