YouTube's server-side ads resulted in a black screen for ad blocker users
YouTube's server-side ads resulted in a black screen for ad blocker users
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.
I'll take a black screen over an ad any day of the week. Screw ads.
What's the endgame here for users?
Do we just want a reasonable subscription price? Something we can genuinely afford?
If youtube doesn't play ads then they cant remain a service. At least not as it is today. Hosting costs money.
Im not shilling for them, i dont want ads either. And google are a terrible company. But im trying to be realistic.
Do we want cheap subscription?
Or a reduced service that can be maintained without so many ads
Do we just want 5 second skippable ads back?
Im just seeing this fight progressing to the point were youtube becomes subscription only and the ad blocker users have to pay or lose the service they obviously want to access.
The day adblocks/yt-dlp finally loose to google forever is the day I kiss youtube bye-bye. No youtube premium, no 2 minute long unskippable commerical breaks. I am strong enough to break the addiction and go back to the before-fore times when we bashed rocks together and stacked CDs in towers.
Peertube, odysee, bittorrenting, IPTV. Ill throw my favorite content creators a buck or two on patreon to watch their stuff there if needed. We've got options, its a matter of how hot you need to boil the water before the lowest common denominator consumer finally has enough.
Youtube is becoming too useless. But no change in the addiction. 😐
I remember a time when ads weren’t crazy intrusive. They weren’t being shoved into every os and app and website.
There wasn’t 20 of them on every page, and advertisers weren’t trying to harvest my data to the point where they knew every last detail of my personal life.
And I didn’t mind having them in order to have “free” content. But they got greedy and now I’ll block them in every chance I get.
Maybe forcing ads into everything isn’t the answer.
Hulu used to work this way with ad blockers back in the day
I can understand, I would feel better watching a black screen than an ad trying to psychologically manipulate you in a personalized way.
I've been seeing the black screen on Firefox. Still better than an ad, but it would be nice to be gone lol
If I'm watching YouTube I'm not too worried about my time. The black screen is worth it as long as it directly spites their greedy asses.
fine on firefox and ubo here
When I stream YouTube to my TV, I get 15-30 seconds of unskippable ads with the ability to skip enabling at the 15 or 30 second mark. The full length of the ad is 90+ seconds (according to the timer that never goes down). Would this implementation work similarly? 6 seconds of a silent black screen is fine; 90 or more seconds because the skip button is also missing would be more annoying (or be a nice time for a bathroom break).
I've been enjoying Odysee a lot. It doesn't have much content but it works great. Hopefully content creators start uploading there as well.
6 seconds?! GASP
Soon we'll all be free as the enshittification snake eats its own tail.
GrayJay has also been very quick to push updates. I haven't had any issues watching YouTube videos on there. Hopefully more content creators will continue to spread out across multiple services so that there's better competition with YouTube.
relevant - "YouTube server-side ad injection faq" from Ajayyy, the developer of SponsorBlock
https://gist.github.com/ajayyy/f7b1807e13731c25cef4c2c057d022bc#file-faq-md
No black screens in GrayJay...
Hot take for those who hate YouTube ads while still keep using it. You deserve it. The answer is right in front of us, stop using it there are alternative out there.
the moment I see a damn grammarly ad on freetube I'm dropping $100 on real debrid
I'm a scrub that pays for YouTube Premium and I've also been running into songs and videos that just don't play recently because I'm using uBlock Origin.
Those that make peaceful ad-blocking impossible make violent rage quiting inevitable.