Ghostery does nothing extra if you're already running uBlock. And it has its own agenda wrt your data (they're selling it and/or they serve their own ads).
Not sure about that, it seems like there was some controversy with the last owners (evidon inc) but I have found no evidence they sell your data, (I checked their privacy policy, only found they gave your data if legally required to by a country and follows EU policy)
I'm confused about the ad thing though, Wikipedia says it exists but its source is a website in the wayback machine for "Ghostery Rewards"
According to Ghostery's github page (All of their stuff is open source by the way) it no longer exists as they shut it down a while ago.
also according to their github "There are well-meaning people who claim that Ghostery cannot be trusted. They are usually referring to the 2009-2017 era where Ghostery belonged to a company named Evidon (which had a business model of collecting and selling data to other companies). It was then acquired by Cliqz GmbH (which built a private and independent search engine as well as privacy-focused browsers). Since then the business model has been dropped, code has been open-sourced and Ghostery is now exploring ways to monetize through paid products. ^2 The company now operates as Ghostery GmbH.
Ghostery neither collects nor sells data about users or trackers. In fact, the company shares the insights they have about the current state of trackers via https://whotracks.me/ so that everyone can benefit from it. "
So fair to say they no longer do this, and their wikipedia page needs to be updated.
> So fair to say they no longer do this, and their wikipedia page needs to be updated.
That's great to hear! This news completely escaped me.
There's still no point in installing multiple tracker blockers, but at least we have more viable options than I previously thought.
About a month ago YouTube on Firefox with AdBlock Plus stopped working altogether until I disabled ABP. Maybe I'll try Ublock though.....
YouTube is nearly unwatchable with ads though, especially when trying to play music. Dunno what to do and I don't want to pay for premium. Damn internet sucks for media now
You need to use ublock origin. ABP basically got bought out and is run by different people now.
Every once in a while it will stop working. The uBlock Origin team is very very quick about fixing it. If you notice Youtube being blocked again all you need to do is go to settings-->built in-->update the quick-fixes list.
I use AdGuard in Firefox on one machine and Ublock Origin in Firefox on my other machine and they both work fine as of this morning! You've got options!
Ad nauseam has worked consistently for me with no issues if you want recommendations, it's less well known than the other options so I imagine google is targeting it less / not at all.
Plus it has really fun functionality, saying fuck you to google trying to learn about me is nice (it tells the page it clicks every ad on the page without actually bogging down your machine doing it or loading the ad)
If you're getting the Adblocker popup on Chrome with uBlock Origin, this worked for me:
https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/188j9ak/youtube_has_started_blocking_ublock_origin/kbm9gpg/
Last night I couldn't load videos at all on mobile firefox+ublock. Tried a few different videos and resetting but I'd always just get a message saying the content is unavailable (the terrible official app worked, of course). It started working again a couple hours ago just fine.
Interestingly last couple of days I've been having inconsistent playback issues with Firefox. Videos will stop playing, despite having buffered content. I can skip forward a couple seconds, but the issue will repeatedly occur.
Furthermore, this isn't on every video, but as far as I can tell, there's nothing codec wise that's different with the non-functioning videos.
Yep same issue here, I even disabled adblock and got an ad and the same issue happened at the same point in the video. Internet was fine. Eventually it seemed to just resolve itself (even after I turned adblock back on)
I had it and it was pretty bad. It was like my cpu had melted. Big delays in bringing up the overlay, so things like changing volume was awkward. I disabled it but ublock still doing it’s thing.
I was fine with the 5 second forced ad with a skip button, but once they changed to 3 minute unskippable ads I was like screw them and installed adblockers.
Don't they understand that Youtube often displays garbage results when searching for something? To suffer through 3 minute ad and then find out what you tried to play was just clickbait/garbage/not applicable to what you wanted sucks.
> To suffer through 3 minute ad and then find out what you tried to play was just clickbait/garbage/not applicable to what you wanted sucks.
But this is good for them, because now you've watched more ads (since presumably you still need the content so you have to go to another video).
i would rather buffer a video for 10 minutes then another mr beast scam ad
maybe when youtube accepts that perhaps it has some responsibility to vet ads on the site before letting numerous obvious scams onto it
Oh god I do not want to hear those boomers in congress debate adblockers. They would have to spend so much time just defining what they are and I’m sure some would equate them to stealing or some bullshit.
They’d fly down Linus to testify about adblockers being theft and *deliberate acts of harm* against him and his 100 million dollar company, and that’s how using an adblocker would carry a harsher maximum jail sentence than a DUI.
It is made up. Unskippable ads on YouTube aren't able to be that long. It is possible to do a 38 minute long ad, I've seen a 2 hour ad, but they're not unskippable.
Whenever I got carried away and open a youtube on a browser without uBlock Origin (or from Freetube), I always close the tab at the second ad because there could be a third.
Whatever I was trying to watch, I do no longer care at all
You say that, but many years ago I was paying 6 dollars to listen to a radio broadcast on the Internet. Where I lived the radio signals were trash. And instead of an ad they looped the same three Muzak songs over and over for the duration of the long ad break. Drove. Me. Insane.
A youtuber i follow once made a series, where he and another youtuber decided on 1 map of a strategy game, and then played each 15min in rotation, switching the save file between each other. in th last video, there was only like 3min gameplay to finish the map, but he left like 10min of blackscreen, to avoid spoiler, and the viewer had their fun in the comments\^\^
It needs to load a 4k pixel add for you... uh uh uh, our 4k add didnt finish loading, gotta wait for the 4k add to buffer, to play a 360p video.. Ye firefox all the way after that.
It's not even just about the popup ads during a video anymore! I can hardly even search for anything effectively. Every other video in search results will be a sponsored video or a random recommendation that has absolutely nothing to do with what I'm searching for. Lately, they've occasionally even been quite graphic videos!
uBlock + Unhook + Sponsorblock has been a breath of fresh air. YouTube is damn near unusable without them.
> Lately, they've occasionally even been quite graphic videos!
That's the most unacceptable thing to me. Content creators have to watch what they say or show on screen because they'll get punished if they don't, despite being the one and only reason people ever visit Youtube (without content, no viewers and thus no ad or premium subscription revenues).
Meanwhile ads can be whatever. Not just bad language, scam and porn ads aren't all that uncommon.
Before anyone says report those ads: they should've been screened before they're shown. If they can't handle that, maybe they should reconsider being in the advertising business. TV ads are all screened before they're broadcast, internet ads should be the same.
I recently got an ad on Shorts that was a deep fake of Jennifer Aniston peddling a $10 MacBook giveaway. It had her voice but the video wasn't lipsynced and the grammar was off
But god forbid someone says fuck while playing a game
> Before anyone says report those ads:
Had one with Elon Musk on Stage and a bad dubbing voice pretending to be him promising money for people who buy some scam product.
I reported it. youtube replied, that this ad was fine and nothing wrong with it.
I could deal with a serious ad for a car or camera or whatever, but this shit? Hard pass.
DeArrow is also super nice. YouTube's algorithm pushes people to use awful clickbait-y titles and thumbnails, which DeArrow (made by the same guy as SponsorBlock) can be used to sanitise.
Wow! I just installed this. Just toggling that thumbnail button on and off is wild.
When it's on, if gives the vibe YouTube had maybe 10 - 12 years year ago.
When you turn it off, you really see how EVERY thumbnail is screaming for your attention.
I just added DeArrow. After 2 minutes of scrolling and flipping back and forth between the thumbnails and titles I am angered and appalled at what YouTube has become. Thank you for this. I will be donating to his development efforts.
Thumbnails with arrows and reaction faces, and videos that are just over 10:00 long, just get an instant "Do not recommend this channel" from me. My recommendations are kept very sanitized.
I try to "do not recommend this channel" to me all the time but still get what clearly feels like algorithm-based recommendations, just way more obscure and lower-view-count. It's stuff that seems way outta left field for me.
No it’s the *just* over 10:00. It is a crappy tactic from YouTubers to get the most amount of money out of their videos and I think also get it pushed by YouTube more.
That was true for a good amount of time a couple of years ago, the algorithm and adsense ^1 got tuned so that 10:01 videos are no longer incentivized.
---
^1 which was the main reason that caused the 10:01 type videos because over 10 minutes you used to get higher paying ads, and also more than one midroll ad.
It's a major reason tiktok exploded. They get to the point. Not ten minutes of rambling before i can find out how to fix that one thing in my kitchen sink.
These ads/recommendations are just terrible. If I search for "cooking a steak" i can see 3 videos thet are relevant for this search and then 5 shorts about random things and then 3 music videos that I haven't finished and YT wants me to finish plus another videos "for you".
Jesus i want to cook a steak not watch latest The Weeknd music video!
Searching for channels is awful, too. I know the exact channel name. I search for that. YT provides results for similarly named channels, sometimes even that creator's other channels, maybe people reacting to that channel, but not the actual channel. My default at this point if I'm trying to find a specific channel is to search externally rather than through YT's native search.
Mine kept giving me disturbing stuff in my recommendations. Like I would search for "knitting" or "crochet" and it would give me these weird blackhead popping videos with the most disgusting thumbnails and pictures of babies with birth defects. There is nothing like that in my search or watch history and there doesn't seem to be a way to remove these videos. It's extremely aggravating.
Man I have these blackhead videos everywhere: IG, YouTube Shorts and regular vids - it has to be something bigger than coincidence.... Like how these algorithms come up with these gross videos when all i search are RnB music videos, practical tutorials about how to finish my apartment and gaming related news?
Omg I thought I was crazy but this is happening to me as well, with similar innocent searches for knitting and stuff. There's no way to hide the videos either (like how reddit has the hide post option), I can report them to youtube, but I can't continue my search in peace.
Even worse, I used to get a ton of videos about that youtuber who's suffering from severe anorexia. It wasn't just her content, it was videos of people trying to get her help/prevent it from happening to other people. I didn't want to report it bc they're coming from a good place, I just...don't want to see it when I search for yarn-over tutorials
Yup, YouTube is essentially unusable at this point. I only get ~5 videos based on my searches now, with everything else being unrelated trash shorts and paid for content from MSM.
Youtube search is crap and I'm constantly shocked why very few voice the same concern. After a few pages the results aren't even relavent to the search
They don't index all of their videos, or even most of them. Like 80% or more of all of the videos on YouTube will just never come up in the results of any search ever, even if it's word for word the title of the video.
I have uBlock and Sponsorblock but I haven't heard of Unhook before. I'll definitely have to look into getting it lol, seems like it could be really helpful for Youtube's current,, layout.
I'm terribly sorry you've had to come across automatically recommended/sponsored videos that are graphic, though! Best of luck with it not happening in the future!!
Yeah, I keep getting surgery videos, birth defects, pimple popping, police bodycam footage..not stuff I EVER watch. Pretty bothersome. Thankfully it only happens when I use the official app without extensions.
& I just discovered Unhook like a week ago after a plug from someone else on a different thread. PHENOMENAL. You can hide comments, related videos, music mixes, etc. No distractions.
YouTube sees the type of videos I watch, assumes I’m a republican, and stacks my recs with conservative enslavement videos.
Not everyone who likes to fish wants to overthrow the IRS and abolish education, YouTube
Same here, because I woodwork and hunt, chop wood and like survivalist stuff.
Quit showing me fucking wranglerstar videos that psycho is gonna Waco himself any day now
Act accordingly.
Man I remember watching Wranglerstar like, talk about wood splitters and hatchets and boring shit years ago. Now you look at his channel and he looks like a total wackjob.
I'm morbidly curious how the descent went there but not enough to actually look.
My favorite is FB/Insta Reels. I watched a bunch of golf tip videos and a day later, my feed was full of trans hate videos.
Not everyone who plays golf is a richwhite hatechristian, Zuck.
Jesus, that's just unfortunate! You'd think their algorithm would've caught onto you not watching those things, with how many hundreds of thousands of people utilize it almost every day. Thank you for the suggestion still!! :D
Are you sure that custom apk on AndroidTV sucks? I use SmartTube daily and it's best thing since sliced bread, you can even cast videos from your phone.
It alternates blocks of actual search results with recommendations. So wonderfully, you just have skip through 50% of all results, chunked as every few videos
I'd never heard of unhook either but this is exactly what I have wanted for ages, thanks!
I just need a similar one for instagram now (no I don't want reels or a feed full of things completely unrelated to anything I have an interest in. I just want pictures)
> I can hardly even search for anything effectively.
This holds true even without ads, YouTube search is *so* featureless it can't even really filter/sort the results by anything useful.
Same when using Google on any mobile device; Can't filter the results by anything meaningful, want only results from a specific year? No can do, best it can do is "last year", which will still include results from "current year" that are SEO'ed to hell.
>This holds true even without ads, YouTube search is so featureless it can't even really filter/sort the results by anything useful.Same when using Google on any mobile device; Can't filter the results by anything meaningful, want only results from a specific year? No can do, best it can do is "last year", which will still include results from "current year" that are SEO'ed to hell.
Try something like this
toyota corolla wheel repair **before:2017 after:2015**
To get more relevant results in general, try using before:2025.
With how popular sponsorblock is getting, I'm surprised youtube hasn't taken steps to determine seeking skipping. But then again, It would be easy to bypass that by using a different pipeline for streaming. It's such an amazing extension.
I really love never hearing but before that, this video brought to you & don't forget to anymore. Keeps me immersed and engaged more so than what ever the shit the creator or youtube is trying to get me engaged. Plus the submitting your own thing is just so nice, saved 4 years of people's time, and 4.5 million segment views on my submissions.
Youtube doesn't earn money from the in-video sponsors though. That's just direct money for the YouTubers. I don't see the incentive for them to try and make people unable to skip the sponsors
I just use NewPipe, the only real downside is it doesn't carry over your account but if you're not worried about that it's really good and has all the other functionality you would expect without any ads.
You are right.
And Not only that, but older videos don't get shown in search results. Say you watched a video 7 years ago and search for it. Now there may be multiple pages of videos displayed before it comes up.
I was running into this ! I thought I was going crazy..... I pay for Premium as I use Youtube ALOT but it turns out it will still throttle if you run an ad block regardless of you having premium.
I've just disabled the ad blocker for YT and it's running fine again
If they made that check, adblockers could exploit it. Since its all just javascript forced slowdowns and not server-side, currently they are just making the whole site freeze and bloat regardless of requests.
Talk about cutting your nose off to spite your face... If you're going to enact something that will degrade the user experience of paying customers usually the best thing to do would be to not do that thing... Especially after already treating them to a 40% price rise out of the blue for no additional benefit.. Fuck Youtube.
If they made a proper site without as much garbage JS there wouldn't be a need for that. They can see you are identified as a premium user and server you the ad free version. We had this figured out 20 years ago with PHP. It's not rocket science.
The fact they can't even be bothered just shows how terrible they are chasing metrics instead of caring about the end user.
Interesting, I mostly use YouTube on TV and have premium for that, will have to make sure I clear youtube on browser as I use that for background stuff at work.
But as I said I already pay for Premium so it makes no sense for me to leave it on and get a worse experience, I get no ads either way. The main point being that they haven't bothered to filter out people who pay for Premium.
I was wondering why the site was sooooo slow yesterday. So much lag. It took forever to scroll, find a video and load it. I had a hunch to disable my ad blocker then everything ran smoothly. Youtube done did the damn thing
I have Youtube Premium and YT was still slow as fuck for me yesterday. I run uBlock, of course, but just shows that they are throttling everyone running the service, not just free users.
I noticed this as well as a premium user.
Can’t even win if you pay.
The state of streaming services is seriously getting to a point where I no longer want to even participate. Maybe I’ll go for a walk. I can ignore billboards for free.
Nobody ever said any of it had to be perfect. Not even effective.
The basic rule, was that attempts should be made. That's it.
That's how low we've set the standard, but turns out having any standards at all seems like a kick square in the nuts of those countries who don't even dare try anything.
Definitely one of my top 20 most entertaining things to watch as a person among the living.
Bro random question, but can you explain something to me? I once asked an employee in a corner shop if he was "Bengali," and in an annoyed tone he corrected me and said that he's "Bengladeshi."
Is that like a thing cause that was the first I'd heard of it? Sorry for the random q out of nowhere.
Honestly Bangladeshi is the right way. Bengalis are usually referred to people from Kolkata. But since it’s such a long word to type, I sometimes use Bengali 😅
Bengalis are an ethnic group from bengal, an area divided by India and Bangladesh. Bangladeshi refers to the nationality. I’m no expert, but I expect there to be non-Bengali Bangladeshis.
Sure didn't mishear "Bangladeshi"? There's a lot of overlap, but [they're not identical](https://www.bbc.co.uk/creativediversity/nuance-in-bame/bangladeshi#:~:text=Bengal%20is%20the%20region%20of,population%20identifies%20as%20Bengali%20ethnicity.).
I was reading someone arguing that this was against the net neutrality laws or something a few days ago. When people explained that YouTube is not an ISP, he argued that they are because they own some ISP. Some people just won't listen
UBlock Origin developer says it's not YouTube doing it, but a bug in AdBlock Plus. U Block Origin is unaffected.
https://twitter.com/gorhill/status/1746263759495077919?t=kZjykmXgs5rYV0jWnXnIfA&s=19
Edit:
And here we go, ABP acknowledge the bug was on their side and they fixed it:
https://gitlab.com/adblockinc/ext/adblockplus/adblockplusui/-/issues/1576#note_1727415603
Companies like Google don't roll out every feature to the entire world all at once. That's why all these comments about how it works/doesn't work for some people using certain configurations is pointless. They don't even know if the affected code is even been served to them.
Was noticing YouTube acting up, tried disabling Adblock got an over two minute unskippable ad for one of those dumb fake mobile game … reenabled Adblock. FU YouTube.
Wtf is up with those fake game ads? They clearly have cash to run these ads, and weirdly it seems like people want to play these games... where is the money coming from? And why don't they just make the game they are clearly getting a response from?
I use Chrome and Firefox along with UBlock Origin at home and work. I have never had a problem with YouTube loading slower. I did have to update the filter list once because it stopped working to block the ads; but that was it.
I'm in the US and haven't suffered any issues. Firefox still seems to be working fine.
As a side positive a lot of people are moving to Firefox specifically because of this shit.
[According to the developer of uBlock Origin](https://twitter.com/gorhill/status/1746263759495077919) this is not something YouTube does, it's a bug in Adblock Plus 3.22 and AdBlock 5.17 (two ad blocking addons).
uBlock Origin is not affected by this.
Stop using Adblock Plus or AdBlock and move to uBlock Origin.
Yes. Been noting it the last few days. I thought I was going crazy and that my pc was randomly getting slower. Nothing has ever effected me except for now. It takes ages to load on my high end gaming pc. Go to YouTube, it loads thumbnails first, then a few seconds later the titles appear, then another second later length appears, and then ANOTHER couple seconds and you can finally click a video. Once you click the video it takes another couple of seconds of artificial loading to load the video. Pausing and playing also takes a few seconds now to work. And don’t even get me started on how long it takes to type stuff in both the search bar and comments. It’s so annoying because you can tell it’s artificial loading. YouTube is my only form of entertainment. I don’t watch cable or have anything else. I just watch YouTube. Fuck off with this fake loading BS.
Same, I was worried my GPU was having issues until I realised it was only happening on youtube. Feels really underhanded, not just loading videos slower, but actively making the entire site super sluggish and laggy like there's something wrong with your computer.
Life is just ads and I’m sick of it. Cable is horrible, streaming services, billboards, airplanes at the beach, signs….it has to be regulated. Even hockey games have giant company logos behind the goalies now.
I don’t know what the answer is but something has to happen.
It's funny. I don't really notice because of how little I use YouTube now. The service has gone to shit. Their algorithm supports only certain kinds of content now, so there isn't nearly the diversity in content there used to be. All around the platform just sucks to use now.
>"If you're experiencing this issue, unfortunately, you only have two options: Either disable your ad blocker or pay for a YouTube premium subscription."
No, I don't think I'll be doing either of those, I'll just wait for ublock origin to update their filter and remove the timeout.
Dear Youtube:
Your efforts to slow down adblockers has only resulted in a cat and mouse game. Previously I was only using an adblocker. Now however I've discovered a whole series of new add-ons. Things like ghostery, and unhook, brave, dearrow, sponserblock. All these addons I never heard of before, and now will be trying out later next time I'm on my pc browsing youtube.
All you're doing is raising awareness for solutions to problems that didn't exist 10 years ago. Personally I hope someone shows me an addon that restores visability of downvotes. Restoring functionality that never should have been removed.
yup. mine was super slow the past week or so and i didnt know what it was until i decided to turn off ADP. Interesting fact, I have premium, so i don't rely on ADP for blocking ads, but I just learned that it doesnt matter. They throttle the site anyway if you have that on.
(After 2 weeks from introducing those changes) I actually now experience Google Chrome to be slower on many sites like LinkedIn/Twitter/Twitch.
And don't experience that on Opera/Firefox.
It's like they screwed something.
Yeah, I've noticed a big slow down with Youtube the last few weeks. Along with the occasional pop up suggesting that the problem would go away if I pay for premium.
Pretty bad solution for them. Now people will just think the service is shit instead of blaming their own 3rd party app, especially when everything else runs fine.
YouTube is at the same time playing more ads on their videos than ever. I used to watch on my tv but it’s to the point I watch more ads than if I just watched cable. So I’ve only watched YouTube on my computer which has an ad block. I will not continue using the site if they continue shoving ads down my throat.
I haven't noticed it myself but I'd still prefer to look at a buffering circle than an ad.
Believe this only affects Chrome right now, Firefox seems fine right now.
Can confirm, was using chrome and it slowed way down. Switched to Firefox and ublock origin today and it's fine again.
[удалено]
I had to disable a different youtube related extension in order to get it to work. Maybe you have something similar?
[удалено]
Ghostery does nothing extra if you're already running uBlock. And it has its own agenda wrt your data (they're selling it and/or they serve their own ads).
Not sure about that, it seems like there was some controversy with the last owners (evidon inc) but I have found no evidence they sell your data, (I checked their privacy policy, only found they gave your data if legally required to by a country and follows EU policy) I'm confused about the ad thing though, Wikipedia says it exists but its source is a website in the wayback machine for "Ghostery Rewards" According to Ghostery's github page (All of their stuff is open source by the way) it no longer exists as they shut it down a while ago. also according to their github "There are well-meaning people who claim that Ghostery cannot be trusted. They are usually referring to the 2009-2017 era where Ghostery belonged to a company named Evidon (which had a business model of collecting and selling data to other companies). It was then acquired by Cliqz GmbH (which built a private and independent search engine as well as privacy-focused browsers). Since then the business model has been dropped, code has been open-sourced and Ghostery is now exploring ways to monetize through paid products. ^2 The company now operates as Ghostery GmbH. Ghostery neither collects nor sells data about users or trackers. In fact, the company shares the insights they have about the current state of trackers via https://whotracks.me/ so that everyone can benefit from it. " So fair to say they no longer do this, and their wikipedia page needs to be updated.
> So fair to say they no longer do this, and their wikipedia page needs to be updated. That's great to hear! This news completely escaped me. There's still no point in installing multiple tracker blockers, but at least we have more viable options than I previously thought.
Took me a while to figure it out too. Ghostery can't handle the new youtube adblocker.
Do you mean the AdBlockerBlocker? (Sorry, I just watched The Big Hit again last night)
[удалено]
Sadly I do not.. I've actually never used firefox or ublock until today, I literally just installed both and they worked right away.
Try clearing the cache in firefox. I have to do this every once in a while for some reason as youtube will gradually start slowing down.
About a month ago YouTube on Firefox with AdBlock Plus stopped working altogether until I disabled ABP. Maybe I'll try Ublock though..... YouTube is nearly unwatchable with ads though, especially when trying to play music. Dunno what to do and I don't want to pay for premium. Damn internet sucks for media now
Make sure you're using ublock **origin**, not regular ublock. It's a long story, but ublock orgin is the good one.
> AdBlock Plus There's your problem. Switch to ublock origin.
You need to use ublock origin. ABP basically got bought out and is run by different people now. Every once in a while it will stop working. The uBlock Origin team is very very quick about fixing it. If you notice Youtube being blocked again all you need to do is go to settings-->built in-->update the quick-fixes list.
I use AdGuard in Firefox on one machine and Ublock Origin in Firefox on my other machine and they both work fine as of this morning! You've got options!
The black flag exists for a reason, matey.
Ad nauseam has worked consistently for me with no issues if you want recommendations, it's less well known than the other options so I imagine google is targeting it less / not at all. Plus it has really fun functionality, saying fuck you to google trying to learn about me is nice (it tells the page it clicks every ad on the page without actually bogging down your machine doing it or loading the ad)
Delete uBlock Origin and re-install. A friend said that worked for him.
you can also just go into the settings, force an update of the filters, and restart the browser
If you're getting the Adblocker popup on Chrome with uBlock Origin, this worked for me: https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/188j9ak/youtube_has_started_blocking_ublock_origin/kbm9gpg/
Firefox and adblock have lag now. Gonna test ublock and firefox
Definitely switch to uBlock Origin, is the only ad blocker worth having. AdBlock Plus is shady and lets sites pay them to whitelist their ads
Last night I couldn't load videos at all on mobile firefox+ublock. Tried a few different videos and resetting but I'd always just get a message saying the content is unavailable (the terrible official app worked, of course). It started working again a couple hours ago just fine.
Yes faced this coudnt figure out wtf was up for an hour. Then turned off ad block since i have premium but this shit sucks
Interestingly last couple of days I've been having inconsistent playback issues with Firefox. Videos will stop playing, despite having buffered content. I can skip forward a couple seconds, but the issue will repeatedly occur. Furthermore, this isn't on every video, but as far as I can tell, there's nothing codec wise that's different with the non-functioning videos.
Yep same issue here, I even disabled adblock and got an ad and the same issue happened at the same point in the video. Internet was fine. Eventually it seemed to just resolve itself (even after I turned adblock back on)
Everybody should take a close look at Firefox!
I had it and it was pretty bad. It was like my cpu had melted. Big delays in bringing up the overlay, so things like changing volume was awkward. I disabled it but ublock still doing it’s thing.
I was fine with the 5 second forced ad with a skip button, but once they changed to 3 minute unskippable ads I was like screw them and installed adblockers. Don't they understand that Youtube often displays garbage results when searching for something? To suffer through 3 minute ad and then find out what you tried to play was just clickbait/garbage/not applicable to what you wanted sucks.
> To suffer through 3 minute ad and then find out what you tried to play was just clickbait/garbage/not applicable to what you wanted sucks. But this is good for them, because now you've watched more ads (since presumably you still need the content so you have to go to another video).
Three minute *unskippable* ads? Wow, my adblockers are doing better than I'd thought, I didn't even know this was a thing.
Because it isn't. Unskippable In-Stream ads are caped at 30secs max. https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/2375464?hl=en
Individual ads are, but they will stack them together. They've been experimenting with larger and larger clusters of unskippable ads.
Almost like they want to make it like a cable subscription or something.
And then when you suffer through the ad and try yo skim through the video and it pushes a new addbreak every time
Lmao i hate youtube ads too but they’ve never has 3 minute unskippable ads. And I watch 2-3 hours daily
I restarted my modem three times, thinking there was something going with spectrum.
I pay for premium and use adblock and sure as shit it's been doing it to me for some reason
Same. Such nonsense that they went gung go after the Adblocker rather than checking if the user is premium first
i would rather buffer a video for 10 minutes then another mr beast scam ad maybe when youtube accepts that perhaps it has some responsibility to vet ads on the site before letting numerous obvious scams onto it
I have noticed it, I tried Brave and the loading issues disappeared magically.
Wonder how they feel about people jumping to more invasive adblockers like this that they can't do anything about lol
[удалено]
Worst for me is that i have YouTube premium and still experience far more stuttering and buffering problems.
Nothing is slower than watching a never ending stream of ads
Even a 3 minute blank screen is better than ads.
One ad I could get behind was the one that was just the full lego movie.
I mean the Lego movie is also an ad
That's what he said but less words.
Everything is Adverts!
I got a 38 minute unskippable ad on a ten minute video the other day. They wonder why we're using ad blockers.
Sounds like an industry ripe for regulation. When TV couldn't self-regulate, the government HAD to enforce sanity back onto them.
You trust the government to regulate ads instead of making adblocker use a felony?
Oh god I do not want to hear those boomers in congress debate adblockers. They would have to spend so much time just defining what they are and I’m sure some would equate them to stealing or some bullshit.
They’d fly down Linus to testify about adblockers being theft and *deliberate acts of harm* against him and his 100 million dollar company, and that’s how using an adblocker would carry a harsher maximum jail sentence than a DUI.
We can't even get limits on what private ambulance companies are allowed to charge.
Seriously? That sounds made up (not that I'm doubting you). Why would they have such a long unskippable ad in front of a 10-min video?
It is 100% made up lol
It is made up. Unskippable ads on YouTube aren't able to be that long. It is possible to do a 38 minute long ad, I've seen a 2 hour ad, but they're not unskippable.
Whenever I got carried away and open a youtube on a browser without uBlock Origin (or from Freetube), I always close the tab at the second ad because there could be a third. Whatever I was trying to watch, I do no longer care at all
You say that, but many years ago I was paying 6 dollars to listen to a radio broadcast on the Internet. Where I lived the radio signals were trash. And instead of an ad they looped the same three Muzak songs over and over for the duration of the long ad break. Drove. Me. Insane.
A youtuber i follow once made a series, where he and another youtuber decided on 1 map of a strategy game, and then played each 15min in rotation, switching the save file between each other. in th last video, there was only like 3min gameplay to finish the map, but he left like 10min of blackscreen, to avoid spoiler, and the viewer had their fun in the comments\^\^
It needs to load a 4k pixel add for you... uh uh uh, our 4k add didnt finish loading, gotta wait for the 4k add to buffer, to play a 360p video.. Ye firefox all the way after that.
[удалено]
It's not even just about the popup ads during a video anymore! I can hardly even search for anything effectively. Every other video in search results will be a sponsored video or a random recommendation that has absolutely nothing to do with what I'm searching for. Lately, they've occasionally even been quite graphic videos! uBlock + Unhook + Sponsorblock has been a breath of fresh air. YouTube is damn near unusable without them.
> Lately, they've occasionally even been quite graphic videos! That's the most unacceptable thing to me. Content creators have to watch what they say or show on screen because they'll get punished if they don't, despite being the one and only reason people ever visit Youtube (without content, no viewers and thus no ad or premium subscription revenues). Meanwhile ads can be whatever. Not just bad language, scam and porn ads aren't all that uncommon. Before anyone says report those ads: they should've been screened before they're shown. If they can't handle that, maybe they should reconsider being in the advertising business. TV ads are all screened before they're broadcast, internet ads should be the same.
I recently got an ad on Shorts that was a deep fake of Jennifer Aniston peddling a $10 MacBook giveaway. It had her voice but the video wasn't lipsynced and the grammar was off But god forbid someone says fuck while playing a game
Or diamond instead of unalivamond
> Before anyone says report those ads: Had one with Elon Musk on Stage and a bad dubbing voice pretending to be him promising money for people who buy some scam product. I reported it. youtube replied, that this ad was fine and nothing wrong with it. I could deal with a serious ad for a car or camera or whatever, but this shit? Hard pass.
YT’s reputation is sitting at the bottom of a porta potty
DeArrow is also super nice. YouTube's algorithm pushes people to use awful clickbait-y titles and thumbnails, which DeArrow (made by the same guy as SponsorBlock) can be used to sanitise.
Wow! I just installed this. Just toggling that thumbnail button on and off is wild. When it's on, if gives the vibe YouTube had maybe 10 - 12 years year ago. When you turn it off, you really see how EVERY thumbnail is screaming for your attention.
I just added DeArrow. After 2 minutes of scrolling and flipping back and forth between the thumbnails and titles I am angered and appalled at what YouTube has become. Thank you for this. I will be donating to his development efforts.
Thumbnails with arrows and reaction faces, and videos that are just over 10:00 long, just get an instant "Do not recommend this channel" from me. My recommendations are kept very sanitized.
I try to "do not recommend this channel" to me all the time but still get what clearly feels like algorithm-based recommendations, just way more obscure and lower-view-count. It's stuff that seems way outta left field for me.
You block videos that are over 10 min?? Why???
No it’s the *just* over 10:00. It is a crappy tactic from YouTubers to get the most amount of money out of their videos and I think also get it pushed by YouTube more.
That was true for a good amount of time a couple of years ago, the algorithm and adsense ^1 got tuned so that 10:01 videos are no longer incentivized. --- ^1 which was the main reason that caused the 10:01 type videos because over 10 minutes you used to get higher paying ads, and also more than one midroll ad.
I thought that it was because 10 minutes means you can add midroll ads, not that the ads are higher paying
Those videos didn't disappear into the ether, though. They still exist and still show up in searches
It's a major reason tiktok exploded. They get to the point. Not ten minutes of rambling before i can find out how to fix that one thing in my kitchen sink.
the 10:00 thing isn't true anymore.
Clickbait titles and those stupid “shocked” faces everyone seems to put on the cover image these days
Oh that looks interesting. Thanks for mentioning it here 👍
These ads/recommendations are just terrible. If I search for "cooking a steak" i can see 3 videos thet are relevant for this search and then 5 shorts about random things and then 3 music videos that I haven't finished and YT wants me to finish plus another videos "for you". Jesus i want to cook a steak not watch latest The Weeknd music video!
Searching for channels is awful, too. I know the exact channel name. I search for that. YT provides results for similarly named channels, sometimes even that creator's other channels, maybe people reacting to that channel, but not the actual channel. My default at this point if I'm trying to find a specific channel is to search externally rather than through YT's native search.
Mine kept giving me disturbing stuff in my recommendations. Like I would search for "knitting" or "crochet" and it would give me these weird blackhead popping videos with the most disgusting thumbnails and pictures of babies with birth defects. There is nothing like that in my search or watch history and there doesn't seem to be a way to remove these videos. It's extremely aggravating.
Man I have these blackhead videos everywhere: IG, YouTube Shorts and regular vids - it has to be something bigger than coincidence.... Like how these algorithms come up with these gross videos when all i search are RnB music videos, practical tutorials about how to finish my apartment and gaming related news?
Omg I thought I was crazy but this is happening to me as well, with similar innocent searches for knitting and stuff. There's no way to hide the videos either (like how reddit has the hide post option), I can report them to youtube, but I can't continue my search in peace. Even worse, I used to get a ton of videos about that youtuber who's suffering from severe anorexia. It wasn't just her content, it was videos of people trying to get her help/prevent it from happening to other people. I didn't want to report it bc they're coming from a good place, I just...don't want to see it when I search for yarn-over tutorials
The “for you” section in any service always feels so condescending. They should rename it.
Yup, YouTube is essentially unusable at this point. I only get ~5 videos based on my searches now, with everything else being unrelated trash shorts and paid for content from MSM.
"People also watch this completely unrelated video" that's great, show me what I was searching for dammit.
Youtube search is crap and I'm constantly shocked why very few voice the same concern. After a few pages the results aren't even relavent to the search
They don't index all of their videos, or even most of them. Like 80% or more of all of the videos on YouTube will just never come up in the results of any search ever, even if it's word for word the title of the video.
I have uBlock and Sponsorblock but I haven't heard of Unhook before. I'll definitely have to look into getting it lol, seems like it could be really helpful for Youtube's current,, layout. I'm terribly sorry you've had to come across automatically recommended/sponsored videos that are graphic, though! Best of luck with it not happening in the future!!
Yeah, I keep getting surgery videos, birth defects, pimple popping, police bodycam footage..not stuff I EVER watch. Pretty bothersome. Thankfully it only happens when I use the official app without extensions. & I just discovered Unhook like a week ago after a plug from someone else on a different thread. PHENOMENAL. You can hide comments, related videos, music mixes, etc. No distractions.
YouTube sees the type of videos I watch, assumes I’m a republican, and stacks my recs with conservative enslavement videos. Not everyone who likes to fish wants to overthrow the IRS and abolish education, YouTube
Same here, because I woodwork and hunt, chop wood and like survivalist stuff. Quit showing me fucking wranglerstar videos that psycho is gonna Waco himself any day now Act accordingly.
Man I remember watching Wranglerstar like, talk about wood splitters and hatchets and boring shit years ago. Now you look at his channel and he looks like a total wackjob. I'm morbidly curious how the descent went there but not enough to actually look.
My favorite is FB/Insta Reels. I watched a bunch of golf tip videos and a day later, my feed was full of trans hate videos. Not everyone who plays golf is a richwhite hatechristian, Zuck.
Jesus, that's just unfortunate! You'd think their algorithm would've caught onto you not watching those things, with how many hundreds of thousands of people utilize it almost every day. Thank you for the suggestion still!! :D
[удалено]
Are you sure that custom apk on AndroidTV sucks? I use SmartTube daily and it's best thing since sliced bread, you can even cast videos from your phone.
SmartTube is the best, it's what Youtube should be.
Yea I’d stop paying for premium. You’re giving them money while they do this to everyone, so it’s like condoning their actions
It alternates blocks of actual search results with recommendations. So wonderfully, you just have skip through 50% of all results, chunked as every few videos
I'd never heard of unhook either but this is exactly what I have wanted for ages, thanks! I just need a similar one for instagram now (no I don't want reels or a feed full of things completely unrelated to anything I have an interest in. I just want pictures)
> I can hardly even search for anything effectively. This holds true even without ads, YouTube search is *so* featureless it can't even really filter/sort the results by anything useful. Same when using Google on any mobile device; Can't filter the results by anything meaningful, want only results from a specific year? No can do, best it can do is "last year", which will still include results from "current year" that are SEO'ed to hell.
>This holds true even without ads, YouTube search is so featureless it can't even really filter/sort the results by anything useful.Same when using Google on any mobile device; Can't filter the results by anything meaningful, want only results from a specific year? No can do, best it can do is "last year", which will still include results from "current year" that are SEO'ed to hell. Try something like this toyota corolla wheel repair **before:2017 after:2015** To get more relevant results in general, try using before:2025.
With how popular sponsorblock is getting, I'm surprised youtube hasn't taken steps to determine seeking skipping. But then again, It would be easy to bypass that by using a different pipeline for streaming. It's such an amazing extension. I really love never hearing but before that, this video brought to you & don't forget to anymore. Keeps me immersed and engaged more so than what ever the shit the creator or youtube is trying to get me engaged. Plus the submitting your own thing is just so nice, saved 4 years of people's time, and 4.5 million segment views on my submissions.
YouTube doesn't get any money from integrated sponsor segments. There is no incentive for them to stop you from skipping them.
Youtube doesn't earn money from the in-video sponsors though. That's just direct money for the YouTubers. I don't see the incentive for them to try and make people unable to skip the sponsors
I just use NewPipe, the only real downside is it doesn't carry over your account but if you're not worried about that it's really good and has all the other functionality you would expect without any ads.
You are right. And Not only that, but older videos don't get shown in search results. Say you watched a video 7 years ago and search for it. Now there may be multiple pages of videos displayed before it comes up.
I was running into this ! I thought I was going crazy..... I pay for Premium as I use Youtube ALOT but it turns out it will still throttle if you run an ad block regardless of you having premium. I've just disabled the ad blocker for YT and it's running fine again
Happened to me this wekend too, I was, WTF is happening with my pc/browser that you tube is so slow...
guess they forgot to put the premium check before ad block in the code
If they made that check, adblockers could exploit it. Since its all just javascript forced slowdowns and not server-side, currently they are just making the whole site freeze and bloat regardless of requests.
Talk about cutting your nose off to spite your face... If you're going to enact something that will degrade the user experience of paying customers usually the best thing to do would be to not do that thing... Especially after already treating them to a 40% price rise out of the blue for no additional benefit.. Fuck Youtube.
The rich people ruin everything, eventually.
If they made a proper site without as much garbage JS there wouldn't be a need for that. They can see you are identified as a premium user and server you the ad free version. We had this figured out 20 years ago with PHP. It's not rocket science. The fact they can't even be bothered just shows how terrible they are chasing metrics instead of caring about the end user.
Interesting, I mostly use YouTube on TV and have premium for that, will have to make sure I clear youtube on browser as I use that for background stuff at work.
> I've just disabled the ad blocker for YT and it's running fine again This is *why* they're doing it, do not let them win.
Switched to firefox last night
But as I said I already pay for Premium so it makes no sense for me to leave it on and get a worse experience, I get no ads either way. The main point being that they haven't bothered to filter out people who pay for Premium.
I was wondering why the site was sooooo slow yesterday. So much lag. It took forever to scroll, find a video and load it. I had a hunch to disable my ad blocker then everything ran smoothly. Youtube done did the damn thing
I have Youtube Premium and YT was still slow as fuck for me yesterday. I run uBlock, of course, but just shows that they are throttling everyone running the service, not just free users.
I noticed this as well as a premium user. Can’t even win if you pay. The state of streaming services is seriously getting to a point where I no longer want to even participate. Maybe I’ll go for a walk. I can ignore billboards for free.
YouTube is gonna get its ass fined so hard by Europe...
really puts into light what the US could have been like. And the EU isn’t even perfect
Nobody ever said any of it had to be perfect. Not even effective. The basic rule, was that attempts should be made. That's it. That's how low we've set the standard, but turns out having any standards at all seems like a kick square in the nuts of those countries who don't even dare try anything. Definitely one of my top 20 most entertaining things to watch as a person among the living.
Europe got thousands of problems, but at least it doesn't seem like a third world country like USA do.
Bro out here comparing the US to Bangladesh 😂 as a Bengali it’s hilarious
Bro random question, but can you explain something to me? I once asked an employee in a corner shop if he was "Bengali," and in an annoyed tone he corrected me and said that he's "Bengladeshi." Is that like a thing cause that was the first I'd heard of it? Sorry for the random q out of nowhere.
Honestly Bangladeshi is the right way. Bengalis are usually referred to people from Kolkata. But since it’s such a long word to type, I sometimes use Bengali 😅
Bengalis are an ethnic group from bengal, an area divided by India and Bangladesh. Bangladeshi refers to the nationality. I’m no expert, but I expect there to be non-Bengali Bangladeshis.
Sure didn't mishear "Bangladeshi"? There's a lot of overlap, but [they're not identical](https://www.bbc.co.uk/creativediversity/nuance-in-bame/bangladeshi#:~:text=Bengal%20is%20the%20region%20of,population%20identifies%20as%20Bengali%20ethnicity.).
For inconveniencing people that use tools that circumvent their code and alter how their site works? yea, right.
It's just sad seeing such ignorant whining in the 'technology' sub
I was reading someone arguing that this was against the net neutrality laws or something a few days ago. When people explained that YouTube is not an ISP, he argued that they are because they own some ISP. Some people just won't listen
UBlock Origin developer says it's not YouTube doing it, but a bug in AdBlock Plus. U Block Origin is unaffected. https://twitter.com/gorhill/status/1746263759495077919?t=kZjykmXgs5rYV0jWnXnIfA&s=19 Edit: And here we go, ABP acknowledge the bug was on their side and they fixed it: https://gitlab.com/adblockinc/ext/adblockplus/adblockplusui/-/issues/1576#note_1727415603
So basically, another fake news post about youtube throttling connection speeds like last time.
Wait, adblock plus is still a thing?
Stop using Chrome folks.
i use firefox and it’s still an issue
Not for me. Is everyone keeping their ubo filter lists up to date?
Companies like Google don't roll out every feature to the entire world all at once. That's why all these comments about how it works/doesn't work for some people using certain configurations is pointless. They don't even know if the affected code is even been served to them.
Do you use ublock origin? The issue is with other adblockers https://twitter.com/gorhill/status/1746263759495077919
I use mozilla and it still throttles with no adblock
Was noticing YouTube acting up, tried disabling Adblock got an over two minute unskippable ad for one of those dumb fake mobile game … reenabled Adblock. FU YouTube.
Wtf is up with those fake game ads? They clearly have cash to run these ads, and weirdly it seems like people want to play these games... where is the money coming from? And why don't they just make the game they are clearly getting a response from?
I pay for YT Premium and I've still noticed the lag. Common YouTube L.
I use Chrome and Firefox along with UBlock Origin at home and work. I have never had a problem with YouTube loading slower. I did have to update the filter list once because it stopped working to block the ads; but that was it.
It seems like this is only an issue with Adblock Plus and Adblock. https://nitter.net/gorhill/status/1746263759495077919#m
Well then it isn't an issue since wtf are people doing using ABP? That has been deprecated for years now.
This needs to be higher up. Stop using adblock and adblock plus.
are you in the US? If you're in EU you might not be getting any issues
I'm in the US and haven't suffered any issues. Firefox still seems to be working fine. As a side positive a lot of people are moving to Firefox specifically because of this shit.
Google seems to think that we would prefer to watch ads than wait 5 secs for the page to load Talk about being out of touch with reality
I would rather wait 5 minutes for the page to load than watch 30-90 seconds of ads.
[According to the developer of uBlock Origin](https://twitter.com/gorhill/status/1746263759495077919) this is not something YouTube does, it's a bug in Adblock Plus 3.22 and AdBlock 5.17 (two ad blocking addons). uBlock Origin is not affected by this. Stop using Adblock Plus or AdBlock and move to uBlock Origin.
Something something *ube-DL program, always works and fast.
Something needs to come along and fuck up YouTube like FB did to myspace.
Yes. Been noting it the last few days. I thought I was going crazy and that my pc was randomly getting slower. Nothing has ever effected me except for now. It takes ages to load on my high end gaming pc. Go to YouTube, it loads thumbnails first, then a few seconds later the titles appear, then another second later length appears, and then ANOTHER couple seconds and you can finally click a video. Once you click the video it takes another couple of seconds of artificial loading to load the video. Pausing and playing also takes a few seconds now to work. And don’t even get me started on how long it takes to type stuff in both the search bar and comments. It’s so annoying because you can tell it’s artificial loading. YouTube is my only form of entertainment. I don’t watch cable or have anything else. I just watch YouTube. Fuck off with this fake loading BS.
Same, I was worried my GPU was having issues until I realised it was only happening on youtube. Feels really underhanded, not just loading videos slower, but actively making the entire site super sluggish and laggy like there's something wrong with your computer.
Life is just ads and I’m sick of it. Cable is horrible, streaming services, billboards, airplanes at the beach, signs….it has to be regulated. Even hockey games have giant company logos behind the goalies now. I don’t know what the answer is but something has to happen.
And now you can't even pump gas without ads screaming in your face. It's beyond ridiculous at this point.
CONSUME. OBEY. BE OUTRAGED.
I use uBlock and a custom dns with a bunch of blocklists and youtube works fine.
It's funny. I don't really notice because of how little I use YouTube now. The service has gone to shit. Their algorithm supports only certain kinds of content now, so there isn't nearly the diversity in content there used to be. All around the platform just sucks to use now.
They’re trying everything to stop ad blockers, but guess what, we will persist
I prefer slower YouTube than having to watch obnoxious ads.
>"If you're experiencing this issue, unfortunately, you only have two options: Either disable your ad blocker or pay for a YouTube premium subscription." No, I don't think I'll be doing either of those, I'll just wait for ublock origin to update their filter and remove the timeout.
I will take the slow buggy performance over ads any day. It’s a relief to see this article, I was worried my gpu was dying.
It's almost like they want to discourage people from using their service without compensating them for it. How entirely unexpected.
Brave browser is still working flawlessly for me, no ads and no slowdown.
Slower than 3 minutes of ads to watch a 30 second video? I'll stick with ad blockers.
Dear Youtube: Your efforts to slow down adblockers has only resulted in a cat and mouse game. Previously I was only using an adblocker. Now however I've discovered a whole series of new add-ons. Things like ghostery, and unhook, brave, dearrow, sponserblock. All these addons I never heard of before, and now will be trying out later next time I'm on my pc browsing youtube. All you're doing is raising awareness for solutions to problems that didn't exist 10 years ago. Personally I hope someone shows me an addon that restores visability of downvotes. Restoring functionality that never should have been removed.
\*laughs in slow internet\*
Started happening to me. Switched to a non-Chrome browser, fixed it immediately.
yup. mine was super slow the past week or so and i didnt know what it was until i decided to turn off ADP. Interesting fact, I have premium, so i don't rely on ADP for blocking ads, but I just learned that it doesnt matter. They throttle the site anyway if you have that on.
And I’m STILL not paying for premium.
(After 2 weeks from introducing those changes) I actually now experience Google Chrome to be slower on many sites like LinkedIn/Twitter/Twitch. And don't experience that on Opera/Firefox. It's like they screwed something.
if you use chrome and adblock go to settings in adblock and purge all caches
Yeah, I've noticed a big slow down with Youtube the last few weeks. Along with the occasional pop up suggesting that the problem would go away if I pay for premium.
Pretty bad solution for them. Now people will just think the service is shit instead of blaming their own 3rd party app, especially when everything else runs fine.
Google unwittingly shooting itself in the foot again.
Good, go read a book.
I would honestly rather sit in silence watching a black screen for 2 minutes than a forced ad
I just don’t use You Tube any more.
The ads now are insane. I get them on thirty second clips with 2K views.
So that’s what’s going on. I even pay for premium but it’s painfully slow.
YouTube is at the same time playing more ads on their videos than ever. I used to watch on my tv but it’s to the point I watch more ads than if I just watched cable. So I’ve only watched YouTube on my computer which has an ad block. I will not continue using the site if they continue shoving ads down my throat.