[PuercoPop]

It is likely you use Chrome or a browser that uses Blink for its engine and the OP uses a non-blink browser like Firefox. I use Firefox and I can cofirm since the last few months Youtube usability borders on usable

[jorvi]

They've also started to be really aggressive against VPNs. I've tried Private Internet Access, Mulvad and AirVPN and often I have to cycle through 5-15(!) servers before YouTube stops saying "sign in to confirm you're not a bot".

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.

[SchemaLoad]

Almost everything blocks you on a VPN until you sign in now. AI scrapers were the final nail in the coffin.

[Eduard]

> It really makes me feel like there will be an inflection point in a few years, where the internet is cleaved in two.

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.

[mikestorrent]

100%. Web Credentials + Digital ID + age verification will all be handled with Secure Attestation backing it. Cloudflare will have a checkbox for site admins... [X] Require Age Verification... and that's it. Boom. Your site is "safe" from accidentally allowing kids in.

...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?

[galaxy_gas]

For Discord it is basic rate limiting ( anty-VPN is other separate thing require phone number )

There a bunch of bad actors doing mass scrape of all public server and history via all of those VPN

[jasonvorhe]

What's so clean about YouTube, Discord, X etc? It's full of low quality content, scams, malware, influencers, advertisers and other scum and villainy.

[ThePowerOfFuet]

Mullvad Frankfurt 102 seems to always be OK in this regard.

[immibis]

it's already like that

[velcrovan]

I use it on Firefox and Safari on Mac OS (mainly Safari), and it's been OK except it's started doing a thing where it blips a bit after roughly the first 1sec of video plays.

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.

[MrNeon]

I use Firefox with uBlock and besides a couple of times where video start was delayed by a few seconds it has been working as well as before.

[viftodi]

Google does A/B testing for anti ad blockers.

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.

[tedivm]

For the last two days I haven't been able to watch youtube videos on Firefox without disabling uBlock.

[o11c]

Recently I've found Youtube to just show a white screen if it detects Firefox+uBO.

[rubyn00bie]

Yeah, big same here. It’s pretty frustrating, because I pay for YouTube premium, but cannot use my preferred browser. I have to use Chromium in order to have it work reliably. Doubly so considering it worked fine in Firefox for YEARS… until maybe six months ago?

It feels like something the FTC should be investigating, or perhaps a European equivalent, but I doubt it will.

[dotancohen]

The FTC will not investigate anything that was not reported to them. Did you report your experience? They do care about these issues, if you care enough to take six minutes to report it.

[jcalvinowens]

YT works pretty flawlessly for me with firefox on debian. What's the issue you're seeing?

[therein]

If you are blocking ads now, the videos will start in a very delayed fashion almost as if the server is waiting the length expected for the ad to take before streaming you any bytes.

[plugger]

I use Firefox + uBlock Origin on both Linux (Debian 12) and on Android to watch Youtube without ads and it works without issue.

[recursive]

I'm using Firefox.

[TiredOfLife]

I use Chrome and it's not good. They recently removed ability to force AV1 to only low resolution videos and as a result I had to disable HW acceleration in Chrome because accelerated AV1 decoding is broken on Steam Deck.

[RHSeeger]

Interesting. I use Firefox and it works flawlessly for me. I wonder if it's a computing power thing?

[rajamaka]

I am constantly having serious issues running YouTube (Pentium II, IE3, Windows SQL Server 2003)