Are you me? Just going through the exact same lol.

TIL there are two layers in hell

It’s just Lemmy admins trying to give us the true Reddit experience

Web sockets are meant for applications where it’s important that you receive updates fast in a push fashion. E.g. collaborative editors like Google docs or a chat application. To scroll Lemmy or open a specific Lemmy post you don’t need that at all. You can just fetch the data once and have users refresh manually if for example they want to fetch the latest comments on a post. Using websockets for that type of application just puts unnecessary strain on the server.

To everyone who is saying they use adblock and haven’t seen this yet: YouTube probably rolled this out to a smaller percentage of users first. It allows them to understand how this change impacts user behaviour, e.g. how many users comply and disable their adblocker, how many more users close YouTube than usual etc. Most tech companies do this type of analysis before releasing a high impact change to all users.