Technology

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.

Too be honest I was fine with seeing an ad every few videos. But at some point it became unskippable ads before , during and after a video.

I never had an issue with YT's 1-2 skipable ads at the beginning, or even the banner ad. But they got greedy.

The midrolls and the unskipable ads was the trigger point for me.

A very large chunk of what people consume these days is effectively already ads

That’s what grinds my gears. I understand ads pay bills, but showing multiple ads before a trailer for a video game or movie is excessive.

There is potentially a world in which you want to see ads because ads themselves do technically provide a service. You do want to know about things you care about and would want to buy… you just don’t want it obnoxiously shoved into your face all of the time in psychologically manipulative ways.

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 have YouTube premium

Wow, so you pay them and they still screw you? Glad that’s a product I’ll never buy then!

Also I'd rather wait without ads than wait with ads, like what's the point?