If your PC has felt slower than usual while you watch YouTube, that isn’t a figment of your imagination – YouTube is deliberately causing the issue in a bid for you to get rid of your trusty ad blocker.
It’s a cruel tactic for YouTube to apply, especially considering that YouTube Premium costs £12.99 a month. That cost on top of Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Disney+ soon adds up to an expense too many, leaving viewers with no other alternative but to use an ad blocker.
But even that sanctuary has been breached.
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Not only is the site purposefully slowing down video buffing but it’s also “killing” Chrome. “One thing to add also, this messes up the resources on the computer as a whole. It just kills Chrome, it seems,” posted one annoyed user in response to the subreddit calling YouTube out.
The issue has gotten so bad that some users, not realising the issue, were ready to purchase new computers to avoid further crashes, as revealed by AdventurousDegree58. “I almost was about to buy a new computer,” they admitted. “Instead of making the site better for users, they [YouTube] are spending millions on destroying themselves by not listening and respecting the users who literally created them.”
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Frustratingly, it seems that the only way to avoid these lags is to change your settings and remove the ad blocker. A move that few will want to do when YouTube’s content is now packed full of ads, often at inconvenient moments during your viewing. You could, of course, try using a different browser. However, for some people that simply isn’t an option.
So if your PC has been running “like a f**king jet” for the last few days, this could be the reason why. Instead of “deleting sh*t randomly” believing it’s a storage issue, check out your CPU usage while using YouTube – you might just get a nasty surprise.*
Update: Since the time of writing this, it's been revealed that YouTube has refuted claims it's to blame for the slowness, with the issue apparently being caused by AdBlock and AdBlock Plus. For anyone still experiencing the issue, it's suggested that you simply try a different ad blocker.