Comment by PuercoPop
3 months ago
It is likely you use Chrome or a browser that uses Blink for its engine and the OP uses a non-blink browser like Firefox. I use Firefox and I can cofirm since the last few months Youtube usability borders on usable
3 months ago
It is likely you use Chrome or a browser that uses Blink for its engine and the OP uses a non-blink browser like Firefox. I use Firefox and I can cofirm since the last few months Youtube usability borders on usable
They've also started to be really aggressive against VPNs. I've tried Private Internet Access, Mulvad and AirVPN and often I have to cycle through 5-15(!) servers before YouTube stops saying "sign in to confirm you're not a bot".
Discord has started to become absurdly aggressive with it too, to the point that they don't even let you load messages whilst logged in if you're on a VPN.
It really makes me feel like there will be an inflection point in a few years, where the internet is cleaved in two. You'll have the 'free' internet that is full of interesting stuff but also full of malware, spam and scams, and you'll have the squeaky clean corporate internet, basically a facsimile of WeChat's super-app, of which you'll only have access with a government ID. No VPNs or anti-fingerprinting allowed.
Almost everything blocks you on a VPN until you sign in now. AI scrapers were the final nail in the coffin.
> It really makes me feel like there will be an inflection point in a few years, where the internet is cleaved in two.
Hasn't it been like that for already many years?
arguably, already 90's AOL very much pushed its users to stay within its walled garden.
100%. Web Credentials + Digital ID + age verification will all be handled with Secure Attestation backing it. Cloudflare will have a checkbox for site admins... [X] Require Age Verification... and that's it. Boom. Your site is "safe" from accidentally allowing kids in.
...of course, free speech and anonymity die with this, but why would that be a problem? You don't want to say anything the current or potential future government wouldn't like, do you?
Free speech doesn't die with this. Host your own site.
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For Discord it is basic rate limiting ( anty-VPN is other separate thing require phone number )
There a bunch of bad actors doing mass scrape of all public server and history via all of those VPN
What's so clean about YouTube, Discord, X etc? It's full of low quality content, scams, malware, influencers, advertisers and other scum and villainy.
I think it refers to the fact they can deperson you from their platforms if they want to. It's only "dirty" and "clean" if you emphasize the quote marks, but it's definitely "heavily censored" and "free".
There are allegations going around that e.g. some platforms are lax on child protection because some high up executives are pedophiles. But I'd still place those platforms in the "heavily sanitised" bucket if they're heavily restricting everything else. Those platforms just have a slightly different definition of "clean" than most of us.
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Mullvad Frankfurt 102 seems to always be OK in this regard.
it's already like that
I use it on Firefox and Safari on Mac OS (mainly Safari), and it's been OK except it's started doing a thing where it blips a bit after roughly the first 1sec of video plays.
I wonder if being a YouTube Premium subscriber is also a factor here. I do pay for it so I don't see ads. But maybe the way ads are being served/injected has changed things for the worse for people that get them.
I use Firefox with uBlock and besides a couple of times where video start was delayed by a few seconds it has been working as well as before.
Google does A/B testing for anti ad blockers.
Not only do I get slowdowns and some videos don't load at all at times, but I also get a notification that explains that the reason is using adblockers.
Here I am, totally given up on adblockers, and no way I’m paying for premium, but jesus christ the amount of ads I get, sometimes seems to be one every minute, making most videos unwatchable.
Though it’s mostly good for my addiction since it makes me use youtube less.
For the last two days I haven't been able to watch youtube videos on Firefox without disabling uBlock.
I had the same problem. Make sure you're running the latest version of uBlock Origin. By that I mean you should explicitly check for updates and install the latest version. That fixed it for me.
I've disabled adblock/vpn and can watch maybe 1-2 videos before the video player starts blacking out on each one. Only restarting firefox "resets" it and I haven't been able to find a reason for this happening. Time for yt-dlp I guess
I disable youtube instead when this happens.
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Recently I've found Youtube to just show a white screen if it detects Firefox+uBO.
There's probably scripts you can add to your ubo to combat this.
Yeah, big same here. It’s pretty frustrating, because I pay for YouTube premium, but cannot use my preferred browser. I have to use Chromium in order to have it work reliably. Doubly so considering it worked fine in Firefox for YEARS… until maybe six months ago?
It feels like something the FTC should be investigating, or perhaps a European equivalent, but I doubt it will.
The FTC will not investigate anything that was not reported to them. Did you report your experience? They do care about these issues, if you care enough to take six minutes to report it.
YT works pretty flawlessly for me with firefox on debian. What's the issue you're seeing?
If you are blocking ads now, the videos will start in a very delayed fashion almost as if the server is waiting the length expected for the ad to take before streaming you any bytes.
Same here. Still, I prefer to wait instead of suffering those aggressive ads.
The worst part is if someone doesn’t put 2+2 together and starts blaming their ISP for poor load issues because their Youtube “keeps buffering” because of this continue cat-and-mouse game messing with the player client.
I do not enjoy having to troubleshoot “Youtube isn’t working” calls where it’s because of this adblock ‘protection’ bullshit.
It’s just as bad as Ad-Shield’s bullshit “an error occured loading this page” — no, the page loaded just fine until your malware decided to dump the CSS and hijack my pageload to some “error-report.com” website to tell me my adblocker did it.
I've seen that too, but it's still better than somebody yelling in your face about toilet paper.
I use Firefox + uBlock Origin on both Linux (Debian 12) and on Android to watch Youtube without ads and it works without issue.
I'm using Firefox.
I use Chrome and it's not good. They recently removed ability to force AV1 to only low resolution videos and as a result I had to disable HW acceleration in Chrome because accelerated AV1 decoding is broken on Steam Deck.
Interesting. I use Firefox and it works flawlessly for me. I wonder if it's a computing power thing?
I am constantly having serious issues running YouTube (Pentium II, IE3, Windows SQL Server 2003)