It is likely you use Chrome or a browser that uses Blink for its engine and the OP uses a non-blink browser like Firefox. I use Firefox and I can cofirm since the last few months Youtube usability borders on usable
They've also started to be really aggressive against VPNs. I've tried Private Internet Access, Mulvad and AirVPN and often I have to cycle through 5-15(!) servers before YouTube stops saying "sign in to confirm you're not a bot".
Discord has started to become absurdly aggressive with it too, to the point that they don't even let you load messages whilst logged in if you're on a VPN.
It really makes me feel like there will be an inflection point in a few years, where the internet is cleaved in two. You'll have the 'free' internet that is full of interesting stuff but also full of malware, spam and scams, and you'll have the squeaky clean corporate internet, basically a facsimile of WeChat's super-app, of which you'll only have access with a government ID. No VPNs or anti-fingerprinting allowed.
100%. Web Credentials + Digital ID + age verification will all be handled with Secure Attestation backing it. Cloudflare will have a checkbox for site admins... [X] Require Age Verification... and that's it. Boom. Your site is "safe" from accidentally allowing kids in.
...of course, free speech and anonymity die with this, but why would that be a problem? You don't want to say anything the current or potential future government wouldn't like, do you?
The year is 2041. Google announces that only a negligible fraction of users acceses websites outside of the clean pool. These users are at risk, they claim, due to "all the bad stuff on the free web". They refuse to clarify if this refers to malware or to content not aligned with The Party doctrine. However, they draw the consequence that "free web" sites will no longer be supported by Chrome, to protect the users. Less than an hour later, Mozilla releases a new version of Firefox that also disables access to websites that were not whitelistet by The Party, using the same reasoning.
I think it refers to the fact they can deperson you from their platforms if they want to. It's only "dirty" and "clean" if you emphasize the quote marks, but it's definitely "heavily censored" and "free".
There are allegations going around that e.g. some platforms are lax on child protection because some high up executives are pedophiles. But I'd still place those platforms in the "heavily sanitised" bucket if they're heavily restricting everything else. Those platforms just have a slightly different definition of "clean" than most of us.
I use it on Firefox and Safari on Mac OS (mainly Safari), and it's been OK except it's started doing a thing where it blips a bit after roughly the first 1sec of video plays.
I wonder if being a YouTube Premium subscriber is also a factor here. I do pay for it so I don't see ads. But maybe the way ads are being served/injected has changed things for the worse for people that get them.
Not only do I get slowdowns and some videos don't load at all at times, but I also get a notification that explains that the reason is using adblockers.
Here I am, totally given up on adblockers, and no way I’m paying for premium, but jesus christ the amount of ads I get, sometimes seems to be one every minute, making most videos unwatchable.
Though it’s mostly good for my addiction since it makes me use youtube less.
I had the same problem. Make sure you're running the latest version of uBlock Origin. By that I mean you should explicitly check for updates and install the latest version. That fixed it for me.
I've disabled adblock/vpn and can watch maybe 1-2 videos before the video player starts blacking out on each one. Only restarting firefox "resets" it and I haven't been able to find a reason for this happening. Time for yt-dlp I guess
Yeah, big same here. It’s pretty frustrating, because I pay for YouTube premium, but cannot use my preferred browser. I have to use Chromium in order to have it work reliably. Doubly so considering it worked fine in Firefox for YEARS… until maybe six months ago?
It feels like something the FTC should be investigating, or perhaps a European equivalent, but I doubt it will.
The FTC will not investigate anything that was not reported to them. Did you report your experience? They do care about these issues, if you care enough to take six minutes to report it.
If you are blocking ads now, the videos will start in a very delayed fashion almost as if the server is waiting the length expected for the ad to take before streaming you any bytes.
The worst part is if someone doesn’t put 2+2 together and starts blaming their ISP for poor load issues because their Youtube “keeps buffering” because of this continue cat-and-mouse game messing with the player client.
I do not enjoy having to troubleshoot “Youtube isn’t working” calls where it’s because of this adblock ‘protection’ bullshit.
It’s just as bad as Ad-Shield’s bullshit “an error occured loading this page” — no, the page loaded just fine until your malware decided to dump the CSS and hijack my pageload to some “error-report.com” website to tell me my adblocker did it.
I use Chrome and it's not good. They recently removed ability to force AV1 to only low resolution videos and as a result I had to disable HW acceleration in Chrome because accelerated AV1 decoding is broken on Steam Deck.
Well... I have many new, emerging problems with YouTube as of lately.
For example I have to scroll down a lot to get to the comment section, the suggestions are all over the place, and so forth. Annoying.
Also due to uBlock Origin, some videos do not start and I have to refresh. It is not much of an issue for me but the fact that apparently I need a huge monitor to see the "old layout" is a problem for me.
It feels like "serving you the video you actually want to see" has become some kind of unimportant side quest, as opposed to serving you the crap (Ads, Shorts, recommendations, comments, sponsored content) that they would rather you be looking at.
Since some days I suddenly get freezes in the tab; these
unfreeze after some time, say 20 seconds or so, but I notice
a delay.
Something has really changed to the worse lately. I think it
has to do with anti-ad programs as well as AI, like the UI
also changed. It is important to point out that while you do
not have any issues, other people do or may.
I've been seeing weird stuff where the video will play but the page is unresponsive: can't click to pause, can't click the time index bar to move to a different point in the video, etc. Then I close the tab, and the audio keeps playing! It will play for 10-15 seconds before cutting out. Bizarre. . .
Airplay from youtube is broken for me. I airplay and instead of english, I get german and no way to change the language. This is not an isolated incident.
I considered it as motivation to switch more from Firefox to Zen, where it works, I guess because Google doesn't recognize it as Firefox and doesn't apply the anti-competition script?
