I’m under the impression that Google deliberately hinders their YouTube platform just because you have ad-blockers. With videos taking time to buffer, seems to signal this, because it almost makes up nearly the amount of time for when ads take if you had to watch them. So since you’re ad-blocking and they don’t like that, they’ll make your experience miserable until you want to pay their service or not use ad-block.
Youtube definitely hinders the experience if you have adblockers. I’ve had a page load instantly and the video start to buffer immediately, only to refresh on its own a fraction of a second later, load the page slowly, and then wait about 10 seconds before any buffering would happen. If adblockers are disabled, the page loads instantly and the video buffers immediately.
I also regularly get the little popup in the corner saying “Experiencing interruptions?” but shockingly only if the adblocker is enabled. Weird.
I read somewhere that this is because adblockers sometimes can’t block the ad so they just block audio and video from it and wait it out.
I’ve no idea if it’s true.
Hulu used to do something like this if they detected an ad blocker, IIRC … Except they would also display a blurb about what they were doing to encourage you to stop trying.