Technology

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.

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....

In related news, PeerTube just achieved its funding goal - including all of its stretch goals.

ublockorigin etc... 5 second unnecessary delay, very annoying . that's my experience

Sample size one but I'm on Fedora with Firefox and uBlock. Not seeing any issues yet.

Remember when videos would buffer all the time on non-chrome browsers lol

Freetube works pretty well, there's a cat and mouse game with youtube changes though.

https://freetubeapp.io/

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!

So this is it. The enshittification has reached slowlorris levels.

So it's wait a few seconds and watch a black screen or watch a minute of ads? What a choice...

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

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.

might be brain damaged but haven't noticed a slowdown or seen any ads in occasional use.

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'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.

Yo I pay for premium and it’s been fucking slow. Cancel my subscription? Guess I might need to.

Make me wait 5 mins on a black screen and I'll do that before watching an ad.

I've started bulk downloading videos with yt-dlp and watching them locally. No ads or throttling to deal with.

I'd sooner spend five minutes waiting for the video to buffer than five seconds watching an ad

“Do evil.” Google’s official new slogan.

God damn American companies love fucking up everything for money!

Ive been commenting on creators videos asking them to upload elsewhere as well. I doubt it will work, but we could try

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