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It's perfectly fine and valid to question the pile of JS code executing in Youtube webpages, but in this specific instance the performance issues are caused by ABP/AdBlock. The issue has been acknowledged by the developers[1]. It affects only the latest version of both blockers, not previous versions, so it makes no sense to keep speculating Google is at the root of that specific issue.
Out of curiosity I investigated these performance issues myself using profiling sessions[2] and the faulty code is definitely in the latest versions of these extensions.
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[1] https://gitlab.com/adblockinc/ext/adblockplus/adblockplusui/...
Going to drop this here for others who haven't heard of it https://invidious.io/
Now, how do we fix this? YouTube's ad model sucks. Their algorithm sucks. Their front page sucks. They've captured a bunch of creators though so often YouTube is the only place you can find someone.
I want those creators to benefit from me viewing their videos. I want the fact that I view a video and like it to help other people find that video in their recommendations. I want an algorithm that shows me things that are interesting and relevant not one that promotes the spammiest and most ad heavy videos that barely have anything to do with my watch history.
Having an alternative front end is nice but I don't want to rob YouTube of the money they spend on hosting the videos.
So, how do we do this?
Peer to peer fails when there is little interest in something or when most people leech and it sucks for archiving old content.
Hosting it all in one place is super expensive and hard for a small group to manage without turning into YouTube.
Maybe we could find a way for the creators to host their own content and get paid when people view it while being part of a large federated network for easy discoverability?
Please list any projects you know of, I'm sure there are a lot of people here who would be willing to contribute or donate.