913
Google is intentionally throttling YouTube videos, slowing down users with ad blockers
(www.windowscentral.com)
“Do evil.” Google’s official new slogan.
this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2025
913 points (98.6% liked)
Technology
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That's true but I wouldn't really classify this as evil.
Serving videos isn't easy or cheap. It's hard and expensive.
I obviously use an adblocker everywhere and so should you.
But saying that Google or anyone else is doing anything wrong by blocking adblockers is ridiculous. When they finally succeed, I will just accept that I finally lost after many many years. My usage of YouTube will likely go down substantially as well. Crying about it after you have used their service for free for YEARS, really makes no sense.
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.
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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.
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The thing is, their anti-adblocking measures are still less unpleasant than actually watching ads.
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God damn American companies love fucking up everything for money!
Make me wait 5 mins on a black screen and I'll do that before watching an ad.
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
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I'd sooner spend five minutes waiting for the video to buffer than five seconds watching an ad
Welcome back to 2007
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I've started bulk downloading videos with yt-dlp and watching them locally. No ads or throttling to deal with.
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Daniel Suelo for CEO of YouTube!
Been using revanced for months and haven't noticed a difference other than no ads or sponsors on bigger channels.
Ive been commenting on creators videos asking them to upload elsewhere as well. I doubt it will work, but we could try
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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.
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"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
Down with google
And his stupid CEO specifically. I've yet to hear him pitch a good idea.