this post was submitted on 17 Dec 2023
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Technology

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145
YouTube screwing itself with adblockers again (beehaw.org)
submitted 11 months ago by TheBaldness@beehaw.org to c/technology@beehaw.org
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I use Firefox and uBlock Origin. Not sure what kind of experience anyone else is having with YouTube, but recently my home page has been empty because I "don't have watch history turned on". Okay, fine. I won't be able to browse suggested videos, and I'll spend less time on their platform.

Then I began to get warnings about using an adblocker. Okay, fine. I know they need to make money, so I turned off the adblocker. Now when I'm having my time wasted by ads, I have to ask myself, how bad do I really want to watch this video? Not badly enough? I close the tab and spend less time on their platform.

Finally, I began experiencing glitches when playing videos. The video stops, but the audio continues. This never happened before. Perhaps mistakenly, I attribute this to YouTube, which is owned by Google, trying to force me off Firefox and on to Chrome. That was the last straw.

Now I use YouTube to simply follow the channels I'm subscribed to. When I want to watch something, I copy the URL, paste it into YT-DLP, download the video and spend zero time on their platform at all.

To summarize; Now I'm watching zero commercials, and YouTube is streaming the entire video to me, even if I only watch a small portion of it, and they're collecting less information about my watching habits than ever before.

Nice job, YouTube. Nice job.

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[–] Zaphod@discuss.tchncs.de 5 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Firefox + uBlock as well and I the only issue tha I have is that YouTube always takes a few seconds to load, before that the page is basically frozen

[–] Rangus97@beehaw.org 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

You could get around the load time by spoofing your useragent to chrome on Windows

[–] Zaphod@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 11 months ago

I did try that with the extension, but unfortunately didn't work