Oh no! The video is black for a few seconds instead of showing several ads for a minute! Whatever am I going to do???

Oh that's why it says this? Guess I'll block this message too.

I'm watching a 4h video. I can wait 5 seconds for it to load 😂

I’m fine with waiting 10 seconds at the beginning of a video. I wonder how much YouTube would save (by reducing bandwidth, smaller caches, choosing slower storage) if they didn’t have the goal to start the video virtually immediately.

ReVanced and Grayjay do the same thing but for free and are open source so long as Google keeps trying to engineer enshitification the proud people of the open source community will engineer a solution.

The cost of hosting YouTube itself doesn't pay for itself unfortunately. They could get away with it back then because the internet itself wasn't that big. Therefore, we need to KICK THE NORMIES OUT OF OUR INTERNET. WE WERE HERE FIRST, REEEEEE

Also not run by oligarchs

On windows Firefox + ublock origin is an ad free experience for YouTube. Any chance you picked a browser that has ublock origin added hy default?

I doubt they’ll ever actually do it, just threaten it constantly.

They’d rather have people without accounts, and/or using adblockers keep using the site. If they started actually cracking down, then it would create a significant pool of users who would use some other platform. They’d rather eat the losses of some people not viewing ads then push a significant amount of users to a potential competitor.

Much like how Microsoft hasn’t cracked down on unlicensed windows installs because it would push a significant amount of people to look for an alternative OS.

you know those FBI Warnings in front of a LEGALLY (they are removed by pirates on pirated movies) procured Movie? Those are scare screens.

This used to be the case, but it's a different equation now. Ads used to be one or two per video. Fine, I get there are bills to pay.

Now it's pure greed and pushing us to a subscription for a service they purposely made shitty so we would think exactly what you are. 4-5 ads, with forced ads interrupting the videos, and auto redirects to more ads after the video fonishes. Unskippable multi-minute ads.

And if you're thinking "well then just pay for it", tell that to Netflix, Hulu, and all of the streaming services that were "ad-free" until they decided that actually, pay twice as much or watch ads (even though your paying).

So while I understand you're saying, you're assuming Google will play fair. They won't. They will up the price, they will still force ads, and it will get worse. I'm taking a stand now saying enough is enough. I'm not rewarding them for enshittifying the service.