824
Google is intentionally throttling YouTube videos, slowing down users with ad blockers
(www.windowscentral.com)
Down with google
this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2025
824 points (98.8% liked)
Technology
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God damn American companies love fucking up everything for money!
Just Americans?
Nestlé: I have done nothing wrong, ever, in my life.
OTOH, Danone is a B corporation, so there are choices in that space.
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Then I suppose it's a good thing they're limiting non-premium users from using the "high bitrate" quality options?
^ that was sarcasm. HARSH sarcasm. With both middle fingers pointing toward a Google logo and spitting.
yeah I had some blender visuals I made that only look good high quality because of the detail and it looks sick as my desktop wallpaper with hidamsri but horrible and blurry viewing it on youtube at the highest quality
Oh hey I ran into that issue, fixed it by blocking the element on ublock and spoofing my user agent
Edit: I put more details under nameisnotimportant's comment, I was about to head to bed so I didn't really provide details LOL
fixed it by blocking the element
Which one? That'd certainly help to know how to do that
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I have ublock, with sponsor block and some others, and don't have any issues on yt as of yet. Just in case though, how do I block an element and spoof a user agent?
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Been using revanced for months and haven't noticed a difference other than no ads or sponsors on bigger channels.
fine by me i listen to audio of videos i watch and i dont mind the lower resolution because it means im using less internet
Make me wait 5 mins on a black screen and I'll do that before watching an ad.
Yeah they are, I noticed it get really, really bad this week. It's an awful experience. But they'll leave my browser before my adblocker does.
Same. When I opened the Stats for Nerds pop-up, I noticed that I was being throttled to 1500kbps. Anything above 720p was unplayable this week.
But apparently the Ublock Origin devs yet again figured out another workaround, because streaming speeds are back to normal for me as of yesterday.
The thing is, their anti-adblocking measures are still less unpleasant than actually watching ads.
100%. Half the time I get blocked due to VPN or whatever I just close the tab and go with my life. The rest of the time I try all known workarounds. If those fail, I just go with my life.
My hatred for monopolisation and enshittification is stronger than my desire to watch content on any platform.
Lol, this is exactly why I use Lemmy. Sure there might be less engagement than reddit. But I'd rather gargle a bucket of diarrhea than go back to that shitty place.
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"Is your video not loading ? Check out why, you fucking ad dodging commie" is the feeling i got from youtube's newest message while my video was unexpectedly taking 10s to load
I'd sooner spend five minutes waiting for the video to buffer than five seconds watching an ad
Welcome back to 2007
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That's a relief. I've been dreading the day when they introduce server-side adsm but it seems we're not there yet 😅 I'm not sure what they think they'll accomplish with this when it's A LOT less painful than turning off your adblocker and dealing with the ads, though. Maybe they're just trying random things to see what works.
I've started bulk downloading videos with yt-dlp and watching them locally. No ads or throttling to deal with.
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Ive been commenting on creators videos asking them to upload elsewhere as well. I doubt it will work, but we could try
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So here's what happened recently:
- I opened the Google News widget on my Android phone, saw a Sponsored link, and found it interesting
- Clicked on it, the link opened in Chrome, opening the googleadservices redirection thingummy
- Took over 5 seconds to process the redirect
- I exited the browser
Guess who missed ad money?
But of course, maybe they got the ad money and the only losers were:
- me, who didn't get to see the website that might actually have had something I wanted
- the website owner, who not only didn't get my business but also had to pay Google, because Google most probably processed the ad first and didn't care to process the redirect
I feel like I understand why they removed the "Do no evil" sign. Because now, they are messing with both, the product and the customers, only providing as much as is required to take their money, instead of the full, advertised service.
They cannot kill Adblocks, because if they would — a lot of html5 embedded YouTube videos would be coming worthless and so would youtube (discord for example)