Aha I’m not crazy! There was about a week where YouTube videos were so slow and we mainly use SmartTube on the shield TV, the fucked up part is I pay for YouTube premium, I just like the UI and options available on SmartTube better then the default app.
It did seem to get better, so maybe they realized I fucking pay for this service.
Or it was just a weird network issue. A week is a long time, though.
Very good news!!
Is it possible to post the same video both to youtube and peertube without trouble? I wonder if this is prohibited cause I think many creators would mirror their content to peertube if they could.
Remember when videos would buffer all the time on non-chrome browsers lol
Freetube works pretty well, there’s a cat and mouse game with youtube changes though.
I have no issues at all, once a vid is running. Choosing a vid takes much longer these days though, because the goddam stupid fucking algorhythm serves up 95% slop these days. Already viewed vids, ones expressly blocked, “news” stories that are YEARS old, or those in weird foreign languages, make up most of the garbage I get offered…
Sample size one but I’m on Fedora with Firefox and uBlock. Not seeing any issues yet.
I’m on Android w/ PipePipe & GrayJay and have been experiencing issues with videos loading a little then buffering for like 5 minutes
Same, using CleanTube.
Same setup, same results. I do intentionally keep the resolution low though.
Same with Piped. Pinchflat downloads it so even if it were throttled when it fetches, it will play at local speeds
Same on FireDragon with Garuda.
ublockorigin etc… 5 second unnecessary delay, very annoying . that’s my experience
So this is it. The enshittification has reached slowlorris levels.
A wild YouTube appeared!
Go, uBlock Origin!
Wild YouTube used Throttle!
It’s not very effective…
uBlock Origin used Evolve!
It’s super effective!
YouTube fainted!
This made me laugh. I wonder which one will prevail in the end
Piracy always prevails
I’ve noticed occasional “buffering” before playback starts through the past week or so. Takes like ten seconds before the video starts playing. Hasn’t been worse than that so far, knock on wood.
Youtube feels like an impossible service to actually compete with, whether through the enormous and complicated setup required or amassing creators/users. It’s basically a monopoly and it sucks. One will just have to resist Google’s bullshit using whatever means available for as long as possible.
Still I prefer buffering over the inane noises of commercials
Yeah, I’d genuinely rather watch whatever amount of seconds forced ads are of black, silent screen than see an ad. It sucks and is awkward, but whatever.
Peertube is working on breaking the monopoly. I try to use it more.
Never happening.
It kind of is already happening. For example @lfdi@xn–baw-joa.social is soon to be making their instance available for state related institutions.
Small steps in a big picture. Edit: thanks for showing me how to tag @commentBelow
Test comment, please ignore. Jerboa doesn’t recognize that and I’m curious if the punycode version would be.
@lfdi@xn–baw-joa.social
Edit: interesting. Yes.
Yeah, I run multiple ad-blockers and haven’t noticed any slowdown or other degradation.
I’ve noticed a lot of videos give me a still ad and make me click “skip” at the very start of videos through my ad blockers.
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.
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.
So say we all.
So say we all.
The thing is, their anti-adblocking measures are still less unpleasant than actually watching ads.
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.
just use invidious instead
It’s not perfect, but I use grayjay. They have an android app and a desktop client, and are usually pretty quick to make updates that will sidestep Google’s anti-adblocking measures (within 1-2 days.) Again, not perfect, but I don’t mind a slightly worse experience to avoid having to see an ad. Plus it has sponsor block support built right in
This is also a good beginner way to learn about self hosting in docker.
Freetube can make a great backup for when google inevitably breaks something.
And for thise videos you really cant miss there is always yt-dlp scripted to download a channels latests video on a schedule straight to jellyfin of course.
I have not visited the youtube website in more then a year.
This doesn’t seem very straightforward…
it’s like lemmy: you choose an instance, make an account, import your subscriptions from YouTube and done. you can watch all channels from there
So it’s not very straight forward lol?
for us it is ;)
Sadly, most of the instances seem to be completely nonfunctional. Nadeko.net seemed to be the only one working for months.
Ok, so there are hosted instances? At face value this looks like you need to self host. Which I am more than capable of both in terms of equipment and experience. I just don’t want to go that far to watch youtube. Thanks for explaining.
not many but there are
might be brain damaged but haven’t noticed a slowdown or seen any ads in occasional use.
So it’s wait a few seconds and watch a black screen or watch a minute of ads? What a choice…
I watched videos on Newgrounds using dial-up
They are going to have to slow ad blockers by a lot for me to consider it slow
My wife and I were discussing this. This isnt “slow” to us, its just a tiny bit inconvenient. We were used to the old AOL pictures taking a good minute or two to load.
We would get rid of Youtube before we get ads.
Ahh seeing images load line-by-line and you get excited as you can actually start to tell what the image is!
“Finally, a nipple!”
I’ve started bulk downloading videos with yt-dlp and watching them locally. No ads or throttling to deal with.
If Google really wants to, they can crack down on
yt-dlp, and I assume that if enough people are using it, they’re likely to do such a crackdown. Like, this works for the moment, but…I’m sure they could. Other methods will crop up. All else fails, I ditch YT altogether.
Nah. How would you crack down a program that just play the videos in the background and then just capture the content while it’s played?
Just queue up a bunch of vidoe you wanna watch, and let the program just essentially screen record it.
Well if you say “DRM”? Well we could share it to a display that itself is hacked and record all the signals.
Unless they are doing proctoring as if it were a test, there will always be some way to circumvent it.
Hmm, but in this case you would be recording either the ads or the buffering.
I’m so used to the sponsorship thing that I just instinctively tap/click the right side of the screen a few times to skip it.
(As for why I don’t use sponsorblock: I don’t block them because I wanna take a few seconds to take a peak into the sponsor segment to make sure they don’t have very evil sponsors like ahem “Betterhelp” (I don’t trust someone that still have that as a sponsor in 2025)
Edit: Also, I’m pretry sure someone will build a locally run AI model that can detect the ads/buffering and cut it out. “AI” might not give you true information in terms of search results, but pattern recognition is like its main job, right?
Imagine adblock re-rencoding software that picks mp4s clean based on repeated content(ads). The user could select each ad as they happen, mark them as such and let it identify them from there. Imagine sharable or federated caches of these ad records between users.
Someone who can code, please, imagine it.
What they should be imagining instead is a better video sharing platform. There are alternatives already…
Cause all you need is your imagination!
And billions of dollars to build and run the site with servers worldwide. No biggie
DVRs are back in 2025. Who would have thought?
This is the way.
When YouTube wanted to throw me some entertainment and a couple ads, very conveniently, I was down for that.
Now that it’s an all out technology knowledge battle - well, I’m quite good at that.
So I spend the time I would have laughed at their ad instead working around their bullshit.
I haven’t seen an ad in years, but I still enjoy the same content. 🤷♀️
To me, it seems like they’re working really hard, just to fail to serve me ads.
I would but my issue with that is that SponsorBlock doesn’t work on downloaded videos.
Skytube has an option for clipping mid-video ads out of downloaded videos, if that helps.
I use SponsorBlock for more than just skipping sponsored segments. It’s also useful for skipping intros, “like and subscribe” messages, and other general annoyances in most YouTube videos. Once you get used to it, you can’t go without.
Same here. The SponsorBlock in SkyTube skips intros and “like and subscribe”, too. Even in downloads.
Good to know, thanks.
