YT slow as heck currently

[flatlandsman]

Anyone else notice this?

You may or may not spend as much time on youtube as I do but has been very slow since last night

OK I have a few adblockers on so they might be deliberately throttling me, is that possible?

[Blib]

It's working normally for me. I'm on a lot. I pay for premium. Can't be doing with ads.

[aterribleusername]

Yes they are deliberately throttling adblock users, have been for a while now. Making the whole site run slow for the first 19 seconds for me with slow loading of menus, very poor response to going full screen and knocking the quality down to sub-HD at times too. Using Fadblock so I see how long the ads are meant to be, a small wait is much more preferable to 2-3 mins of ads before a 10 minute video! They'll have to make the site pretty much crash before I consider going premium, prefer to support channels I like directly.

[Narcisus]

I pay for it and its running slow for me

[DirktheDaring]

Interesting, slow for me too for a day or two, and I’m a proper UK subscriber too.

[Narcisus]

Sorted.... Turned add blocker off for youtube .... Even though I'm a premium sub.

[flatlandsman]

Interesting so it might not necessarily be throttling, it might be an issue with the site as if those paying for it are experiencing issues, it cannot be purely down to throttling.

[Corso Marche]

flatlandsman said:

Interesting so it might not necessarily be throttling, it might be an issue with the site as if those paying for it are experiencing issues, it cannot be purely down to throttling.

The post above yours explains it.

[Hoofy]

aterribleusername said:

Yes they are deliberately throttling adblock users, have been for a while now. Making the whole site run slow for the first 19 seconds for me with slow loading of menus, very poor response to going full screen and knocking the quality down to sub-HD at times too. Using Fadblock so I see how long the ads are meant to be, a small wait is much more preferable to 2-3 mins of ads before a 10 minute video! They'll have to make the site pretty much crash before I consider going premium, prefer to support channels I like directly.

Well, ditto.

I've noticed something was up and thought it was my PC. Since I now know the problem, I'll go elsewhere for my content ie back to TikTok and Insta that I had stopped using in favour of YT. Bloody clowns.

[Gren]

Seen a couple of articles lately about Google throttling YT experience if an adblocker is detected

[toastyhamster]

Uninstalled AdBlock, installed uBlock, back to normal. Not sure how long it will last though.

There's always SmartTube but if anything that's a bit too aggressive cutting out ads and sponsorship.

[PeterGadsby]

Try using Brave browser, seems to be really quick with that. For me Edge is really slow with YT

- Pete

Edited by PeterGadsby on Sunday 14th January 13:43

[Hoofy]

toastyhamster said:

Uninstalled AdBlock, installed uBlock, back to normal. Not sure how long it will last though.

Thanks! That was easy.

Now what about ads on Amazon Prime Freevee?

[robsa]

Not sure if it's related, but YouTube for me on iOS can take ages to start playing sometimes, and sometimes the screen goes black and I have to shut and reopen it. I'm also on Premium as I loathe ads.

[C69]

There were rumours circulating at the back end of last year that YouTube was running slower in non-Chrome browsers...

https://lifehacker.com/tech/stop-google-slowing-do...

[Lucas Ayde]

Narcisus said:

Sorted.... Turned add blocker off for youtube .... Even though I'm a premium sub.

They must be going out of their way to make ad-blocked experience through a browser poor, no matter who is watching.

I'm also premium but I pretty much use it exclusively on a digtal streaming box/TV, occasionally on phone or tablet with the app, so haven't noticed.

[Hoofy]

C69 said:

There were rumours circulating at the back end of last year that YouTube was running slower in non-Chrome browsers...

https://lifehacker.com/tech/stop-google-slowing-do...

It affected me on Chrome. They must have decided to hit everyone.

[thebraketester]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkRlfB_iz3E

[bunchofkeys]

https://www.techradar.com/computing/websites-apps/...

Seems like you're not the only one to notice the poor performance.
Could be Google targeting Edge users out of spite?

[Corso Marche]

It wasn't Google, or YouTube.

As it turns out it was an issue with AdBlock and AdBlock Plus. Now the developers of AdBlock have admitted to it;


[i] "Recently, ABP released version 3.22 which upgraded the bundled extension engine version to 1.1.1. AdBlock released version 5.17.0 which also updated the extension engine to version 1.1.1. We've had several reports of slow response time since the update.

It appears to be an issue in the extension engine since ABP, AdBlock, and the EWE test extension all seem to experience a similar issue with the 1.1.1 version of the extension engine." [/i]

https://www.neowin.net/news/adblock-google-did-not...

Edited by Corso Marche on Wednesday 17th January 17:21