A new wave of slowdowns is hitting users, with the only resolutions being disabling the ad blocker or upgrading to premium.
Or just switching to ublock origin.
Or just switching to newpipe.
Or just switching to freetube.
etc
etc
etc
Or downloading videos to watch later? Does Plex recognize YouTube videos?
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.
YouTube revanced has also been working for me
And still, I’m more likely to stop using YouTube than to stop using an ad blocker.
That’s what they want. Get all the users they aren’t able to monetize off the platform to lower their costs.
I mean, I like a good Google hate train as much as the next guy, but that’s kind of a legitimate thing to want.
Follow the damn train, CJ!
Ooooooh my dawg
It’s YouTube’s fault for setting the wrong expectations when they benefited from wild growth and success by being free all these years. I dare they go 100% paywalled. I know they won’t. Otherwise they can’t double dip on both premium and advertiser money. Even if they manage to go 100% paywall, it’s inevitable that they will start introducing adverts to paying customers as well.
Then I’mma leech HARDER
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.
Good news: you can have the best of both by watching everything for free through piped video!
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.
Frankly, I’d stop using YouTube entirely before I’d start using it without an adblocker. At least there are no signs of it slowing down for me, yet.
I’d consider paying a few bucks a month, but not $10 or more
Get rid of shitty YouTube music and give me a tier that’s no ads only
That is precisely why Premium Lite was killed off, it did exactly what you are looking for.
I don’t think that was ever available in my country
That’s just leaving money on the table
I really wish government would just come in already and shatter google into a million pieces with the anti-monopoly hammer already.
Google is far worse than AT&T ever was when it was shattered into the baby bells.
Just gotta learn from AT&T to not let them re-congeal back together like somekind of fucked up liquid metal terminator 20+ years down the line.
50% of congress wants to know how the computer mouse stays alive without food.
They pretend to be ignorant but they’re really looking the other way because they’re lobbied for meager sums like $10,000
Our best and brightest?
Watching YouTube load slowly is better than watching ads.
Exactly! I started surfin’ da information highway in the 90’s. I remember watching an image unveil itself slowly as a morning sunrise.
I will download videos then. I refuse to not use an adblocker on the modern internet.
Pirate everything, it’s the only way to show greedy corporations the content should be free.
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…
Time to quit YouTube then
Heck yeah let’s all go to break.com
Didn’t know this was still a thing haha. It brings me back
I already subscribed to someone on Floatplane. If it gets much worse on YouTube, it might be time to switch fully.
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.
I didn’t say anything about paywalled.
Google’s plan is to DRM the web
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?
It would be really cool to be able to download YouTube videos withour the sponsorship segments, I wonder if there is a way to do his already?
yt-dlp has a command-line option to download videos while using sponsor block.
yt-dlp https://youtube... --sponsorblock-remove allLike the ads surrounding the video and breaking the video up or the spots in the video where the creator hawks their latest wares?
If I see one more PCBWay ad…
I swore I’ve seen a FOSS project that did that. An ad segment detector basically
“We’ll make our service worse, that’ll show them!”
Ok google, good luck with that.
Unless you inform those customers with some kind of UI that they’re being throttled because of ad-block how does Google expect them to uninstall it?
I genuinely believe they are trying to push adblock users off the platform completely
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.
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.
The problem is that only conglomerates can eat the cost of running such a platform. Ads will be the end of free interne, that’s for sure.
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.
And if it would be federated, there would be no cycle.
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 have YouTube premium
Wow, so you pay them and they still screw you? Glad that’s a product I’ll never buy then!
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’m generally okay with the idea of “you can get it for free and we’ll include ads to pay for it, or you can pay instead”.
Where I’m definitely not okay is “you can pay, and we’ll include ads anyway.”
The sick twist is that I use Ublock Origin and won’t ever pay for YouTube premium and I haven’t experienced even the slightest issue streaming videos on YouTube. 😂
Anecdotally at best. I know it’s not what you want to hear, but you’re making a conclusion based on something one person said.
I have YouTube premium and an adblocker and I don’t have this problem. I’m skeptical that it’s related.
I have YouTube premium and an adblocker and I don’t have this problem. I’m skeptical that it’s related.
I too am a YouTube premium customer, and my video performance is horrible lately.
Funny enough, on my living room smart TV YouTube app my performance has been bad as well, even though I am logged in to my premium YouTube account.
Something is going on, and it does effect some (at least) premium customers.
Same, YT Premium, Firefox, ad blocker, no issues with streaming.
So, since writing the above I’ve been having issues with YouTube. I’ve been connected to my VPN, so perhaps that’s part of it (by which I mean Google slowing it down, the VPN doesn’t noticeably slow down any other sites).
I tried deactivating my ad blocker, but it hasn’t made a difference. I’ll try more stuff to see if I can figure it out.
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.
After getting premium I just switched the adblocker off for YouTube. Premium would be far too expensive if it didn’t also include YouTube Music :-/
uBlock Origin works on YouTube Music, too.
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.
Ublock doesn’t accept donations
While uBlock would be most deserving of a donation imo, there are others that do accept. Even if it’s an ad blocker you don’t actively use, you’d still be supporting a developer who’s using their time and skills to improve the web.
Donating to no one would be better than paying YouTube.
YouTube already has ways to block users with adblock. They just haven’t fully rolled it out yet.
Lately they blocked playing videos when I had uBlock Origin running, but it was just a warning I could click away. They might also slow down page loading and playback.
YouTube has the ability to lock users with adblock out, they are just very careful about using it. Mostly starting with trials in smaller countries and getting more bold over time.
Ha! Serves you right
That’s why Invidious exists.
I dusted off an old laptop, put debian on it, put an SSD and now I have my own invidious instance, among other services…
No ads, no throttling, no bullshit. Google is very welcome to suck it. I’d gladly stop using youtube, but there’s no competition.
Next step is guaranteed to be limiting the number of views without being logged in.
I have YouTube premium. It still detects the adblocker. It’s infuriating.
The more stuff they do to shoot themselves in the foot, the sooner something else comes in to replace youtube
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.
TIL. Thank you very much. Looks like I’m going to be using that if YouTube gets even more painful.
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.
Be the pioneer and help others move across.
Care to share any of the recommendations? I don’t use YouTube often but would be happy to visit and use an alternative
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.
If everyone keeps expecting everything for free there will never be competition :)
Let me convince you otherwise:
- Who set that expectation in the first place? Don’t all cut-throat corps undercut the previous established companies and gained a lot of market share by being “loss leaders”?
- Do you think YouTube would dare to go completely Pay only?
- Lack of competition is not an excuse to double dip on both customer data and advertisements.
- People who say that we need to pay for server costs should consider that streaming services are now asking for money but also introducing adverts. The money is too lucrative for them to leave on the table.
- Everybody is happy to pay when there’s 1 service or 2 services that give them everything for a nominal fee. Cases in point: Netflix, Steam.
- A lot of people pay for twitch because it’s the only platform they care about. Paying for A platform doesn’t mean we will pay for ALL platforms.
Or, there is plenty of competition even now, but since users are the product, not the customer, the competition isn’t what people think it is or should be.
Thank you for reminding me to get myself an invidious instance set up. It isn’t a huge pain or anything, right?
Not really, they have a docker compose file ready to go, and it works without issue.
I wish I could do the same thing with my 2008 VAIO laptop :/
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.
Might as well just stop paying for premium then if they’re going to ding you anyway.
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.
Why pay when you can watch it for free without ads through piped video! Pirate everything, live for free!!
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
If anyone is curious about the reason, my primary motivation for having Premium is that I don’t want my kids to see more ads than necessary, and they’re on YouTube on their phones, on the Chromecast (connected to a dumb projector) and on the computer.
The YouTube app has a lot to offer them that they won’t get in other apps and I can’t realistically force them to use other alternatives everywhere. Especially since I have shared custody and they’ll be using YouTube at their mom’s place as well.
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Pornhub owns most of those alternatives.
*Aylo
I love how they have clearly tried to hide that they make their money from porn. They used to be called MindGeek. The private equity firm that owns them is called Ethical Capital Partners.
Ethical Capital Partners
So I assume they can guarantee none of the women in the porn they show are victims of human trafficking.
(I can’t know that in the porn I watch either, but I don’t host it.)
in fairness, they did delete most of their content base after a minor was found to be on the platform. To the degree that keeps investors happy, i suppose they do.
Monetizing one is much easier than the other.
I’m actually really surprised pornhub hasn’t moved into the YouTube like space. They have the infrastructure and expertise. Why not branch into that ? Especially if YouTube keeps pissing off users.
Reputation, if you think Nintendo is copyright happy when people put their things on YouTube wait for it to be on “pornhub kids”
LoL wouldn’t even let YouPorn’s team compete
People will pirate porn, they don’t care to pirate COD montages
Use a different front end like piped video! All the content is free and no ads!
Oh no (continues to watch on freetube) anyway…
Revanced Extended ftw!
Alternative front ends are a god send.
What is freetube? (Sorry for the stupid question)
One of many different “third party frontends” for YouTube which, amongst other things, cut out ads and avoid performance throttling.
Personally I use one called NewPipe, and previously one called LibreTube. There are others too.
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One of the few uYou+ users on iOS.
YouTube speed has been shit ever since they stopped actually buffering.
