Firefox users are reporting an 'artificial' load time on YouTube videos. YouTube says it's part of a plan to make people who use adblockers "experience suboptimal viewing, regardless of the browser they are using."
It really does because Google happens to control the browser that now dominates the market by a wide margin, and it’s using it’s monopoly position to break the internet. It’s incredible that people can’t understand the problem with this.
I’m a subscriber of YouTube Premium and I still get loads of ads. On the right sidebar I get offered to buy movies and TV shows, sponsored segments everywhere, etc. I’m literally using ad blockers on top of my Premium subscription because everything got out of hand. I even use ReVanced on my phone because of its SponsorBlock integration.
If Google continues to fail to read the room, I may cancel the subscription, move all my video needs to Piped and Nebula, the latter I also have a paid subscription for. How is that in Google’s interest?
@Vincent
I will just say that as a Boomer, I was raised totally on ad supported media and for the most part I don't mind it.
When YT was ads at the beginning and maybe an ad break in a video over 15 minutes I didn't mind. When articles had static ads in them, I didn't feel the need for an ad blocker.
I don't even bother trying to read text based content without an ad blocker any more. All the flashing ads and video players that scroll as you do, it's impossible to read. The number of ad breaks in a 15 minute YT video is now ridiculous.
I am pretty much deciding that the content is not interesting enough to put up with the ads.
While this is a 5s timeout, the code itself does not check for the user agent. So wherever the code is the 5s timeout will occur. The code also does not seem to be injected server side. I spoofed my user agent and for good measure installed a fresh google chrome, both times the code was present. So this code cannot be used to make any browser slower without making the other browsers slow too.
There is a response to the reddit post, which most articles seem to take their intel from. IMO this response does a good job at exploring what the code could be used for and points out that it is more than likely not for slowing down Firefox users: old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/…/ka08uqj/
I am amused by thinking that many journalists seem to take this story from a post on reddit, without even reading the direct responses - or just copy from another article.
Alternatively, it's funny that people write comments arguing that it wasn't targeted at Firefox users, on a post that already says that it wasn't targeted at Firefox users :P
It doesn’t really matter whether it was “targeted” at Firefox specifically or not, what matters is whether the website has logic that discriminates against Firefox users. Those are 2 different things. “End” vs “means”.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the logic was written by some AI, without specifically targeting any browser, and from the training data the AI concluded that there’s a high enough chance of adblocking to deserve handicapping the UX when the browser happens to be Firefox’s. Given that all it’s doing is slowing the website down (instead of straight out blocking them) it might be that this is just a lower level of protection they added for cases where there’s some indicators even if there’s not a 100% confidence an adblock is used.
The user agent is in the request header, so it’s known before any response is sent from YouTube.
I don’t know if that’s what they’re doing, because it’s not possible to know what their server code is doing, making it a far better place to hide sleazy code.
And I expect it’s likely more complex than just one if-else. I haven’t had the time to check it myself, but there’s probably a mess of extremely hard to read obfuscated code as result of some compilation steps purposefully designed to make it very hard to properly understand when are some paths actually being executed, as a way to make tampering more difficult.
The code is not obfuscated. The person i linked to even formatted it nicely. I do not have the time or energy to go through all of youtube’s JS. But the 5s everyone is talking about does target every browser the same. Serverside the code isn’t altered based on browser detection.
It can be formatted “nicely” with no issue. But that doesn’t necessarily make it easy to understand.
What that person posted was in a function named smb() that only gets called by rmb() under certain conditions, and rmb() gets called by AdB() under other conditions after being called from eeB() used in BaP()… it’s a long list of hard to read minified functions and variables in a mess of chained calls, declared in an order that doesn’t necessarily match up with what you’d expect would be the flow.
In the same file you can also easily find references to the user agent being read at multiple points, sometimes storing it in variables with equally esoteric short names that might sneak past the reader if they aren’t pedantic enough.
Like, for example, there’s this function:
<span style="color:#323232;">function vc() {
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> var a = za.navigator;
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> return a && (a = a.userAgent) ? a : ""
</span><span style="color:#323232;">}
</span>
Searching for vc() gives you 56 instances in that file, often compared to some strings to check what browser the user is using. And that’s just one of the methods where the userAgent is obtained, there’s also a yc=Yba?Yba.userAgentData||null:null; later on too… and several direct uses of both userAgent and userAgentData.
And I’m not saying that the particular instance that was pointed out was the cause of the problem… it’s entirely possible that the issue is somewhere else… but my point is that you cannot point to a snippet of “nicely formated” messed up transpiler output without really understanding fully when does it get called and expect to draw accurate conclusions from it.
Jesus Christ, why can’t they just leave it alone. At this point they are grasping at straws. More likely, people will stop using YouTube at all than turning off adblockers or switching browsers.
Yes, probably. But there are alternatives to circumvent their current restrictions and I think there will always be. If you add those methods, maybe the balance goes the other way around. For example, I’d go the Freetube way (invidious) instead. If they keep investing on preventing me to use Invidious, is it worth it for them? We will see.
If bandwidth was the problem, then they should allow Android systems to switch from video to audio-only when the screen is off or they could limit the resolution and fps to those using adblockers, without denying access to view. People using Firefox+uBlock already made a choice to not be their “clients”. At this point they should just count their blessings, which are still a lot, and let Firefox+uBlock users be or just close their pitty platform to their users as Facebook does. It’s here where their dilemma lives, are they gonna be another Facebook?
'Those people' are still incredibly valuable for YouTube.
They watch content, and interact with creators which increases the health of the community and draws in more viewers - some of whom will watch ads.
They choose to spend their time on YouTube, increasing the chances they share videos, talk about videos, and otherwise increase the cultural mindshare of the platform.
Lastly, by removing themselves from the advertising pool, they boost the engagement rates on the ads themselves. This allows YouTube to charge more to serve ads.
Forcing everyone who currently uses an adblocker to watch ads wouldn't actually help YouTube make more money, it would just piss off advertisers as they would be paying to showore ads to an unengaged audience that wouldn't interact with those ads.
You’re relying on a lot of assumptions, which even if true, still doesn’t mean that the math works out in a way that means allowing ad-blocking users makes sense.
Netflix doesn’t need a “healthy community” for people to use the platform. Shows do perfectly fine letting all the talking happen on other social media.
AND you’re assuming youtube wants to continue the already unsustainable ad-based model at all, which with how hard they push premium, definitely isn’t the case.
AND you’re assuming youtube wants to continue the already unsustainable ad-based model at all
No, I was explaining how people who do not watch ads are still valuable to YouTube today. It doesn't matter if they want to move away from serving ads in the future or not, the points above are still valid.
Netflix is actually a great parallel. They need people to watch the shows and buzz about them to draw in more subscribers. YouTube is the same way, they need people sharing videos and funny comments to scrape attention away from other bits of entertainment.
Further, this isn't a binary outcome. Each time YouTube makes it a little harder to block ads, a slice of people who don't want to put in the effort will start watching them. It is trivial, on the software side, to fully block a video from playing if the ad is not served. To date, they have not done that, and I sincerely doubt they ever will - because ad-free viewers are still valuable.
Yes, they would prefer if everyone watched ads. But they would still prefer ad-free viewers to watch YouTube and add to the network effect than to spend their time elsewhere.
But they would still prefer ad-free viewers to watch YouTube and add to the network effect than to spend their time elsewhere.
This claim is opposite to their actual current behavior. This isn’t a case where they made their ad-blocking slightly more effective, they added it to the terms of service. They changed their stance legally. To use ad-blocking on yt, is now legally the same as using cheats in competitive games. Which game publishers have sued over.
Blocking ad-blocking is not “trivial” from the software side, the arms race has made the work of both sides incredibly complex in some cases. It’s “trivial” to block the video if the ad isn’t served just as it is “trivial” to have the ad-blocker pretend to watch it if that’s the requirement.
It’s fairly clear to me, that YT has decided that whatever losses this incurs, outweighs the benefits. And I tend to agree. YT’s business model never made sense, not after they began allowing basically infinite uploads.
YT doesn’t charge for all the things that actually cost it money, no-one pays them to store the content no-one watches from ten years ago, or even six months ago. The rate at which their expenses grow is not coupled to the rate at which they charge. In fact, their income is constant, while their expenses have the potential to be exponential.
Compare that to Netflix, which has a fixed catalogue that they curate, and doesn’t grow out of the blue as users throw more at their servers to ingest. And they are in a downturn, with subscribing users!
Even targeted ads stop working once an individual gets used to them, ad-based revenue only works for a while, per customer. It only works long-term on a subset of people, which isn’t lucrative, nor ethical. That modern platforms are disproportionately subsidized by their most gullible users is a disgusting reality.
That makes data-mining and targeted advertising a huge business, but insufficient for running something like YT. Because it, is an even bigger business, one that has included all the people you can’t advertise to. Streaming doesn’t do “economies of scale” the way physical products do, servers and bandwidth don’t magically become cheaper the more you buy. In fact in recent years the opposite has often been true.
YT will never make enough with ads. The math simply doesn’t work out. I am very skeptical that it makes sense for YT to “allow” ad-blocking to “spread the message” of their product. If anything, to become solvent, YT needs to deliberately downsize their audience.
To grow and form a network, can be left to the communities that form around channels.
In other words (as I agree with you): they don’t generate direct profit for YouTube, but they generate value, or the long-term ability to generate profit.
And a long-term stable business should focus first and foremost on its value, because predatory profiting (i.e. profit obtained in a way that reduces the platform’s value) doesn’t last very long.
This comment is the equivalent of some guy telling you that you’ll be paid in exposure and that the exposure is going to be worth way more than money in the long run, just trust me bro.
I use Firefox+uBO, and I would stop using it, but I’m not convinced that most users would. Too many people fear the slightest bit inconvenience or change.
That’s okay. My argument is not against this, it’s against the “hahaha” part, as if it was such a ridiculous fantasy to stop using YouTube if you already are trying so hard to avoid the inconveniences of their current ad system.
I’m just gonna use whatever workaround someone develops for it. It’ll always be possible to spoof whatever bullshit they require, except:
I want to force them to actually make YouTube a paid service to get rid of “freeloaders”. That’s the only way to actually “solve” this for YouTube.
And when they do this, it’ll collapse, and I, along with many others, will be forced to stop using it. And that’s when real change will happen, because then the masses will be behind it.
If you actually stop using it, then YouTube won, in my opinion. They got rid of the freeloaders but can keep their shitty business model.
I’ve thought about this before. If YouTube collapsed, it would be a good thing because someone would develop something to fill the void, or we’d all start using Peertube or something
They don’t have a 100% monopoly, but they have enough control over the digital video space that they have real competitors.
In a real competitive landscape, YouTube would be scared to do many of the user-unfriendly things they’ve been doing because it would seriously hurt their market share. As it is, they might go from 97.64% of online user-generated video to 96%. That’s not really going to worry them.
Next step will require them to login to watch, they will probably implode at that point. If they are doing all these things to salvage revenue and or bandwidth from 1.64% of users, is it worth the investment? As I see it, if it is, they are not doing well with their business model and it’s not like this tweak will get them anywhere; if it’s not, they are just wasting time and resources in a Pyrrhic victory.
It seems like yet another example of Google making bad business decisions.
Sometimes, those bad decisions can be traced back to people wanting to “show impact” so that they can get promoted. That’s often why they do something ridiculous like launch yet another chat app, which they end up killing a few years later.
In this case, it could be something like that (like someone has an objective to reduce the number of people using ad blockers from X% to Y% and will hit that target no matter how much it fucks things up). Or, it could just be that Google has some kind of weird strategic goal in mind that they’re willing to burn many bridges to hit.
What’s interesting to me is the role antitrust is playing in this. I’m guessing that a lot of the things they’d like to do are things they feel they can’t do because it will get the attention of antitrust regulators. Like, they could just start perma-banning people based on cookies and IP addresses, but people might raise a real stink about that. So, instead, they’re going with just trying to annoy people enough that they give up and turn off their ad blockers.
This is part of a much larger plan. Google wants to establish a new standard that the rest of the internet will follow.
If Google is seen fighting an endless war against ad blockers, it will encourage other websites to do the same.
No longer will it be “Please disable your ad blocker, as advertising supports us and helps keep this content free”
It will start being “Ad blockers are not permitted.”
Google wants the Internet to start thinking of allowing ads as requirement for entry, and (via Manifest v3 and web environment integrity checking (which you better believe will be brought back in another form)), they will provide websites the tools to enforce this.
And I want to personally blame all the tech savvy people that have helped chrome achieve monopoly status over the last decade. If you’ve used chrome as main browser, it’s your fault.
Pointing fingers now after the fact is not productive. We need to educate people and lead them to alternatives like Firefox. Blaming people is not going to do that.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently. In a lot of your more famous cyberpunk stories, like Snow Crash, the world itself is a violent dystopia, and the internet is depicted as evolving into something both intensely interesting, but also very chaotic and filled with hostile people looking to scam or exploit you. The contemporary internet is moving towards an extreme degree of corporate regulation and control. Its not chaotic - it’s intensely ordered. It’s not interesting - the content is boiled down to the lowest common denominator and recycled ad-nauseam. Companies like Google are now trying to take the current internet, which has tragically become like a gated community with billboards, into something even worse than that. I imagine the next step will be all out war on the only non-Chromium based browser of note left: Firefox. After Firefox is gone, Google will own the internet as we know it.
I highly recommend just downloading any videos you want to watch. Some guy made an extensions for firefox on linux that lets you click a button and it just automatically downloads and opens that video in mpv player. You can also use tube archivist, yt dlp, etc to auto download your subscriptions.
I keep seeing people throw this idea out there but I have yet to have received a reasonable answer to a simple question: How would content creators get paid on a federated video platform?
Yes, content providers make money on YouTube, but considering that Google makes more than then they do as a percentage certainly begs for some other solution.
I have a bit over 60 YouTubers I’m subscribed to on YouTube. Am I supposed to pay $60+ every month to have access to them? The cheapest patreon I’ve ever seen was for $1 and that wasn’t even for full access just a “buy me coffee, thanks” tier.
What about discoverability, how am I supposed to randomly stumble across niche content creators that don’t have a huge following?
Not saying it isn’t possible I just can’t seem to wrap my head around how it would work.
Instances could probably find ways to be ad supported or creators could do 3p sponsorships or ads in videos. Not everyone has to chip in to everything they subscribe to. It’s still impossibly hard compared to youtube though.
e: what about opt-in ads (banner or otherwise) for channels you want to support? could be cool
The other big question is who’s paying for the infrastructure? If payments are done through a third party like Patreon, the host can’t take a cut. Serving lemmy text and image content from a home server is one thing. Being a 4k streaming host is an entirely different business. Way more computing load and bandwidth, which means higher hosting costs.
Ideally, it would be a P2P protocol where the main seeder is either the content creator directly, or a service paid by the content creator (who is funded by their audience and/or sponsors).
I believe there are many podcasts that work somewhat like that (minus the P2P part, they just simply use RSS). Some hosting services have features to insert ads into the audio podcast being hosted.. so the content creators still can choose to do that if they want, but the advantage is that there's isn't a monopoly for a single hosting provider and you can access the podcasts from many different podcast apps without needing to rely on a specific website and company that decides how you can watch it.
That will never work. It simply doesn’t work at scale like that, and it’s very confusing for the non technical. Creators shouldn’t have to worry about anything except uploading and moderating.
I wonder how that would work. My understanding is running a video site is extremely expensive. Transcoding compute, massive amount of storage, etc. Sure, a few small ones could exist, but enough to replace even a fraction of YouTube’s userbase? I just don’t see how the math works out. I mean, text-based Lemmy and Kbin had slowdowns/outages for months with just tens of thousand of users…
And that’s to say nothing of the copyright hurdles. Imagine people who don’t own the original videos start replicating content from YouTube -> fediverse-style video sites. The lawsuits would crush the new platforms to dust.
Believe me, I’d love to see competition. YouTube has had too much power for too long. It sucks how they treat their content creators, and even their users to some degree. But just like how no one up and starts a new electric power company, there’s a reason big players are entrenched: MASSIVE startup costs.
I haven’t had that issue. I’ve heard that disabling adblockers resolves it. But people have said that spoofing their user agent to chrome also magically resolves it…
i remember back when hulu was first starting.. free with ads. at times all you got was a black screen with a message about adblockers instead of the ads, and for the same length, which was still better than having them.
you could also just run the title to the end, then skip-back to the beginning and not have ads for the replay. so i just ran on two PCs. i'd watch a 'replay' on one pc without ads while getting the next title 'ready' on the other--flipping back and forth with a kvm.
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