7mo ago

YouTube's server-side ads resulted in a black screen for ad blocker users

www.ghacks.net YouTube's server-side ads resulted in a black screen for ad blocker users - gHacks Tech News

Ad blocker users say that they are seeing a black screen when trying to play a video on YouTube. Here's what happened.

Mashable reports that users ran into a black screen on YouTube, and that it stayed for about 6 seconds before the video began playing. The reports indicate it affected several browsers including Firefox, Edge, Vivaldi.

Some users joked that they would rather see a black screen than an ad. While that's certainly a better experience, it does waste precious seconds of our time. A simple workaround for the black screen on YouTube is to just refresh the page, hit F5 as soon as the page starts loading. uBlock Origin's filters were updated with a patch to resolve the problem, the add-on updates its filters automatically. If you are still experiencing the black screen issue, just open the extension's dashboard and manually update the filters. This tug-of-war is getting annoying, but it appears to me that Google's efforts are actively promoting the use of ad blockers, instead of attracting new subscribers.

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I'm seeing a lot of comments about Youtube frontends. Don't get me wrong. They're nice and all, but we need some alternatives. At this point in time. We have two of them Odysee & Rumble. If you're tried of Youtube's bullshit. Alternatives are the way to go.
- I think its important to highlight that Odysee and Rumble are both "free speech" platforms that neo-nazis love to use to platform their calls for violence.
  
  New platforms get the fringe content first, because the vanilla content can happily use the old incumbents.
  
  Lemmy is also a "free speech" platform. Yet, we're all still here.
  
  Neo-Nazis use Lemmy as a platform for their calls to violence?
  
  I know they use Mastodon to do it. Truth Social runs on the Mastodon software.
  
  Pretty sure the fediverse is VERY left-leaning lmao
  
  It is. Which makes it even weirder that black people have a horrible experience on Fedi with loads of racist harassment.
  
  Horseshoe theory
  
  Yeah, which is why !meanwhileongrad@sh.itjust.works exists.
  
  This right here is the community that made the lemmy developers themselves write code to specifically censor this community.
  
  There's a big difference between a protocol (what you refer to as Lemmy is actually a protocol called ActivityPub) and a centralized organization (Odyssee). Many / most Lemmy instances will ban Nazi posts, many also defederating from instances which allow them. However, the fact that it's a protocol means it's still free speech. This is IMO a very good system to have, and emulates real world free speech dynamics.
  Odyssee, however, allowing Nazi stuff is not okay since they are not a protocol. They're the equivalent of a Lemmy instance. Lots of people are against Hexbear, for example, myself included.
  
  Odysee is a platform built upon LBRY, a protocol for content distribution. So your statement is incorrect.
  
  Here's a few more in a reddit thread.
  I thought Odyssey was just gun nuts? When did the shitters get there?
  
  although to be fair, that is just what's going to happen.
  
  What does neo-nazi mean to you?
  The reason I ask. I see that word get thrown around on social media (twitter) all the time. The way I see that used 99% of the time. Some Left Winger sees a Right Winger say something they don't like. The Left Winger can't counter it or they just don't like that Right Winger said. So the Left Winger calls the Right Winger the worst thing they can think of.
  
  They always say “says something they don’t like” but in reality what they are saying is trans people are pedos and should die, that’s not an opinion, that’s a call for violence dude. Go fuck yourself and fuck your feelings
  
  Some Left Winger sees a Right Winger say something they don't like. The Left Winger can't counter it
  Many right wing positions are very easy to counter with scientific evidence– climate change, crime rates, public health policy, social programs...
  So if you think the "Left Winger" can't counter it.. do you not consider evidence-based arguments to be legitimate?
  
  While I largely agree with your point, as an Odysee user myself I know there is a visible amount of actual Neo-Nazi content there. That said, such channels are not difficult to block on the user end on the platform so you don't see them after the first time, there's not so much that it's a constant annoyance, and there is still plenty of worthwhile content on Odysee to watch, including various YouTubers who mirror their content to the platform. While the Neo-Nazi content is harder to find on Rumble, it's more politically focused and feels like it's more meant to be "right-wing YouTube" whereas you can actually find more of a variety of viewpoints on Odysee.
  
  What does neo-nazi mean to you?
  
  Actual anti-semitic, fascist, racist people and groups who support the ideology of Nazi Germany and use Nazi symbols and iconography to support their cause. Actual white supremacists. Not every conservative or even most conservatives or MAGA Trump supporters. The real right-wing loons.
  
  Thank you for answering my question.
  
  There are a number of examples I can give but the immediately most obvious that springs to mind is Mark Collett, who can be seen in this picture with his ex-girlfriend who has a large visible swastika tattoo.
  The British Movement, formerly known as the British National Socialist Movement also have a presence on both sites. One of their primary catch phrases is, "No more brother wars." which refers to WW2 as a war between different sects of the "Aryan race". It means that those sects should not be fighting each other but instead non-white people and Jewish people.
  As I say, I can point to more but I think those give you the picture. I should probably also add that its a common quippy clap-back for these types to say "so... huh... everyone you disagree with is a Nazi" themselves. The function of this is to muddy the waters and propagandise the questioning of whether or not their ideology is as bad as those who directly oppose them state. It means that they get to spread their ideas by a proxy to onlookers.
  
  Do you have an example of this ?
- there is also peertube which is fedirated
- Sadly, too large to die. 99% of content creators willl stick to what the majority use. I'm just using Grayjay (Android) & Invidious (desktop) to watch all my content.
- fuck rumble
- lack of content and engagement are the main issue and Youtube reign top because of that
- yt-dlp is also a great alternative, since you can just stuff it into the backend of something like jellyfin and have it work.
  
  yt-dlp is a frontend.
  
  No? It downloads the videos. Your video player is the "frontend".
  
  not technically a fronted. however, if you use it mainly for downloading YT content, it will run into the same problem as many frontends.
  
  it will, theoretically, but it's singular backend, and development efforts can be focused on it specifically, rather than something like vanced, which is integrating more heavily with the yt UI itself, whereas yt-dlp doesn't care at all, and just rips the content spit out.
  I would hope most front ends are using yt-dlp as the backend, but i suspect they're just tacking shit on top of the youtube web ui instead, unfortunately.
  
  it's a backend, the front end would be something like jellyfin, obviously the shitpost here being that this was a topic about frontends, if you want my opinion though, all frontends are dead, and backends are where it's at. You can even integrate yt-dlp as a backend to something like VLC so that it operates as a real frontend.

236 comments