Firefox users are reporting an ‘artificial’ load time on YouTube videos. YouTube says it’s part of a plan to make people who use adblockers “experience suboptimal viewing, regardless of the browser they are using.”
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.
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.
Oh wow, I just opened lemmy because a YouTube video was taking extra time to open in Firefox lol.
Everything fine with private DNS and brave 👍👍
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.
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.
Strange then how my Vivaldi browser doesn’t have the load time, then. Almost like it’s a punishment for non-chromium users.
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.
I’ll take 20 minutes of silence over 1 second of ads. I will never willingly watch an ad I didn’t explicitly request. Ever.
Life is short and I won’t devote any of it to advertisements.
That being said, I do pay for YouTube premium because I do use it a lot and understand that the platform has every right to make money. But that makes what they’re doing with Firefox and ad blockers worse.
Honestly, worst case scenario, if YouTube manages to completely eliminate adblockers, maybe by making some kind of cryptographic system where the browser has to provide a token embedded inside the ad video stream in order to access the video, I would still use an extension to mute sound and draw a black bar over the ads while technically playing them in the background, it’s not the wait time that bothers me, it’s how repetitive and obnoxious the ads are, I just don’t want to perceive them.
Which is why you have to void warranties and go through a lot of hassle to r Unlock the bootloader, or root your own phone and have actual control over it.
And that’s the reason Google is trying to push shitty web standards to remove your control.
And why Apple and Microsoft keep restricting your access to your OS, with rumors of Windows 12 being cloud-only.
Many governments around the world don’t want you to have any control or privacy. Many tech giants don’t want you to have any control or privacy. It’s the same old thing religions have done forever. Enforce a lack of control and privacy through violence, social pressure, or resources. Only now, the enforcement style is indirect, trying to say you don’t own your device, can’t use ad blockers or privacy tools, have to agree to terms and conditions that waive your rights, your usage has to be monitored, or that backdoors have to be built into everything.
Don’t expect this behavior to stop unless regulation is created to prevent it, or the company caves to financial or social pressure to change…for now.
Don’t expect regulation to be created unless you put people who care about privacy and such in power.
Even then, people in power need to be held accountable if they misbehave, or nothing else matters.
It all comes back to class struggle and politics.
“Which color hat did the extra in the background of your latest ad wear?” Wrong answer = 10 ads.
If they could, YouTube would hire someone to sit on your couch and make sure you consume the ads with your utmost attention.
But they can’t extend it longer than the shortest ads, since then it’ll affect users after they watch ads too, which kinda defeats the point
That’s not a problem. Just put in longer ads. Or multiple ads in a row.
Or multiple ads in a row.
They aleady do that
Exactly, so this still guarantees a better experience than ad viewers because you will always have the minimum ad length
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
Deliberately and actively try to make user experience worst is shit evil. Now im gonna actively share ubo to all people i talk IRL
In my experience, Google as a whole has been getting worse and worse to use over the past 5-10years.
Biggest mistake I made was moving the company emails to Google workspaces 😭. Cant wait to be rid of them.
Why was it a mistake? I’ve used Google workspaces for business email for about 5 years and find it to be a really good and inexpensive service.
“Biggest mistake” was an exaggeration, but it caused me a lot of headache.
The email itself is alright, but then we started using the drive and the calendar.
By the time we realized that the shared drive is not usable for our application we had ~750gb of data which was supper annoying to retrieve.
Calendar is annoying because it doesn’t play well with outlook calendar.
I’d rather a 5 second pause then see something trying to hijack my freewill.
Honestly, as long as the video itself doesn’t have interruptions, I’m okay with the ad-free experience having a small delay or even lower video resolution. I don’t have to have 4k 120 FPS video on everything.
What I don’t want is constant interruptions, wild changes in emotional tone or volume, obnoxious and manipulative ads, politically sponsored bullshit, or constant pestering to disable my ad blocker and tracking protection. In short, once the video starts, leave me alone.
I can appreciate that Google has spent its entire existence trying to find another revenue stream beyond advertising, and largely failed, but I don’t care. If my choices are to continue being manipulated and lied to by companies and politicians paying for the privilege, and not using YouTube, I’ll just stop using YouTube. I’ve done it before with other services I used much more frequently.
Either they shut up about using ad blockers, or they give me an alternative.
And yes, I realize this is a very selfish and entitled response. If I get value out of something that costs other people time and money to provide me, it is fair that I give back in some way. Traditionally, that was done via companies serving ads and spying on its users.
But enough is enough. Modern advertising and tracking keep getting worse, and trying to enforce them is not the way to move forward.
No ads or delays > No ads with delays >>>>>> ads
i never experienced that delay in the first place…
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.
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
