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Comment by RisingFusion | Hacker News Reader

If you have an adblocker it might be intentional.

That's not plausible.

If someone sees, oh YouTube is making my computer hot, the last thing that's going to occur to them is, "wait let me try turning off my adblocker."

When corporations try to change people's incentives, they are obvious about it, so people know what to change.

In contrast, changing CPU usage on video playback for people who use adblockers and then not telling anyone is... just not a strategy that makes any sense at all.

I find it fascinating that people think 12 seconds armchair psychology is enough to definitively rule out phenomena that hinge on complex tech and complex human deliberations about policy. That works on campy monster of the week TV shows but it catastrophically underestimates real world complexity.

We've got documented cases in the wild of youtube adding 5 second timer, as well as experimenting with 3 video limits for adblock users, not to mention the cat and mouse game of breaking scraper-oriented tools like Newpipe. So it's happened before, and on-the-ground evidence of historical precedent and a straight look at incentives tell us more than assumed psychological states.

Did you mean to reply to a different comment? Mine didn't say anything about psychology.

But you do seem to be strengthening my comment -- when YouTube was implementing a 3 video limit for users blocking ads, they were doing so with a big huge message: "It looks like you may be using an ad blocker. Video playback will be blocked unless YouTube is allowlisted or the ad blocker is disabled."

That makes sense as a strategy, telling the user what to change. Silently using up more CPU doesn't.

Musing on how a message will be subjectively experienced by users to the point of ruling out explanations based on an assumed subjective reaction, and assuming complex software development outcomes are tied to that specific strategy, is in fact about psychology on multiple levels, despite your protestation to the contrary. Specifically it's armchair psychology that underestimates complexity.

Most of my examples cut against your interpretation rather than in favor of. The 5 second delay was discovered rather than announced, and same with Newpipe breaking, and I don't even agree that the video message had anything to do with a broad principle of always tying communications to user experience. If anything the history is the opposite, rotating through various forms of obstruction all of which nudge user behavior in various ways, perfectly agnostic to any principle of how it gets communicated.

Not really.

It's pretty common sense to say that YouTube CPU usage will not be linked to adblocking for most people. Any more than a sunny day is linked to what you ate for dinner last night.

It's not psychology. It's just straightforward common sense.

You seem to be trying to obfuscate something here that is really quite simple.

Sure it is. They’ve done crap like make firefox or safari run hot on other Google properties in the past.

Is it incompetence or sabotage? Who knows. The first rule of sabotage is to be indistinguishable from incompetence.

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/26184

Incompetence is by definition not intentional, and sabotage is the action of a rogue employee, not corporate strategy. A corporation can't intentionally sabotage itself, by definition.

They're sabotaging non-Chrome browsers to drive people toward their platform with the strategically weakened extension API.

I don't think that has any connection to the subject under discussion, which is about whether YouTube CPU performance would lead people to turn off adblockers. Not about getting people to switch to Chrome.

I believe their point is that people switching to Chrome _is_ turning off their adblocker.

Why would it? uBlock Origin Lite blocks ads on YouTube just fine on Chrome.

Do I hear boiling water?

It might be worth finding out what codec might be coming down the pipe in any case.

You part of the Armchair Psycholologist Masterrace?

I work for another large streaming site where people like to use adblockers. These adblockers also cause similar performance issues that are entirely caused by awful code in these blockers. I've studied the code for all of these blockers and they do stuff like:

- Constantly hammering the playlist endpoint to try and get something without an ad stitched in

- Constantly tearing down and remaking the player

- During an ad, requesting the playlist for every other quality to see if those do not have any stitched ads

- Proxying all traffic to servers the adblocker people own in countries where ads are not typically served (eg Russia)

- Intercepting playlist requests and simply deleting segments that they believe are ads (oh no why is my stream broken!!! stupid streaming website!!)

Youtube _could_ be doing something here, but there is also a very real chance your adblocker code is simply bad.

None of what you're mentioning applies to uBlock interacting with YouTube, I suspect you're talking about Twitch, which bakes the ad breaks into the stream so you still get the stream interrupted even you manage to block the ads, making people resort to hacky things like using the homepage player when an ad would be played.

Possibly You are conflating CPU usage with halting of video for length of the ad? ad blocker halts the video i.e.spinner widget appears for length of the ad.

Hanlon's Razor: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor

>Hanlon's Razor

Sorry, but drive-by philosophy is not applicable here.

YouTube developers single out adblocker users and taunt them with an "Experiencing interruptions" toast prompt that locks the video stream for ~5 seconds. Curiously, it contains a link to the YouTube Help Center, to the section fragment "#check_ad_blockers". In other words: "yeah, we know you've got uBlock Origin enabled, enjoy the speedbump".

Player base.js:

    api.XL("innertubeCommand",{openPopupAction:{popup:{notificationActionRenderer:{responseText:{runs:[{text:"Experiencing interruptions?"}]},actionButton:{buttonRenderer:{style:"STYLE_OVERLAY",size:"SIZE_DEFAULT", text:{runs:[{text:"Find out why"}]},navigationEndpoint:{commandMetadata:{webCommandMetadata:{url:"https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/3037019#check_ad_blockers

User reports: https://old.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/1la6tkm/anybody_no...

So that's what it is! I've never seen the toast message, but I had a suspicion it was intentional on YouTube's side considering it doesn't occur in Chrome. Sadly I don't see a work-around in that reddit thread. I wonder if someone has a violentmonkey script for it.

I have noticed this but have been unable to explain it until now.

I’m sorry but big tech doesn’t get the benefit of the doubt.

The benefit of the doubt... that corps _don't_ write clunky, slow software?

When the supposed to bug happens to conveniently cause issues for adblocker users, yeah.

Possible, but still just an assumption.

Google does - Google search and maps have gotten objectively worse over the past 2 years. At least in Canada.

I have 38 locations in my (huge) city saved in Google maps and it breaks when I ask it to find a way from point A to point B. Works fine when logged out.

Maps also put traffic signals where there are none, and while finding shortest path it stopped putting weights to traffic signals. So you could have it route you via a city's main street instead of the freeway because it's 2km shorter but it ignores the 9 traffic signals that wastes 15 mins. Apple maps works fine.

Google search on web has adopted bad UX, and clicking a map or a shopping item has a noticeable delay between. Also right click "Open in new tab" options are gone.

Are you saying all these "enshittification" changes are deliberate?

Have you told them yet?

Programmers are usually pretty smart though.

Their middle mgmt though?

Malicious and incompetent.

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