I’m a paying YouTube premium subscriber and use adguard. But, I have been experiencing the YouTube app being slow in loading comments for some reason.
I think youtube has just started needing way more bandwidth than it used to. A few years ago, 100KB/s would load a videos page almost instantly, comments as well, and smoothly run 360p playback. Now even at 160KB/s I often spend 60+ seconds for parts of the page to even load.
To be honest Youtube has always been slow to me, especially their streams. God, their streams are an absolutely resource hog, I’ve never seen a chat use up so much CPU power.
I can tell you why I do. I watch more YT than anything else (on my TV), and don’t want to watch ads, or play cat and mouse games trying to prevent them. I also listen to a lot of music, and use YT Music. I pay for the family plan, since we all listen to music, and my son and I watch a lot of YT (very different videos on YT however :) )
I get, there’s a growing group of people that think everything should be free, but I’m OK paying for something I use a lot, to remove ads. There should, however be more controls for paid users, like controlling whether or not you see creator ads, shorts, etc…
I’ve been tempted to sign up as well so I can stream to my TV through their app. I can block anything I want through my PC but smart TV’s are too locked down for my technical knowledge so I get ad’s which is unacceptable
I do totally get paying to support something you use a ton.
But I don’t get comments like this calling blocking ads a cat and mouse game. It’s always been incredibly easy to block ads on the devices I own and I rarely ever have to mess with anything after installing a single browser extension or a single app.
On my desktop/laptop–ublock origin. I would install this regardless of whether or not I care about YouTube ads because ads on websites in general can be pretty cancerous. So I would already have it on my device to begin with. Install one extension and forget about it. Very occasionally ads start coming through, but then the extension auto updates itself and I don’t have to worry about it. It’s effortless and I absolutely never need to mess with the settings.
On my phone–YouTube ReVanced. Just basically download I think two APK files and you’re set. I’ve had to reinstall this a single time over the maybe decade(?) I’ve been using it as YouTube had some sort of breaking update or something. But having to install it again once every many years is hardly an inconvenience. Oh I guess I have had to install it again when I’ve gotten a new phone, but that’s really not that odd or inconvenient to me either…and generally I don’t get a new phone that often.
On my android TV device–SmartTube Next. It’s a single APK file. Set it and forget it. I’ve never had to reinstall the app.
One caveat with this is that it seems harder to watch YouTube ad free (without paying for premium) on Apple devices. So if you use a lot of Apple products it also makes sense.
I read comments! I watch a lot of videos about self hosting services and the comments is where you find other people who have followed the video and struggled at some point. If you’re lucky it’s a common sticking point you’re stuck on and someone in the comments has a way of fixing it.
It’s free with my YouTube music sub. I was grandfathered into the cheapest price from the Google play music launch. I like a lot of tech and science videos and I watch YouTube for that. Worth it to me.
I’m a YouTube premium subscriber with Adguard Home and haven’t noticed anything slow.
