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Comment by siddboots | Hacker News Reader

Youtube:

* Buffering was nerfed/broken some time ago. I can no longer watch 720p+ videos on youtube at all.

* Changing video quality now has a long and unavoidable delay, and often fails outright.

* Google are evidently uneasy about the profile name that I signed up with, and have been repeatedly nudging me to change it. I don't know how to reassure them about my choice.

* Advertising. Everywhere.

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I hate that Google "created" a youtube account for me, just because I use Gmail doesn't mean I want a youtube account (I don't). One day I forget to sign out of Gmail, I browse to Youtube, and bam, now I have a Youtube account, I'm signed in, and my video history is tracked, and I have to manually turn that off. I didn't ask for that.

If you're not on Google+, you can delete that.

https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/55759?hl=en

YouTube keeps insisting I merge my legacy YouTube account with Google+. Then YouTube insisted I use two-factor authentication (to watch cat videos) and made me choose between giving them my phone number so they could send me a text message or giving them my phone number so they could robo-call me.

I think the last time they bugged me about it there was no choice to opt out (because I have some uploaded videos on it IIRC). I clicked around and somehow I now have a new G+ account which is different than the one linked to my Google account which is linked to my Youtube account.

Brillant.

I can watch 720p+ videos but I have definitely noticed recently that loading is slower and sometimes more inconsistent.

The subscription feed is a mess. Before it was a grid and now it's in a list. The only reason why I know there are more videos uploaded than what's in my feed is because video authors title their videos in parts. So if I see "Part 3" I know that Part 2 and Part 1 are somewhere, just not in my feed.

There's ads on youtube? I wouldn't know, I'm using adblock

A trick I use when I change quality is immediately clicking on the time bar, it enforce the change right away.

I agree with all the annoying points above!

Luckily you can fix the buffering behaviour with a browser extension. Look for "SmartVideo for Youtube".

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