1y ago

YouTube Says New 5-Second Video Load Delay Is Supposed to Punish Ad Blockers, Not Firefox Users

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

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."

Technology @kbin.social

www.404media.co /youtube-says-new-5-second-video-load-delay-is-supposed-to-punish-ad-blockers-not-firefox-users/

5 4

Technology @lemmy.world

YouTube Says New 5-Second Video Load Delay Is Supposed to Punish Ad Blockers, Not Firefox Users

www.404media.co /youtube-says-new-5-second-video-load-delay-is-supposed-to-punish-ad-blockers-not-firefox-users/

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102 comments

Even though it doesn't apply for me (praise Freetube and Grayjay!) I'd rather waste 5 second looking at black than any ad ever
- Commercial breaks were when you muted the television and had about two minutes to go to the kitchen or use the bathroom. Even if it's forced, I'm not watching them.
- It's funny they think 5 seconds of no content is worst of 10~30 seconds of ads.
  
  I think the goal it to make the user wonder "hum, looks like it's broken" hoping they disable adblocker during troubleshooting. I am not convinced at all about the effectivness of this measure, but it seems they are just trying anything.
  
  Most of the time, the commercial's volume is much louder than whatever content you are watching. So ya, I'd rather have nothing...
- Yeah haha.. They really think we would hat it if there is not a ear busting sound which tells you to buy sth for at least 5 sec.
  The 5s black screen is automatically becoming a video

I experience suboptimal viewing by having to watch ads. If I had to pick one or the other, I know which one I prefer.
- It's crazy that Google thinks people would rather watch 15 seconds of ads than 5 seconds of nothing.
  
  What’s even crazier, for some people, actually a lot of people, they are right. Some people can’t be left alone with silence for that long.
  Not me, but they are out there.
- suboptimal viewing [of the ads]

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.
- More likely, people will stop using YouTube at all
  Hahaha, no.
  
  I meant people who use Firefox+uBlock, not just any people.
- 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.
  
  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.
- Considering those are people who only cost them bandwidth and provide nothing in return, that might actually be a net positive for their bottom line.
  
  '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.
  
  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?
- Yeah, people will just use YouTube's competitor.... uh... called... um...
  
  Outdoors
  
  LiveLeak !
  
  There are already several alternatives and this attitude of YouTube will only get them more users.

Can we stop panicing every 5 seconds? Give adblockers 1-10 days and they will fix it. We have been through this a bunch of times.
- I think it's less panicking and more informational. The enshittification of Google has commenced and this is just documentation.
- Yeah, as long as it is a big enough problem on the internet, you will have at least one nerd trying to find a way to circumvent it.
  Give them time.
  
  The nerds are cooking, let them cook

Most of the articles writing about it seem to reference following reddit post: https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/17ywbjj/whenever_i_open_a_youtube_video_in_a_new_tab_its/k9w3ei4/
Following code is pointed out:
undefined

setTimeout(function() { c(); a.resolve(1) }, 5E3);
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: https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/17ywbjj/whenever_i_open_a_youtube_video_in_a_new_tab_its/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.
- 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.
  
  But the server outputs code for the browser to run. Doesn't matter what the server does as long as the browser gets there same output.
  Server side they could stall based on the agent but it's not the case here. Whatever is happening seems to be client side.
- That's out of context. That snippet of code existing is not sufficient to understand when does that part of the code gets actually executed, right?
  For all we know, that might have been taken from a piece of logic like this that adds the delay only for specific cases:
  undefined
  
  if ( complex_obfuscated_logic_to_discriminate_users ) { setTimeout(function() { c(); a.resolve(1) }, 5E3); } else { c(); a.resolve(1) }
  It's possible that complex_obfuscated_logic_to_discriminate_users has some logic that changes based on user agent.
  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.
- 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.
  
  I said that i found different articles blindly copying. But i did not say 404 did so ;)

Well, ads are usually quite a bit longer... So I really don't see what they would gain from that. Unless they lied, which is of course possible if not likely.
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38346602
- That snippet of code is browser agnostic, which means you have the same problem on chrome lol
  
  'not to worry, chrome will soon not have good adblockers, and those that remain will be crippled and have size-limited filter lists that must be distributed with the addon via our 'store'--meaning we can (and will at some point) shut down any filter updates that block our shit.'
  
  From what I understand from the articles about this, it was found that different JavaScript code (without any delay added) was served in the HTTP response if Firefox was spoofed to look like the request came from Chrome, so it seems the issue only occurs on non-chrome browsers.
  
  It seemed to be just a 5 second wait.
  The weird part is that changing user agent to chrome seems to avoid it.

A mass migration to a federated YouTube alternative couldn't come sooner.
- 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?
  
  @ICommentOnEVERYTHING @CowsLookLikeMaps
  Patreon?
  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.
- 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 block ads and havent noticed that
- I did notice on ublock. Weird black screen for a few seconds and then content loads.
  
  I think Google underestimates how much I hate ads. I'll gladly take the black screen, thank you.
- I saw a clip of it happening on Safari.

i too have a bridge to sell

What an asshole company Google is.
- Google - Be Evil.
  
  And in case you think this is just coming from random users: https://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1700627373&count=1

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...

The Enshittification* of everything continues
https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

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.
- What is the extension called?
  
  Looks like there are several, most of which require extra binaries.
  https://github.com/Baldomo/open-in-mpv
  https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/minimalist-open-in-mpv/

F*k you, YouTube/Google! F******k you! 🖕🖕🖕

Oh let me splain that, it's not what you think silly!

I just moved to using Freetube.

This goes against all the fundamental principles of how the Internet is supposed to work.
- It really doesn't, they can do whatever they want with their website.
  
  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 don't understand how people can think getting a paid service for free shouldn't be fought against by the company losing money from the workaround.
- 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?
  
  I'm also a subscriber of Premium and have my adblocker turned on. Google still tracks you just as much as without Premium
  
  You definitely have the right to block and skip whatever you want if you pay for the service.

102 comments