Turns Out Google and YouTube are Messing Up Our Computers if We Use Adblocker

by Scott Creighton (H/T.. you know who you are)

 I thought it was my system. Turns out Big Business is fucking up our computers if we dare opt out of their glorious advertisements and keep them from getting all that Mammon. FTR, GOOGLE OWNS YT and this article fails to mention their reach.

It's not just you: YouTube is slowing down your PC if you have AdBlock installed by making your CPU sweat—though despite the company's past behaviour, it's probably AdBlock's fault - PCGamer 

AdBlock users have been reporting widespread performance issues with the extension enabled on YouTube, and while suspicion justifiably fell on YouTube's head, the problem may not lie in the platform itself.

In a thread posted to the YouTube subreddit over the weekend (thanks, 9to5Google) users noted that having AdBlock enabled caused slow load times and increased CPU usage, as one user writes: "This messes up the resources on the computer as a whole. It just kills chrome it seems."

I decided to test this myself, and I noticed that having YouTube open with AdBlock increased my rig's CPU usage by around 17%. While using AdBlock or similar programs is against the website's terms of service, AdBlock is also a massively popular extension. On the Chrome web store it boasts 60 million users.

From what I could see the increase was pretty consistent—so not a dangerous spike—but lower-end laptops mainly used for browsing could start having heat problems. At best it's inconvenient and annoying.

This has led to troubleshooting paranoia, as sudden and unexplained performance dips can be a sign of hardware problems. User JotaroKujoxXx says they were "wondering why my laptop ran like a fucking jet for the last few days", while another commenter replies: "Yeah I've been deleting shit randomly thinking it was my storage space problem." PCGamer 

The article states that this slow down also happens when someone pays for YouTube Premium but goes to other sites with their Adblocker enabled.

The slow-down also appears to be impacting users who are subscribed to YouTube Premium while using AdBlocker for other websites, which is a problem—seeing as a subscription is a way to avoid ads without violating ToS, causing some users to feel hard done by. Our Guides Writer Sarah James tested the extension with Premium, and noted an increase of about 15-18%. PCGamer 

What should this tell us that the writer of this article seems to be missing? The elephant in the room is GOOGLE.

GOOGLE not only owns YouTube but also the advertising mechanism on the platform. Paychecks for content creators come from GOOGLE, right? GOOGLE or Alphabet. And GOOGLE is also the biggest advertising company for numbers of other websites, not just YouTube.

So of course GOOGLE is doing the same thing to the OTHER WEBSITES.

And this writer seems to ignore these obvious facts completely.

People are upgrading systems, replacing them even because they think the problem is with their hardware. Now I guess they will delete Adblock and just accept their fate that neither their time NOR their equipment belongs to them anymore and watch all the ads GOOGLE spams across the interwebs so they can get their glorious Mammon.

This is described as 'annoying' in the article but it goes FAR BEYOND that.

Here is a company, deliberately FUCKING UP YOUR PRIVATELY OWNED EQUIPMENT so they can make money and they fear no blacklash or government interference in this grand scheme of theirs because... well, they are GOOGLE and right now they are BIGGER than our government. 

That's it. There's nothing more to it. Government of business, by business, for business wins again and there is jack-all shit we can do about it.