Firefox slow to load YouTube? Just another front in Google's war on ad blockers | Hacker News Reader

Firefox slow to load YouTube? Just another front in Google's war on ad blockers

theregister.com

94 pointsheavyset_go73 comments

Article dated: 21 November 2023

Lots of discussion and posts around then:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38345858

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38363114

I've been really quite enjoying my personal invidious[0] instance. I'm sure there are some added areas of friction, but I can manage my 'subscriptions' all within the invidious instance itself, so I get absolutely minimal exposure to the maximal trash packed into youtube's default front page.

I'm aware that usage of invidious may be short-lived, as Google will likely step on the pipe that invidious feeds off, but I'm enjoying the intervening time.

Separately, this quote from the article is interesting:

"Ads are a vital lifeline for our creators that helps them run and grow their businesses," a Google spokesperson explained

Google is saying that the advertising supports the creators. They're not saying that the advertising (also) supports Youtube's infrastructure.

[0]: https://docs.invidious.io/installation/

And of course ignores the fact that smaller channels don’t see any of that money.

Bigger channels are also seeing less and less of that money.

And ignores the fact that evergreen ad-free content had ads added on opt-out even when the creator had not logged in for years and had no way to be located let alone paid.

Season to taste but I have this as `yt.bat` on my path and just hit Win `yt [paste youtube url]` and it will download it, cut out sponsor segments and queue it up in my VLC.

    youtube-dlp -f "bestvideo[height<=1440]+bestaudio/best[height<=1440]" --add-metadata --no-mtime --sponsorblock-remove default %* -o C:\tmp\ytdlc\%%(title)s-%%(id)s.%%(ext)s --exec "\"c:\Program Files\VideoLAN\VLC\vlc.exe\" --one-instance --playlist-enqueue {}"

too many steps vs $10/month

To be fair, YouTube Premium doesn't cut out the sponsor segments for you. I pay for Premium, but I also use SponsorBlock (and toss a bit to a channel's Patreon if I watch their stuff regularly).

It's 17€ here and 25 for the family package.

These days I only have Disney+ and Prime.

which kinda sucks, as this requires downloading the entire video before you can watch, so you cannot decide _not_ to watch it quickly (it takes at least the time to download, which, if the video is long, might take a while).

Not necessarily.

A while ago, I found the need to stream directly from yt-dlp instead of downloading full videos[1]. You can have yt-dlp write to stdout and pipe that stream into your player of choice.

[1] "Using Unix Pipes to Improve Chromecast Playback": https://alexdelorenzo.dev/linux/2020/03/14/pipes

mpv will play youtube videos given the URL if it can see a youtube-dl executable.

VLC can stream Youtube can't it?

oh sure, you can stream too if you want but I generally queue up a lot of videos so the latency doesn't bother me, and I appreciate the lack of latency when seeking

I also really like having the resultant archive.

Normally I despise anti-ad-blocker tactics as much as most folks here, but I want to give YouTube credit where credit is due: They provide a straightforward way to pay for ad-free service. I've often complained when other sites don't do that.

To be honest, it's not entirely ad free. While I pay for it, the sponsored videos are full of sponsored ads as well. Yes, I make an effort not to support the content providers that are filling their videos with sponsored ads, but this is becoming more prevalent and YouTube Premium is becoming less valuable as a result.

You can also use the SponsorBlock extension to help with some of that (and contribute where someone hasn’t already done so).

I have Premium and I still use Revanced on my mobile devices because of Sponsorblock integration. It's crazy how many ads YouTube videos have these days.

Which is why I go out of my wave to use sponsorblock and anti thumbnail addons.

I'm not watching your embedded ad noty, there's a reason why LTT shadowbans anyone who mentions it

That’s unstoppable, though, short of deploying AI to detect references to sponsors. The only way to discourage that is to boycott the creators in question.

I agree it’s unstoppable (except by YouTube multiplying the amount they pay creators), but there are actually two avenues already available:

1. YouTube could force creators to add their own “sponsored ad” tags

2. SponsorBlock uses crowd-sourced timestamps to determine when the sponsored sections are

In both cases they could be filtered out trivially

Yes, but the logical end for that is that they’ll stop have discrete sponsor segments and start mixing it throughout the programs like daytime TV used to.

As a user, you can block (skip) them with SponsorBlock (which uses a crowdsource database that's incredibly good).

YouTube could easily stop them by making it against the ToS and enforcing it.

That ad-free service comes with pervasive tracking.

The algorithm is a key part of youtube. AI recommendations is both expected and useful to people.

That profiling escapes YouTube and pops up elsewhere in the Google intelligence service.

5 second delay vs 60 seconds of annoying ads and random interruptions. Guess I'll take the 5 seconds delay.

I just use a free desktop client called Freetube instead ( https://freetubeapp.io ). Don't even have to login or create a profile, and there's a ton of UI customization options built in. Voila -- no more Google shenanigans.

It's time to backup any content on youtube you care about. I've noticed that videos that are older and less commonly viewed already take much longer to load. It's just a matter of time before Google starts removing them to save money. I've personally downloaded more videos than I can count from a few obscure channels I care about.

I just yt-dlp things now.

Yep, I have a script to yt-dlp then run whisper v3 on it, works very well especially for archiving certain videos and playlists.

Any reason you run Whisper on it when you can pull subtitles via yt-dlp?

Not all videos have subtitles. I do initially run yt-dlp with the extract subtitles parameter, then I check whether those subtitles were downloaded, then if not, I run whisper.

Have you found Whisper to be better than Google's automated subtitles? Might integrate it into my backup scripts myself.

Much better, actually. Try the large-v3 model, it's great. I use it via whisper-ctranslate2 which is a faster implementation.

https://github.com/Softcatala/whisper-ctranslate2

Nice, thanks for the info.

Couldn't you just use the subtitles from youtube directly?

https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp#subtitle-options

Or are these worse than whisper?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38622439

I'm not sure about whisper, but find YT subtitles pretty poor.

I generally watch videos on 1.5-2x speed (depending on speed of person talking).

I also turn on subtitles in case I miss a word due to the speed, and find it very random at times.

I always thought YT missed a major opportunity: let users submit corrections to the subtitles (probably by clicking on the words it got wrong).

It would have made the experience so much better for everyone who uses subtitles.

They did have a feature similar to this, user-submitted subtitles, but the feature was shuttered.

yt-dlp $(pbpaste) -o - | mplayer -fs -

Is there any reason to use mplayer instead of mpv?

https://mpv.io/ has yt-dlp support, if yt-dlp is installed you just need to throw the URL at it and it plays the video (without download).

It does, however I could never get SponsorBlock support to work with it, even with the plugins.

It's great, it's finally weaned me from mindlessly trawling youtube when I'm bored. I wonder if this is what Google intended, or if statistics will show less engagement on youtube?

Hopefully some Youtube alternatives start popping up soon that don't exist entirely on ads.

In our dreams. It is not about the software, it is the global adaptation of the product. The amount of videos youtube has is insanely high and there is no way all these YouTubers will switch to something else anytime soon. As long as google stays as the main search engine of the planet, we won't see anything becoming popular anytime soon.

>As long as google stays as the main search engine of the planet, we won't see anything becoming popular anytime soon.

That gives me hope, personally.

As terrible as Google search has become, it's a general conversation topic among anyone these days how it can't be used for anything anymore.

- Floatplane

- DTube (“Decentralized Tube”)

Joke's on them. I have Comcast. My internet is molasses-in-January slow, anyway.

Congratulations on eating and deleting all the things I had to add I leave it to you nothing else added you are welcome; the leaders of controversy. Enjoy.

That sounds like a story that could be part one day of Google's version of Microsoft Corp. v. European Commission (2007; T-201/04)

Good. Give me a 60 second black screen before every YouTube video. I'll take it as a feature and use it to reevaluate how I'm spending my time.

For me I start to notice when people begin repeating themselves in videos. It makes me realise they’re actually trying to waste my time, keep me on the video longer and not actually get into the topic in depth. Either that or when channels I like (and podcasts) actually become more like news shows, just talking about what happened the past week or so. Not for me really.

Just use SponsorBlock, it skips all the filler and also gives you a handy skip to highlight button.

Why not simply support the creators of the videos that you're accessing for free?

How do you know I don't support them? SponsorBlock is not a replacement for YouTube Premium, as Premium doesn't even have the option to skip parts of the video. If you do want to support them through watching their sponsor segments, then you can white-list sponsor segments but still skip filler, intro, and ending content.

Based on this comment, I don't believe you have used SponsorBlock or know that it has capabilities beyond just what's in the name, simply blocking sponsors. It has much more. When I said "filler," I was speaking about the literal category that SponsorBlock has, content that serves no purpose than to pad the video: https://wiki.sponsor.ajay.app/w/Filler_Tangent/Jokes

Value(time) > Value(content consumed)-Cost(surviving advertising)

Me watching the sponsor segment is worthless to the creators, since a company advertising on Youtube (or worse, podcasts) is a pretty good sign that it's a solution looking for a problem, or a poorly made or overpriced product.

If I wanted to support them I'd give them cash, not sit in front of an ad segment for something I will never purchase.

Among other reasons: because my time is substantially more valuable than the average 2 cents that YouTube pays the creator for each ad I'm subjected to.

If it was a simple matter of giving them money, that would be great, but I can't really justify giving google a slice if they're going to spend it trying to make every internet-enabled device into a telescreen.

So as a content creator, I can give you some insights into why this is. Keep in mind this will change eventually, and doesn't apply to every creator.

Simply put: if I make a video that's eight (8) minutes long, or longer, I can change where the mid-roll advertisement is placed. If it's less, I cannot. I also get less adverts the shorter the video is. If it's ten (10) minutes or longer, I get more and more adverts.

That's why when my wife and I watched a video about how a certain food stuff was made (I think it was a type of pasta), they made it 10m 30s long and used b-roll footage of pasta moving along a conveyor belt for 2-3 f-ing minutes.

So what you’re saying is that as a content creator, it’s about the money and not the content. At least that’s what your post appears to be saying, as you’re letting monetization potential guide your creative decisions.

> it’s about the money and not the content

I think that’s unfair. In most cases people are doing YouTube as a source of income and in order to do that they must:

- Create regular content

- Stick to content that YouTube encourages

- Diversify intelligently

If they make a mis-step on any of those they can lose that stream of income overnight.

I get it, and you're right. I think we're all just tired of every bit of media being driven by revenue. There seems to be nothing that has been untouched/corrupted by this. Clearly I understand that people need to live, though.

For some, sure. I don't bother customising or changing the adverts that YouTube shows. I let them determine that. Just keep in mind that YouTube will show you adverts whether I enable monetisation or not, so I may as well turn it on.

Yes! I completely agree.

I’ve been using AdGuard on iOS, and it’s not the quickest experience. It takes about 10 seconds to get a YouTube video to start. But oddly enough, I actually appreciate this.

10 seconds of peace and quiet, vs. 10 seconds of someone shouting at me about a product I don’t need.

I saw the same thing on Reddit yesterday. This is old news. Check the date of the article.

Are you requesting somebody tag this [2023]?

Why is Mozilla lying to us?

> Mozilla’s senior brand manager Damiano DeMonte wrote in an email to The Verge that “there’s no evidence that this is a Firefox-specific issue.”

https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/21/23970721/google-youtube-...

Do we have any hard evidence that they are? It sounds like people using ad blockers in other browsers are seeing the same thing.

Chrome users got the same anti adblock javascript snippet and the snippet only whether there was an ad blocker.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com