Not sure if it's related, but looks like the controls are now transparent overlays?
Edit: videos a bit slow to load, but now working again as of 8:02pm EST
I'm pretty sure they devastate your ability to focus though. I really notice it when I've been watching heavily. Something like chronic weed smoking in effect.
I never got on tiktok thank goodness.
And no I'm I'm not going to pretend I watch a lot of enlightening long form documentaries. It's all a guy in Pakistan making gears followed by a dog falling off a boat followed by a short clip from a movie and I don't recall any of it 30 seconds later. Pure brain eating dopamine.
It's way better than watching silly movies or playing video games (which I never got into for some reason).
But it does require heavy moderation. Under half an hour in the evening only seems to be fine.
Ads also have a tendency to load at higher quality even when there are bandwidth restrictions on cellular networks. We're all being forced to watch 360p videos on our $100/month cellphone plan, but somehow everybody is aligned to give us 4k ads, and waste our battery and bandwidth.
I thought YouTube cached all the recommendations fairly locally with a box at the Telco. Clearly this is not the case if it is down for everyone, everywhere.
Also wow I had forgotten how obnoxious yt is on a phone. Usually on an adblocked pc
I'm guessing they don't.
Just had a message from PipePipe. Quote:
"Announcement
##251016
YouTube has just rolled out an update that effectively blocks our current implementation for video stream extraction. This affects both anonymous and authenticated (login based) fetching. We are actively working on a solution. Thank you for your patience!"
alexpadula•2h ago