Okay. Yeah. Sure.

I feel like the explanation follows a thread of believability, but even then, this feature was terribly coded if it was circumvented via User Agent string manipulation.

lol, I take back the snark I gave in another thread the other day about Google doing this to fuck with people now. Egg on my face for giving them the benefit of the doubt.

They can't honestly think this will have the desired effect. I also bet the poor sod that had to implement it "strongly advised not to do it". But was over ruled by some know it all shit head MBA.

I wish I could make YouTube "experience suboptimal revenue" in retaliation, but sadly I can't block more than 100% of ads.

Can you say "anti-trust"

they're so shockingly inept, i can't believe it anymore

This is hillarious! I didn't even notice that. YT always delayed video loading a little. Is this really a change?

Punish?

make people who use adblockers “experience suboptimal viewing, regardless of the browser they are using.”

The sad thing is, I consider this an upgrade. I'll take a moment to breathe and maybe break out of the negative spiral that is modern internet use.

Huh, I just thought youtube was running slow. Still better than ads.

Active enshitification.

I don't understand why companies still place ads on youtube. I've never ever bought a product or visited a company's website which was advertised on youtube.

Are there really people who listen to youtube ads?

It's like when a teacher can't target the bad kid so they punish the whole class instead.

Ads are sub suboptimal viewing.

GrayJay is still working pretty good. I cannot use the YouTube app, or mobile browsers because most of the content I'm interested in isn't highly visual so I like to turn my screen off and listen. I am ok with a reasonable amount of ads but the anti-feature of background play disabled without premium is just stupid.

Whatever you say Google. Hey EU, Google wants to chat with you.

Google's modus operandi - business as usual. Deploying their dirty tricks on their mass of servers to edge out and destroy competition. When caught out they apologize all surprised Pikachu style, then do it again differently. This is likely in response to news about Firefox mobile finally allowing extensions to work. People are probably trying it out, but their Youtube experience will be crap, so they'll go back to chrome.

I feel like all the people running Firefox (most of my friends/family and many colleagues) are just going to say “damn, YouTube sucks. I should look elsewhere” and not “oh, it must be slow because I’m not on chrome.” Heck my parents don’t even know what chrome is.

Still illegal