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YouTube Says New 5-Second Video Load Delay Is Supposed to Punish Ad Blockers, Not Firefox Users (www.404media.co)

submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/technology

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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."

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[–] [email protected] 86 points 11 months ago (10 children)

"supposed to"

Oopsie whoopsy, we accidentally made competing browsers disadvantaged.

Deliberate, disguised as accidental. Disgusting.

[–] Bazoogle 11 points 11 months ago (9 children)

Hanlon's razor - "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."

This is not only adequately explained by stupidity, but it makes the most logical sense to be explained by stupidity. They are actively fighting a war with AdBlockers. They are trying to block AdBlockers, and AdBlockers are working as quickly as possible to fight those changes. Then Google has to fire back as quickly as possible. This is resulting in rapid published changes to counteract AdBlockers and their retaliation. It makes all too much sense that their fight against AdBlockers did not work as intended. The people making these changes are Google software developers, and I really do not think any of them have an issue with Mozilla.

[–] FeelThePoveR 10 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

I don't know how stupid YouTube devs would have to be to:

Tie the delay that was supposed to fight AdBlock to user-agent (changing it to chrome fixes the issue)
Ignore Youtube Premium users that pay for ad-free experience

For those reasons I think it's pretty safe to say that this goes beyond stupidity and into malice territory.

[–] Bazoogle 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

What evidence is there of this being user-agent based? I've heard people make this claim, but I have not seen evidence of it and when testing on my own machine there was no delay at all.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago

I'd wager Googles only releasing it to some users at first like they do with most things.

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