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

submitted 3 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

232 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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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[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago (3 children)

I thought the whole point of server side ads was that they are embedded in the video, not blockable?

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Just because a company makes lots of money, doesn't mean they know wtf they are doing or are smart.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 months ago

Sure they know! Every level of middle managers knows exactly what the status of the graphs of goals and progress of their team!

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

this is true if the client itself has no knowledge of what is ads and what isn't, so like if they have no skip to time feature, no clickable links etc. Otherwise the plugin could just search for those elements and mute or skip if they are present.

with YouTube it just adds another layer of complexity for ad blockers

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

There's loads of information people making apps like NewPipe can save, and lots of that is fighting tracking systems, too.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago

Presumably the implementation is not as seamless as that, and 3rd party clients do not handle it like 1st party ones.