this post was submitted on 20 Nov 2023
2630 points (98.0% liked)

Technology

59708 readers
2436 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] MrSqueezles@lemm.ee 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Yeah, the simplest the answer is usually correct. Is this a conspiracy involving hundreds of Google employees intentionally building features to slow the app down on Firefox or is it incompetence because they don't test their product on multiple browsers?

Edit: https://www.404media.co/youtube-says-new-5-second-video-load-delay-is-supposed-to-punish-ad-blockers-not-firefox-users/

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.