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.
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...
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.
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.
At this point I'm convinced they're trying to drive people away to shrink the overhead on bandwidth and servers, but it doesn't work like that. Not after you got them hooked on videos of cats after years of a steady drip of memes.
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....
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.
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?
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.
I'm not so sure – YouTube is much larger than you might think. It's not the video platform you grew up with anymore. No one in this world can match the backlog and content density/diversity of YouTube, not even all streaming services combined. People complaining that YouTube is dying because a few YouTubers "retire" from their main gig or that it's not the same anymore don't understand how YouTube works. They might not comprehend that the time of their "bubble" has come to an end. When this happens, there are already five new bubbles/niches that are even bigger, and you might not have heard of them, but they are more successful than their "predecessor." The old bubble is still there to consume in the backlog. Someday in the future, AI will have a field day with the data accumulated via YouTube.
It is transforming, for sure, but I don't think it will destroy itself completely. In a sense, you can say it will destroy whatever view you had of YouTube as a platform because it is not what it once was.
To my knowledge, YouTube will hit the billion-user milestone this year (Netflix currently at ~250 million paid users). If we look at other data trends from streaming services, it suggests that YouTube will grow more over the coming years. I don't know how anyone can match YouTube as a whole. In certain niches, sure, but as a whole, it would be like fighting windmills. There's a reason no one tries to tackle YouTube as a platform and only goes for certain niches.
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 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 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.
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.
I know it's a pain, but what's to stop us from using download-clis? In theory I could "collect" the urls that are recommended to me from my home page, call the clis, click all the videos to update my recommendations then close the browser.
using the browser isn't necessary to keep your watch history up to date.
yt-dlp can log in as you by reading your cookies from your browser, and, with the optional --mark-watched flag, mark your downloaded videos as watched in your YT account.
The no competition in the market, is the issue. Hope the situation improves in near future. With it innovations will gradually increase & the demand within the markets will point the directions.
There is competition when it comes to technology stack. People just don't want to use alternatives because the amount of content/users is less on others.
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.
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.
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
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.
Specifically, nationalize the backend, Google can keep their website. And place it in the hands of something like the UN, rather than any specific country. I hardly trust Uncle Sam any more than Google's investors. They've successfully monopolized video hosting, now turn it into a public resource.
And open it up to the world, too. Google might get to keep their website, but everyone else can access the same database, too. May the best front end win.
As much as some may want to believe the UN is some sort of «Global Supreme Court», it is not. It mainly functions by consensus of all other nation (including those who explicitly chooses to abstain). Therefore, by making the UN somehow responsible for the “backend”, as you have said, or as the custodian of the entire repository/library of videos uploaded to YouTube, every member nations would then have their own priorities on what to "keep" and what to "remove" from the repository/library. Since the UN works principaly by consensus only a very small subset of all the videos will be kept as being universally non-controversial. Hence, the majority of videos will be irrecoverably erased.
Alternatively, with a fediverse-like protocol, everyone will be responsible to host their own videos and also videos they consider important/valuable to archive and/or help distribute. Thus, no single point of control and no need to "nationalize" YouTube. Of course it is hard and complex, nevertheless it is only the first step toward a more resilient and a more equitable video sharing/distribution infrastructure.
These are some very pretty words that express ideas without much self-reflection on why the ideas might be bad.
I mean, I suppose you did say it yourself that you can't trust the US government... but why would you trust ANY government? You know why I trust Google more than any government? I understand Google's motivations ($$$). Put something into the hands of government and suddenly that thing is burdened by the desires of every politician and their special interest financiers.
"Place it in the hands of something like the UN" would mean some international body I assume. Comprised of and led by whom exactly? And also, who would fund the thing? You suggest nationalization, so.. taxpayers? Sure, here's your $99/year Degooglebase access fee tax I guess? And beyond just making sure there's enough money to keep the lights on, we need to make sure there's enough money to pay creators. After all, YouTube isn't just a library. It's an economy larger than some countries and there would be consequences to destabilizing that economy. People aren't just posting content for the love of the shared experience.
Please don't take what I'm saying here to be a defense of Google. Google is a shitty company for so many reasons. But advocating for nationalization of YouTube is just a horrifically bad idea in such manner as it was presented.
But - all is not lost. First: for the creators you enjoy - find ways to support them other than Google. Make it possible for them to continue when YouTube stops being lucrative enough.
Second: find, use, and advocate for the use of alternative services. There is no single site that is going to be able to replace YouTube. It simply isn't going to happen unless PornHub wants to step up to the game and create their own SFW site YouTube-killer. They have the infrastructure and capacity to host and share absolutely massive amounts of video and have the business capabilities to accept income and pass it on to creators on a large scale. But that's an entirely different discussion.
Best to look at things differently. Like the Fediverse and the internet itself, it might be better off if the
platform were distributed.
Anything better than listening 3 songs and getting 5 ads.
Stop being trash youtube. Be normal like you once were and i would actually consider a paid subscription IF i get to fully exclude shorts on my side of the platform.
I don't always click on a YouTube ad, but when I do it's a UI failure because it's an accidental click. How much do you want to bet this crackdown is a distraction from the fact their ad system doesn't perform as well as advertised?
Speaking of which... Don't you just love how changing the volume on your phone causes the audio indicator to overlap the button that let's you skip ads?
If you wait in front of an empty screen it's much more pleasant than being in front of visual and audio spam drilling into your head.
It's of course true that YouTube can't support a website for free, so it would be the correct thing to watch some ads: problems arising are that (A) some ads are malicious (either as misinformation or as viruses or as links to those), (B) they've grown from a reasonable amount to an unreasonable one and often interrupted at the worst possible time)
Been using revanced, sometimes using Iceraven (ff fork) w/ ublock origin on phone, and using librewolf (another ff fork) also w/ ublock origin on desktop. So far never encountered slow down since November 2023.
Is this slow down only on select extension issue? Although when it first happend (late 2023) I was thrown up by sudden yt not loading on my librewolf but it only happend only on single day, afterward it gone.
I am for sure one of the smaller number of people doing this, but I watch YouTube on my TV using the TV app. As a result I always had to watch ads. I wish I could avoid them. I suppose a could watch from an alternative and then AirPlay it to my TV, but that’s about it.
I wish Mozilla would add the ability to set User-Agent for the different containers they offer in Firefox with their addon. Would be sweet to set it to Chrome in my YouTube container only.
People dont use Peertube because that guy over there doesn't use Peertube. Or that other guy. Other that person who makes content. I think you get the picture.
Can someone create (or does it already exist?) an app that plays the videos in the background, remove the ads and then let you playback the whole video ad-free? Sort of like you did back in the VHS-days....
On Android, there's Newpipe which doesn't run ads, and Newpipe x Sponsorblock which clips ads out from the video. On desktop there is FreeTube which also has SponsorBlock you can turn on.
Try opening a link from Gmail in Firefox or searching Google for a specific piece of information. SSDD. Fuck Google. At this point they're in par with the evil Amazon.
I do not care. I only watch 10 channels and these are in my favorites. I do not use the algorithm and thanks to European law the frontpage is deactivated. I also ever watch only one video per day and then do something else, so they can slow down the website as much as they want since I am not scrolling. I click on a channel and on a video, that's it. If it gets too bad I rather not use Youtube anymore, it is not the end of the world.
You tube is a central repository for hundreds of thousands of hours of learning. So while you might know everything is a great equalizer for those who are still learning
I mean this wholeheartedly and by no means do I mean to be rude or snarky. I'm glad that works for you but unfortunately there is a ton of us who have to use it for a huge list of things. I personally use it to learn how to fix or make things because for me I need a video for it. I use a bunch of work arounds and such but eventually this will become a bigger issue. Soon embedded videos will stop working for news websites and such at this rate.
Does it affect Invidious front-end as well?? I have been noticing that for a while now, but I thought maybe it is because the page doesn't use native yt js code to track video download. the same videos would load battery smooth when accessed through YT.
I’m not very tech savvy, my Adblock sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t. I’ve been using Firefox with extensions incognito for YouTube or I just avoid the site these days. I really liked it for music videos, since in unwilling to pay Spotify. So far my strategy is working.
I don't understand how anyone can put up with youtube without premium. Every time I visit a friends house I am shocked at the level of bullshit they are ok with. I'd pay a lot more than 10 bucks.
I'd happily pay for premium as I use YouTube religiously. But it's Google so fuck them, they already process my information in order to show me ads and profit off of my data. I think that's payment enough, so I'll just find any free way possible to watch YouTube without ads.