And it cost them 280 million in the 90s ouch

And the stupid thing is that all I use Chrome for is Meets… And that’s it. Do they really think they win me over?

How does one “spoof” chrome?

It works for me now. Only took them 8 years

Here is an alternative Piped link(s):

It doesn’t exist

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.

Is there any place thats roughly analagous or…it must be inspired by something?

Breath of the Wild? Lol

Is that a thing?

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It does play livestreams, yes.

Nah, Reddit source. Wait 5 seconds.

I’m sure the EU will still.

The current US Federal Trade Commission is quite agressive compared to other FTCs historically.

1. Yes. Yes, it is!

2. McDonald’s doesn’t actually give a shit if you bring in food from other places.

🙄 No it would be like Ford owning gas stations and pumping faster for Ford vehicles than Chevy.

Is it more anti competitive than McDonald’s only selling McDonald’s burgers

Yeah, it’s more like the next time you go to Wendy’s, McDonald’s will follow you and try to lock the doors before you go in.

Is this a “gosh Wally, they’re just trying to do business! Do you expect everything for free??” post? Because that’s not how internet business works. This is not a thing that Google invented and developed on their own.

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How to spot a Ms employee

Thanks I’ll get back to this later

I use youtube without logging in, and it runs normally. If I use a private window, that’s when I get a delay when loading videos.

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Edge would like a word

Best I can do is boycott YouTube.

🙄 and they sometimes break sites by accident. I’m not saying it’s Firefox’s fault to fix. If you read the comments on the reddit post, there are several users looking at the code and finding what’s happening and it’s not tied to user agent.

old.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/…/ka0myef/

What does that mean? If you logout and go anonymous do you still have the issue?

Woah, woah, woah, slow down: Why do they get to have padding in their room?

I mean this in the least condescending way:

as far as I’m aware, even after looking it up, I think you are misusing the term blackpill.

Blackpill usually refers to a manosphere/Incel or Qanon type who has given up completely and lost all hope. In the the case of an Incel it’s that there’s no hope in ever escaping Inceldom. In the case of q anon it’s that none of the predictions about the “storm” will ever arise or come true.

I looked around and couldn’t find any other contexts that it’s used.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_pill?wprov=sfti1#

I am willing to accept that I could be wrong. But I looked all over search results etc.

DDG is legit great and even sometimes better than Google search now. I also am a SearXNG enjoyer

DDG, even though apparently a Bing front end, gives legit better results than google

Bought and paid for with a pittance.

They really weren’t that effective with Microsoft then either. The antitrust was far too late for Netscape and allowed Microsoft to hold a dominate market share with IE until they allowed the browser to deprecate and Google came in with a much better browser and took over the browser market (and are now doing the same bullshit).

As long as we keep giving these companies meaningless fines or wait until the damage is irreversible companies are going to always push the limit and look at any repercussions as just a cost of doing business.

So yeah, not much faith in anything changing.

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Microsoft got repeatedly hit over this kind of shenanigans in MSIE during and after the anti-trust lawsuit.

And all they had to do was drag the trial out until a favorable administration took office.

EU anthem intensifies

malicious slowdowns like this are why microsoft abandoned (non chrome) edge, too. Cause they couldnt keep up with fixing the constant fuckery google was doing, and users are idiots and blamed edge for all the problems.

You should look into all of the anti-monopoly actions that Lina Khan has been pursuing as head of the FTC. Under her tenure the watchdogs have had more teeth than ever before. It takes time for this stuff to make a difference, but they are most decidedly doing the work (Cory Doctorow has some excellent write ups on this if you check his blog).

You can always count on lobbiests to enshitifiy the laws

Well, can’t hurt to try.

Hi, code monkey here - I don’t work for a large company like Google, am paid less than a Google code monkey, and the products I work on are used by orders of magnitude less people. But even still, if my lead came to me and said “hey, I need the frontend to detect when a user is using ‘XYZ Browser’ and then introduce an artificial 5 second latency whenever they try to load a page”, I’d look at him with incredulity and tell him “no, I’m not doing that. That’s stupid and you should feel bad for suggesting it.”

Code monkeys aren’t paid to simply follow instructions given to them by someone else like some sort of robot - were paid to create applications and programs that people can use, and are usually given enough creative room to do that in a way we see as the best way.

Google developers can easily find a job elsewhere. If they stay at Google the chose to.

I heard they quietly dropped that as their motto several years ago.

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Thank you. I’m an idiot today. Sorry about that.

Yup, I can’t read. My bad.

In certain parts of the world, you quite literally do not have a choice. For example: I’m in a rural community on an island. No one uses any other website to post anything, from local classified ads to events to important city/community stuff. The choice isn’t to use a better alternative but whether a person here has social contact with anyone locally at all.

No, moving is not a realistic option, especially not moving as far as we’d have to move; even the biggest city in the province doesn’t use anything else.

I wasn’t sure if the first boring, low-effort comment was going to call me an Apple fanboy, or comment on the Facebook account I haven’t posted to since 2016, but it looks like Facebook won.

Your combative, yet somehow insubstantial comment reminds me of the same hollow, thoughtless comments that made Reddit so easy to abandon once they’d shown their hand.

But I didn’t have friends on Reddit. When I got to know people there, we moved our interaction off the site, to other services, or we became IRL friends. (One of them even moved across the country and married me!)

And that’s sort of the difference, right? What made Reddit easy to walk away from doesn’t hold for Facebook. The friends I’ve added on Facebook are still on the platform. They still share tidbits about their life that they may not want to individually message every single person they know, they still send me messages, and they still invite me to gatherings. I’ll deign to log in with email accounts that are not tied to my identity for them. I get significantly more satisfaction out of those interactions than I do from sparring with people who write as if their entire ability to relate to others is restricted to cheap jabs.

docs.invidious.io/instances/

This should be illegal, Firefox being their competition (tangentially)

The thing that gets me is they think no one will ever find this stuff. There are hundreds of thousands of people (maybe more) who are actively looking ways to block ads and get around this behavior. There’s no way it’ll ever go unnoticed.

That’s not the point.

No, the full context of the code snippet doesn’t appear to check the browser user agent at all. Other comments have explained that it’s most likely a lazy implementation of a check for ad blockers.

I was wondering how badly out of context the above quote must be considering the UA isn’t checked in the function. Above poster is trying to construe it as a pure and simple permanent delay for Firefox.

That being said, the solution is still bullshit.

Then use alternative youtube clients, like piped or freetube.

Or even better: spend money (if you can afford it) to host a peertube instance that automatically rips the videos off of youtube.

That’s an even stronger message that you’d rather spend money than use their crappy free services.

which is why everyone I like to watch content of posts their stuff on YouTube

I’m not sure this is exactly true - like, first off, I am not a YouTuber and I only watch a very specific kind of content there (breadtube), so idk if my opinion is valid, but

From what I’ve heard creators say, it’s not that YouTube is great, in fact it kind of sucks in a lot of ways, it’s just that the alternatives don’t do it better, and obviously don’t have the size & reach. All the things that YouTube does badly or not at all, the competition doesn’t do well either, so why bother.

You’re 100% right tho that Google’s success at this point hinges almost entirely on their convenience. Google drive/docs/sheets/etc are kinda garbage, but they’te fast, simple to use, and the integration is incredibly smooth. If there was any alternative that was as simple to transition into from email or whatever, I’d jump ship in a second.

Actually, the main problem isn’t that they’ve made their services convenient. Most of them are inconvenient in multiple ways.

The really big problem, the absolutely INSIDIOUS shit is how extremely inconvenient they’ve made using alternatives.

Example: Google the search engine straight up sucks from an end user perspective now. Yet because it’s where over 90% of all search engine searches happen, it’s MORE inconvenient to use any other one, no matter how much better the algorithms and what have you.

Same with YouTube: the user experience becomes worse and worse, but since it has a de facto near-monopoly of certain types of content from certain creators, best you can do is a custom frontend. Which they’re of course trying to make impossible ever since they removed the “Don’t” from their original informal slogan.

Offering a free convenient service is the first step of enshittification.

[Side eye at Bluesky]

You described a straight up better product. That’s not convenience. You said it yourself: alternatives have worse quality.

Thank you. I’m tired of hearing “it’s the consumer’s responsability” when we have governments and various regulatory bodies for this exact reason

Yes. I’m not a frontend dev, so not familiar with JS code (let alone an obfuscated fragment), but according to this HN comment, it’s used for a different ad block detection function.

Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act might stop any attempt to undermine browser performance.

If anything we need more laws around the tech space as a whole

All the advertisers abandoning them again. Musk threatening everyone with lawsuits again. A fair few media companies leaving the site over antisemitism and racism (rhetorical question -why does it take so long?).

But the title explicitly talks about FF.

There are none.

I mean, safari exists

Or, they could use an A/B architecture because it makes good design sense when you are dealing with a change that will impact millions/billions of people. But the conspiracy theory’s sure are a lot more fun to wallow in I will admit.

They use an incremental rollout system for essentially every feature. Are you suggesting every feature of every product Google makes has some nefarious purpose?

The point is, it has to be reproducible. On a clean FF install on linux, I cannot replicate this. Changing user agent does not affect the page load speed. So there has to be some another aspect, maybe iser’s OS configuration or smth that affects this, too.

What are you switching to ?

Seize the means of technology

Well you typically need standing in order to file a lawsuit, who would do it? Mozilla are probably the only ones. Why would this cause them to do it when past similar practices haven’t?

What law are they breaking? Not trying to defend Google or anything, just curious what law is blatantly being broken here because I don’t know of one

I was wondering why YouTube started taking a while to load pages in the last couple weeks. Fucking Google, pulling this shit.

Not that I don’t believe you, but do you have a source for that?

If changing your user agent to Chrome on Firefox fixes it that justification won’t fly

Oh, I have no idea. It’s just something I noticed previously, and has a similar thing to this post, so I thought I’d mention it. I don’t have any inside or expert knowledge here.

xd

Hasn’t been their motto for some time… and it shows.

Very overtly and loudly claiming a quality which should be self-evident in oneself, one’s company or one’s nation invariably means it’s not really there.

I think they changed it didn’t they?

Right - “Do no evil” uhhh… Is that not your default setting?

“It’s evil not to make as much money as possible”, Google founders. C-suite and board, probably.

Not arbitrary enough that they thought they could keep saying it. They ditched that about a decade ago.

Is that easy to do?

When they decide to do tricks in the backend differently between browsers, there will be ways to overcome that.

it’s part of their anti-adblock code. without going into too much details, they can instantly find out whether ad-block is trying to do anything on chrome, but on firefox they need a 5 sec delay

not saying we should worry for them, but youtube is run at a loss so they do actually need money from SOMEWHERE to maintain youtube. youtube still sucks and this is definitely not the way to win over users but thems the facts

Librewolf is on the microsoft store?..And so it is! Don’t get it from there. That build most likely isn’t actually Libre

Adguard for desktop. You may want to add AdNauseam into all your browsers as well. It helps spoof the anti-adblock stuff by making that bullshit think you’re clicking on ads

Its possible one of the problems plaguing most countries today is that tech companies are greatly overvalued. I think musk made this obvious with twitter but across the board you see almost identical playbooks by every major tech company. This is maybe because they aren’t as profitable as they’ve been saying.

Using a VPN on a shitty network won’t magically make your network connection better.

👍 thanks

Content king was sentenced for being pedo to 14 year olds. I smell Andrew Tate syndrome.

I’m not very familiar with those services but are they not relying on YouTube, and therefore still YouTube in a way?

edit before anyone argues, I know these alternative frontends bring many privacy advantages and many usability advantages (and disadvantages). But the content still comes from YouTube which is what my argument is about. I wouldn’t say an alternative frontend (or client for that matter) is not using YouTube…

True, could just be lucky. I still haven’t noticed any ad blocking changes either, but then again I’m using Firefox with μBlock Origin…

Big shame that this wouldn’t be illegal. But hopefully soon. Very anticompetitive behavior.

That’s interesting. Could be uBlock doing its thing then, for which I’m quite thankful

Seriously who downvotes a bot.

Nobody’s getting hurt by a small grammar correction. People may even learn from it and be better off.

True, thank you.

Firefox isn’t going to die because of this. There are already workarounds and even if there weren’t, an open source browser isn’t dependent on bringing in revenue to stay in development.

Oh, so it’s shit in the way I originally thought, then.

And also shit in the second way I thought, since adblock is a symptom of how terrible they’ve made the experience on their platform and if they want less people to use it they should make that experience more reasonable.

Given the shit big companies have got up to in the past and continue to get up to, as exposed in past and ongoing antitrust cases, that conspiracy theory you mention really isn’t all that unrealistic. Yeah, it’s not what happened in this case and it isn’t the simplest solution, but it’s absolutely a believable thing for YouTube to do, though I think they would have hidden it better if they had.