Hmm, that would explain the issues I've been having. The odd thing to me is that there's no feedback provided to let the user know that this is a response to adblock. I assumed that there were just technical problems somewhere.
If they told users what they were doing, it would probably make awareness of the existence of ad blocks a little wider. Surprisingly many people still don't know about them.
I haven't had any issues with slow buffering yet, but I have experienced something different: Sometimes the video playback suddenly stops altogether in the middle and throws me out of the video completely. I suspect that an ad is supposed to be played in this particular part of the video. I have to re-start playing the video from the part where it threw me out. Sometimes this happens several times in the same video.
I use the latest Firefox in combination with uBlock Origin (also always up-to-date).
I am a premium member but over the last week or so my YouTube videos suddenly started to take an eternity (5-10 seconds) to start playing when they were near instant before. Does YouTube assume I have an ad blocker? I have no Chrome Extensions and no deliberately installed Ad Blockers on Win 11. Going to play around with it tomorrow to see if I can determine what is going on.
I have pihole and premium. I get a lot of buffer stalls too. Started recently. But they're also updating the Android app every couple weeks, so I assumed they are screwing things all up out of incompetence.
This must be some exec's hard focus right now. What a tool.
Apparently, this time it wasn't on Youtube. Rather some users are still using AB/ABP, and there's a bug in those that affects a lot of content, not just Youtube.
I support the creators by buying merchandise and supporting Kickstarter etc. and others support using Patreon.
With those miniscule amounts Google pays to their creators (except the top 0.01%) I estimate that what I have brought is equal to 100-1000x of what they would have gotten from ads. And I'm no saint at supporting, there's people giving 100x more than me.
YouTube's greedy decisions are pulling me away from YouTube and towards the creator-owned Nebula platform. It's fairly inexpensive, I'm supporting creators and not Google, and there are no ads.
Tldr business did a video on their inckne sources, Nebula views get them much more money per view than YT. However YT is still their main income.
I really hope Nebula picks up more popularity