Google may find that their only option is to paywall YouTube. Too many of us will prefer to pay creators directly rather than letting Google take a cut. And YouTube is not the only game in town.
I admit that I’m pretty much done with YouTube anyway. Their unskippable mid roll ads that interrupt videos mid-word have become obnoxious enough that many creators I follow are jumping ship and advising their viewers where to find them.
Google may find that their only option is to paywall YouTube.
They already have Youtube premium. But $14/month is an insane price. I refuse to believe that is anywhere near the typical ad revenue they get from people. That is more than many streaming services.
Not that I support anything their doing, but managing YouTube has to be an order of magnitude more expensive to operate than a streaming service. I actually think they could get some sympathy if they took more of a Wikipedia approach and we’re more open about the costs to operate YouTube. However much we might hate Google, YouTube is practically a public good in the way it operates and the world relies on it.
How could hosting other people’s work and at most giving them a cut of the ad revenue be more expensive than
A. Paying for streaming rights to other people’s work. B. Creating your own works And C. Paying to host all of the above. ???
Unless you’re saying that the hours streamed from YouTube is so vastly more than any streaming service that it out costs all the other costs Netflix etc has in licensing and content creation.
It’s not, because it’s a lot easier to get someone willing to pay anything in the first place to pay more than it is to convert a free user into a paying one. So as long as a yearly rise doesn’t lose them more in profit they’ll keep increasing the price it until it does.
Though I really doubt that on a platform as huge as YouTube halving the cost to $7 wouldn’t get them twice the paying customers almost instantly, because $14/month is simply ridiculously expensive.
Where are they going? Most of the ones I follow are along the “this sucks, but it’s the only real game in town”, so I’d be interested to check alternatives and see what’s there.
The big problem with any social or content centric platform is that new ones are only useful for consumers if there are creators and only useful for creators if there are consumers.
Hmm. Is this supposed to be affecting everyone using Firefox with adblockers? I just played a video on FF with uBO. Worked fine for me with no delays. Maybe because I searched for the video using DDG and watched it via DDG (meaning I did not click through and watch it on YT)?
I would guess that Google uses a randomised rollout system to make changes affect a tiny % of users while they test it (common in big software companies). Changing your useragent might make you appear as a different client that’s not affected (yet). Source: I work in software and can guess.
Just to put this out there for those who probally didn’t read the article. YouTube does this 5 second delay thing, on purpose only if it detects a user using an adblocker if you don’t use the adblocker then Youtube will work as it normally would on that browser.
Whether it’s still a clunky experienceor the browser crashes really Is dependant on that browser and if it’s a good alternative browser.
In other words, ‘fix he delay by disabling the adblocker’, coming from Youtube themselves.
Man, I already had a hard time justifying my YouTube Premium subscription. I literally only have it for putting on stuff to sleep to on my TV without some ad telling me Mr. Beast wants to give me $10,000 if i click.
But the worse this gets, the more I feel like an asshole for giving them a dime.
Hi m8, do you know what would be a good option for like an android box or roku or whatever for tv? I have a semi smart lg tv that sucks ass and i whant to connect it to something like that, but i whant a tv box that can get open source stuff or at least is conpatible with something like youtube revance.
Silly. This wouldn't explain why people still get the delay in a "clean" version of firefox, or why the delay disappears when the only thing changed is spoofing that your browser is chrome instead.
Someone should investigate deeply. My combo of a whitelist firewall on an OpenWRT variant and Graphene often has a bandwidth issue that is clearly software related only after watching something from YT. I can stop the apps manually and close everything related to browsing and the connection issue still exists. I can disconnect the internet from my router and the problem still persists. However, if I shutdown all 3 devices for a few minutes and bring them up fresh, the network connection is flawless. Something is running in memory, and I believe it is related to YT, but I lack the skills to break it down further. I like to run an AI server and it is simply useless if anything on the network has connected to YT since booting.
I’ve also noticed when family is watching YT premium (not something I use) and I am downloading a LLM from HF, the internet bandwidth of our network more than doubles on my wired connection. In between the streaming packets from YT the speed on the download jumps massively. If family is watching YT, I can actually download a LLM faster. That just seems odd to me that those are connected.
Does that seem legitimate to you? There are many more implications below the surface with this. Yes, YT has little black boxes that cache content locally with ISPs that also means they are likely filtering all data. I don’t like that part, but I can live with it.
The idea that something is running on my device that seems to be hidden, but where I can stop the behavior by flushing the memory; that is extremely alarming. If I understand it correctly they have direct memory access for streaming video through h.264. Whatever they are doing is causing me to drop connections and impacting my WiFi signal stability even when offline doing tasks unrelated to YT. As soon as I reboot the problem is gone. I distrust them so much now that I do a hard reboot any time I watch YT. (It improves battery life as well.) This is criminal behavior if my speculative analysis is correct and they are running stuff like this in the background. I’m running a combo where I control every aspect of my network. This should not be happening in my circumstance.
I would recommend trimming all your custom configuration from your router/firewall, one change at a time, until you can no longer reproduce the issue.
Or go the other way around: set up a barebones configuration, confirm the issue is resolved, and begin adding one customization at a time until it breaks.
It sounds like you have a lot of stateful inspection configured. YouTube’s heavy usage of QUIC (i.e. UDP transport) may not play well with your config.
And, incidentally, what does your hardware look like?
Frankly, even the most barebones router should be able to handle YouTube. I am running pfSense in an ESXi VM, with passthru Intel gigabit NICs, 2 GB reserved RAM, and 2 vCPU (shared, but with higher priority than other VMs) on a Dell desktop with a second-gen i7 that was shipped from the factory in 2012.
Yes, I am routing on decade-old hardware. And I have never seen anything like what you are describing.
YouTube should “just work.”
I am going to assume that if you’re running OpenWRT, then you are probably using a typical consumer router? Please correct me if I am wrong.
Have you by any chance tried backing up your OpenWRT config and going back to stock firmware?
I know, I know, OpenWRT is great. I have a consumer router that I flashed with it to use strictly as a wireless AP.
But consumer devices flashed with vanilla OpenWRT tend to have very, very little resources left over to handle fun configurations.
And I have a feeling some of the fun configuration might be contributing to your issues.
After further investigation, apparently one of my routers 2.4G antennae is either held low or more likely fried. Sometimes the firmware is switching the working antenna more rapidly, enough to cause server outputs to look stable but other times it sticks on transmit or receive and doesn’t toggle. Gradio is apparently not robust enough to compensate for the inconsistent connection.
It sucks because the router is from PCWRT and the dude updates and maintains the router and supplies a simplified interface. I’ve used it for years. It looks like LUCY has come a long way since I used it last. I have a couple of the same routers as the PCWRT router I was going to flash with OpenWRT, but the documentation for flashing this model is terrible. I guess I am going to need to figure out something going forward now. …so yeah, maybe not YT.
Nobody can even state that it’s actually happening “for competitive browsers” as even Chrome users are reporting an unexplained lag/slowdown. At this point, it’s just wild speculation and bandwagoning.
There’s been multiple posts pointing to some possibly “wait for ads to finish loading” type code. It’s quite possible that it’s just bugged in Firefox etc since browsers are horrendously inconsistent etc.
But that doesn’t make a cool headline so instead the “it’s Google being evil” story is the popular one.
I’ve read a lot on this and never saw any conclusive claim here.
There were claims many years ago by Mozilla about this, and it had to do with slow APIs in Mozilla that YouTube was using…
There’s also been many known performance issues in a lot of the APIs/libraries Google/YouTube use on Mozilla for many years. And Mozilla just hasn’t been able to keep up.
I don’t see anything about this in recent history, because everything is just floods of people complaining about this round, with still no conclusive evidence that this is happening intentionally. YouTube is currently on a ad-block-blocker crusade and their code keeps changing and there’s nothing to conclusively indicate that this is malice and not just a bug in the way Mozilla performs.
So as much as everyone seems happy to burn the witch because of poor performance, I’m not ready to jump to that conclusion until there’s actually evidence of this being intentional. Especially when this smells a lot like a long standing different problem. “Someone said they are” is not going to convince me. Especially if you can’t even point to that someone saying that thing.
You absolutely can tell what's happening by reading the source code. They are using a listener and a delay for when ontimeupdate promise is not met, which timeouts the entire connection for 5 full seconds.
They don’t need to put incriminating “if Firefox” statements in their code – the initial page request would have included the user agent and it would be trivial to serve different JavaScript based on what it said.
The video in the linked article does just that. The page takes 5 seconds to load the video, the user changes the UA, they refresh the page and suddenly the video loads instantly. I would have liked to see them change the UA back to Firefox to prove it’s not some weird caching issue though
It’s not wild speculation as there is compelling, if incomplete, evidence. And to describe everyone’s reaction as “bandwagoning” is ridiculous. Firefox and Mullvad are my daily drivers. This directly impacts me. The fediverse is going to have a disproportionate number of non-chrome users.
I’ve duplicated it on 4 machines across 3 OS’s (windows 11, macOS, steamOS). Glad you got lucky. I’m sure you’re also familiar with A/B testing but if not I’m happy to explain it.
It is absolutely possible there is a reasonable explanation but for you to say 1) nothing is happening and 2) it’s “bandwagoning” is, again, ridiculous. Especially if your evidence is “well mine is fine,” which is not acceptable troubleshooting procedure.
Not all regions are served with the same scripts. That’s why the ad-block pop-up was shown for some users but not for others or at a later time for others. This also affected the update cycle of those anti-adblock scripts.
The reason for that is quite simple. New stuff is rolled out to only some users at first as some sort of beta testing procedure. If many people complain about functionality issues and all of those have the new version of the script, Google knows there is something wrong with it.
“It happens all the time” and “they always do *” is also comically unhelpful and useless. I’m getting a pot/kettle vibe from those that seem to take offense at my comment.
I mean you’re saying you want proof, don’t read the article, then say you don’t care because it works for you. Do you not understand why that’s a little perplexing? Anyway, I’ve said my piece. I don’t imagine it will be a very productive discussion. Have a good week.
Don’t worry, there isn’t proof in the article either. There’s a snippet of code out of context, and a video that, while it shows a loading delay, doesn’t show the code being executed.
While this is abhorrent, I have to say in general Firefox is just painfully slow on mobile compared to other browsers. Don’t know what it’s doing but I stopped using it because it’s noticeably slow.
I’m using Fold 5 and can tell a difference in scrolling performance between Samsung Internet and Firefox. There are also some issues regarding how the UI handles transition between folded to unfolded and vice versa.
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