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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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Very good news!!
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(1 replies)
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.
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The thing is, their anti-adblocking measures are still less unpleasant than actually watching ads.
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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.
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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!
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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.
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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.
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So it's wait a few seconds and watch a black screen or watch a minute of ads? What a choice...
Remember when videos would buffer all the time on non-chrome browsers lol
I'd sooner spend five minutes waiting for the video to buffer than five seconds watching an ad
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Make me wait 5 mins on a black screen and I'll do that before watching an ad.
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.
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Freetube works pretty well, there's a cat and mouse game with youtube changes though.
Yo I pay for premium and it’s been fucking slow. Cancel my subscription? Guess I might need to.
I had to turn off privacy badger and ublock for it to not be slow. It's stupid I'm paying for the service to be ad free it should be ad free without complaints.
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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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I'm finding I'm using youtube less and less that I can't actually remember the last time I used it for anything. Youtube has so much crap now.
Because of their monetisation scheme for content creators, it was profitable for creators to drag 15 mins of information out to one hour, and then to include shock faces as thumbs to get more clicks, and then to get more viewers just to watch a bit of the video as viewership dwindles into just mindlessly watching suggestions.
I feel sorry for those creators who have gone balls deep with youtube content and who have no "plan b".
I think that says more about the channels you watch and your viewing habits. I enjoy STEM and STEM related channels; I don't experience the same as what you've described.
ublockorigin etc... 5 second unnecessary delay, very annoying . that's my experience
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
www.youtube.com/##.paper-toast-open.yt-notification-action-renderer.style-scope.toast-button
I believe it was this one, just add it as part of the filter list in ublock
The extension I used for user agent was this one. I don't think it matters what you spoof as, but I chose to spoof as chrome. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/user-agent-string-switcher/
So far it worked and I'm back to no ads and no interruptions
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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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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.
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So this is it. The enshittification has reached slowlorris levels.
Been using revanced for months and haven't noticed a difference other than no ads or sponsors on bigger channels.
"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 didn’t know if I’m crazy or of YouTube is genuinely slow for me (with adblocker)
Turns out I was not crazy
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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?
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