I use YouTube on a daily basis. I haven't seen any of these problems.
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.
Though it’s mostly good for my addiction since it makes me use youtube less.
It feels like something the FTC should be investigating, or perhaps a European equivalent, but I doubt it will.
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.
There a bunch of bad actors doing mass scrape of all public server and history via all of those VPN
Hasn't it been like that for already many years?
arguably, already 90's AOL very much pushed its users to stay within its walled garden.
...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?
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 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 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.
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.
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.
See https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/1id4amh/youtube_ch... and https://discussions.apple.com/thread/255931836
Also many times, the video won't play. If I reload the page, then it will play.
When Firefox dies, the last glimmer of hope will go out.