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.
this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2025
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Google is intentionally throttling YouTube videos, slowing down users with ad blockers
(www.windowscentral.com)
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.
The thing is, their anti-adblocking measures are still less unpleasant than actually watching ads.
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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.
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It will happen eventually. All they need to do is start new/rotating keys on wildvine and put the ads at random times right in the stream, then disable fast forward if you use it to skip ads. It'll be a UX hit, so it'll need to be worth it to them.
In the end, they can't stop us from HDMI capturing and using comskip to detect / remove but there are a million ways to play tag between where we are now and that which don't require people posting videos to pirate bay :)
My ip was blocked a LONG time ago by google for using yt-dlp. Works with VPN but nothing else. Fun times. I think I only pulled a couple of videos off for archival services. On my own channel non-the-less.
You might try again. I was blocked for a couple weeks after I pulled a bunch of videos from a channel using yt-dlp, and for a while YouTube required an account (which I will not get) from that IP. But a couple weeks later, things were working again.
Ok cool! I updated yt-dlp via pip, and it looks like its working again. No warnings or anything. Awesome.
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Virtual desktop program that watches videos and uses sponsorblock and adblock after the fact to pick it clean and re-encode it.
I'm that level of anal
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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’m new to yt-dlp. Care to share your flags? I’m a little confused on which ones I actually need.
I mean, you don't need anything; it'll work with no flags. I have these:
$ cat ~/.config/yt-dlp/config
--embed-subs
--embed-metadata
--embed-chapters
--embed-thumbnail
--sponsorblock-mark=all
$
That'll just embed some useful metadata in the file.
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I'd sooner spend five minutes waiting for the video to buffer than five seconds watching an ad
Make me wait 5 mins on a black screen and I'll do that before watching an ad.
I've been seeing this for a couple weeks now along with a popup telling me "ad blockers aren't allowed" at work where I'm forced to use Chrome. I have UBlock Lite installed. Typically a refresh takes care of the popup and a 10 second delay later, the video loads.
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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
A lot of my favorites are already on Nebula. I'd ask the rest to follow but that would require a google account.
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Great idea. Eventually, and if enough ask, it could be a thing.
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I'll wait.
Oh no, where will I get my AI slop?
Like it or not, YouTube still has a fuckton of good, informative tutorials and advice on how to fix things or make things made by individuals with a phone camera and no script, who make them not for money but for the pride in sharing their knowledge. I shared some fix it videos for my van and a very obscure phone, and consumed a lot of fix it videos for washing machines, motorbikes and furniture.
This. YouTube is extremely helpful for anyone who can't afford to take their stuff to a repair service or hire someone to fix something at their home. Just a few months ago, I thought my washer was done for, but it turned out to be a super simple fix that no website mentioned except for a super obscure YouTube video with only a couple hundred views. Saved me hundreds of dollars. There's countless other anecdotes like that over the years.
This is what sucks so much about Google's monopoly. I truly wish a cooperative of governments and/or academia created a publicly funded alternative as well as hosting an archive of YouTube on it. It would of course need to be administered by a non-partisan committee made up of representatives from multiple countries that had numerous safeguards against governmental political censorship. Hoping for a grassroots alternative is a lost cause, as the hosting and administrative expenses are just way too cost prohibitive, so publicly funded is the only solution I can see as being plausible
Why do i feel like this happened a while ago? Like, isn't this old news? Or "olds" as it were?
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Oh hey I ran into that issue, fixed it by blocking the element on ublock and spoofing my user agent
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Good, kill your product
I use adblockers, but I'm confused how this would hurt google if people using adblockers stopped using youtube.
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I saw something that might be this happening last week where every video took an extra 20 seconds to load and presented a popup that took you to the support page where the first thing listed to troubleshoot your problem was disabling ad blockers, but this week the videos are perfect and load normally; but the rest of the page is absolutely fucked. Like the "playables" section last night was tripping balls and looked like a slot machine as the entries randomly changed around at light speeds. The comments, related videos section on the right, description, etc all just refuse to load now on Firefox for me.
Considering these issues for me have only happened recently, and coincidentally around the same time an issue with Google services took a shitton of the entire Internet down for almost a whole day, I suspect it's not about blocking ad blockers so much as it is Google just fucking sucks at implementing any changes across the board of their products.
Ublock origin (if your using it) "fixed" the issue shortly after. Im convinced someone at google works on adblock lol. Probably not true but the timing was really fast.
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It's a good thing I'm patient when it comes to when the videos load. If they keep doing this, I'll just find another platform. Nebula seems like it has the same types of videos I like to watch.
Of course, I can get into PeerTube as well.
Nebula seems like it has the same types of videos I like to watch.
I mean, Nebula is commercial service and I assume that they'd profile, the same as YouTube. Like, if you're okay with that, you can get YouTube Premium.
Of course, I can get into PeerTube as well.
I'm still skeptical that this is going to scale sufficiently either in bandwidth or in amount of content.
https://peertube.fediverse.observer/ for people who want to try it, though.
I mean, at least Nebula is owned by the content creators. Eliminate the middle man and all that.
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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
HA! Jokes on them! I'm running a budget dell PC from 10 years ago! The PC itself is slower than any delays they cause! I'm talkin' 3-5 minutes to load each video. Sometimes the whole PC freezes, and you need to unplug it. Sometimes the browser crashes right at the end, so you gotta relaunch the browser, and then wait 20 minutes for all the tabs to populate. Then you gotta end task on all the individual windows. Then you gotta reload just the tab you're looking at, and THEN you can wait 5 minutes again.
You think I'm even going to notice your 10 second delay?
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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)
uBlock Origin->gear icon (settings)->My Filters->add this line:
||googlevideo.com/videoplayback$xhr,3p,method=get,domain=www.youtube.com
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Wish they could use Gemini to generate ad clicks instead.
I feel like this has been happening for a while, but maybe it's just that YouTube's website is shite.
Ok so im not crazy. I was wondering why videos kept buffering every minute this past week.
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