919
Google is intentionally throttling YouTube videos, slowing down users with ad blockers
(www.windowscentral.com)
this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2025
919 points (98.6% liked)
Technology
71665 readers
3752 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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.
Still I prefer buffering over the inane noises of commercials
Yeah, I'd genuinely rather watch whatever amount of seconds forced ads are of black, silent screen than see an ad. It sucks and is awkward, but whatever.
Peertube is working on breaking the monopoly. I try to use it more.
Never happening.
It kind of is already happening. For example @lfdi@xn--baw-joa.social is soon to be making their instance available for state related institutions.
Small steps in a big picture. Edit: thanks for showing me how to tag @commentBelow
Test comment, please ignore. Jerboa doesn't recognize that and I'm curious if the punycode version would be.
@lfdi@xn--baw-joa.social
Edit: interesting. Yes.
Yeah, I run multiple ad-blockers and haven't noticed any slowdown or other degradation.
I've noticed a lot of videos give me a still ad and make me click "skip" at the very start of videos through my ad blockers.