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Google is intentionally throttling YouTube videos, slowing down users with ad blockers
(www.windowscentral.com)
this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2025
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Why do i feel like this happened a while ago? Like, isn't this old news? Or "olds" as it were?
It was previously a "thread.sleep(5000)" in the client code IIRC.
It was reported a decent amoint of time ago and i thought i felt a difference...turned out my isp was sending air bubbles through the internet cable.
After the internet stabilized i noticed exactly zero, just an occasional "restart browser because video's stopped playing alltogether"
I’ve been dealing with this forever.
Some issues I have that I only deal with when I’m not signed in without an adblocker:
If I try to skip back to a spot in a video, I get the loading circle and sometimes it doesn’t come back until I refresh the page. I have to make a mental note of the time and do that pretty often.
In safari and Firefox I will get a black box for about 40 seconds, no play button, and sometimes I have to refresh the page a few times just to get it to work at all.
Comments will not load sometimes until I refresh the page, sometimes more than once.
The video will sometimes stop and start “loading” while I’m watching it. The solution is always a page refresh or two.
Signed in with an adblocker, the problems drop by about 50% (pulled that number out of my ass, but I’d be willing to bet it’s close). Signed in with no adblocker on Firefox or Safari and the issues become significantly less noticeable, with exceptions from time to time. Signed in with no adblocker on chrome or edge, I experience none of this.
I believe they purposely throttle it on non chromium browsers too.
Sorry if this comment is jumbled. Woke up in the middle of the night with a stomach ache, got bored waiting for it to pass, so now I’m here and barely conscious.
Yep, for me it ha been "fixed" for about a week now.