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Google is intentionally throttling YouTube videos, slowing down users with ad blockers
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this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2025
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“Do evil.” Google’s official new slogan.
God damn American companies love fucking up everything for money!
Been using revanced for months and haven't noticed a difference other than no ads or sponsors on bigger channels.
Oh hey I ran into that issue, fixed it by blocking the element on ublock and spoofing my user agent
fixed it by blocking the element
Which one? That'd certainly help to know how to do that
Lemme know if they ever reply.
I have ublock, with sponsor block and some others, and don't have any issues on yt as of yet. Just in case though, how do I block an element and spoof a user agent?
Also interested in how you can do this.
So here's what happened recently:
- I opened the Google News widget on my Android phone, saw a Sponsored link, and found it interesting
- Clicked on it, the link opened in Chrome, opening the googleadservices redirection thingummy
- Took over 5 seconds to process the redirect
- I exited the browser
Guess who missed ad money?
But of course, maybe they got the ad money and the only losers were:
- me, who didn't get to see the website that might actually have had something I wanted
- the website owner, who not only didn't get my business but also had to pay Google, because Google most probably processed the ad first and didn't care to process the redirect
I feel like I understand why they removed the "Do no evil" sign. Because now, they are messing with both, the product and the customers, only providing as much as is required to take their money, instead of the full, advertised service.
"Is your video not loading ? Check out why, you fucking ad dodging commie" is the feeling i got from youtube's newest message while my video was unexpectedly taking 10s to load
They cannot kill Adblocks, because if they would — a lot of html5 embedded YouTube videos would be coming worthless and so would youtube (discord for example)
Make me wait 5 mins on a black screen and I'll do that before watching an ad.
Grayjay :)
YT's blocked on it. Fuck you, Google.
https://github.com/futo-org/grayjay-android/issues/2351
If Google's going to be further tightening YT to the degree where they might roll out DRM platform-wide as opposed to just limiting it to movies on the platform, I'm about to seriously start looking for stuff to watch on PeerTube because YT is not long for the world and will probably start pushing away anything that isn't AI slop at some point in terms of content.
YT's blocked on it.
Just tried it. It works.
Bless you.
Why do i feel like this happened a while ago? Like, isn't this old news? Or "olds" as it were?
It was previously a "thread.sleep(5000)" in the client code IIRC.
It was reported a decent amoint of time ago and i thought i felt a difference...turned out my isp was sending air bubbles through the internet cable.
After the internet stabilized i noticed exactly zero, just an occasional "restart browser because video's stopped playing alltogether"
I’ve been dealing with this forever.
Some issues I have that I only deal with when I’m not signed in without an adblocker:
If I try to skip back to a spot in a video, I get the loading circle and sometimes it doesn’t come back until I refresh the page. I have to make a mental note of the time and do that pretty often.
In safari and Firefox I will get a black box for about 40 seconds, no play button, and sometimes I have to refresh the page a few times just to get it to work at all.
Comments will not load sometimes until I refresh the page, sometimes more than once.
The video will sometimes stop and start “loading” while I’m watching it. The solution is always a page refresh or two.
Signed in with an adblocker, the problems drop by about 50% (pulled that number out of my ass, but I’d be willing to bet it’s close). Signed in with no adblocker on Firefox or Safari and the issues become significantly less noticeable, with exceptions from time to time. Signed in with no adblocker on chrome or edge, I experience none of this.
I believe they purposely throttle it on non chromium browsers too.
Sorry if this comment is jumbled. Woke up in the middle of the night with a stomach ache, got bored waiting for it to pass, so now I’m here and barely conscious.
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Ive been commenting on creators videos asking them to upload elsewhere as well. I doubt it will work, but we could try
A lot of my favorites are already on Nebula. I'd ask the rest to follow but that would require a google account.
I also asked some creators, but they can’t because of the Google partnership Programm, it prohibits reupload on other platforms
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Is google’s company motto still ‘Don’t be evil’?
They removed that from their official code of conduct in 2018.
I'd sooner spend five minutes waiting for the video to buffer than five seconds watching an ad
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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.
The thing is, their anti-adblocking measures are still less unpleasant than actually watching ads.
100%. Half the time I get blocked due to VPN or whatever I just close the tab and go with my life. The rest of the time I try all known workarounds. If those fail, I just go with my life.
My hatred for monopolisation and enshittification is stronger than my desire to watch content on any platform.
Amen.
So say we all.
So say we all.
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I've started bulk downloading videos with yt-dlp and watching them locally. No ads or throttling to deal with.
I've been doing this with band love videos and storing them on a hard drive. One I love got taken down and almost lost a while back and it's made me paranoid ha
DVRs are back in 2025. Who would have thought?
This is the way.
When YouTube wanted to throw me some entertainment and a couple ads, very conveniently, I was down for that.
Now that it's an all out technology knowledge battle - well, I'm quite good at that.
So I spend the time I would have laughed at their ad instead working around their bullshit.
I haven't seen an ad in years, but I still enjoy the same content. 🤷♀️
To me, it seems like they're working really hard, just to fail to serve me ads.
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