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.
Well, I’d rather see blankness than another ad.
6 seconds of black screen VS 11 mins of the epoch times telling me how trans people are the devil?
I’ll take the black screen.
I can understand, I would feel better watching a black screen than an ad trying to psychologically manipulate you in a personalized way.
Yeah I know. Youtube tested them on me for only a day and yes of course I would rather see a black screen than an ad. I am not that needy for background noise that I would want to listen to an ad of the millionth MLM scam this month.
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.
Nebula has some of the better creators anyway.
Same. I do enjoy sitting back and skimming trough the sub content every now and then, but I have gotten to a point recently, where I might as well save my time by not watching them. Definitely not watching 10+ sec ads before I can see the video.
I’ll take a black screen over an ad any day of the week. Screw ads.
Some users joked that they would rather see a black screen than an ad.
Yeah. The time lost is a shame but the ad is far worse.
if im gonna lose time regardless, i’d rather spend it staring at 6 seconds of black nothingness, than 15 seconds of PragerU talking about how slavery was a boon the black man.
Out of principle, if I can’t block or skip an ad, I’m closing the window. I’d rather not use the service than be force-fed advertising.
I take public transit on the daily, and that’s just about the only place I can’t avoid advertising.
It’s not so bad. You can just treat it as the dimming of the lights/countdown timer you see in theatres, in the lead-in of the film.
Or better, use FreeTube and NewPipe.
I get a feeling their time will be up soon. I hope I’m wrong.
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.
you’re misremembering the time. ad blockers aren’t new and they were invented for a reason. people forget pop up ads could literally cover your entire screen and they were so bad that blocking them was a browser feature. popups are blocked by default even today.
They block pop-up windows but now website designers have discovered they can just do soft pop-ups. The worst websites have at least 3, the cookie wall, the newsletter and some pay wall or offer, often overlapping.
yeah, not my point though. my point is there’s never been a time for unintrusive, respectful ads.
Not to mention that ads are a prime vector for malware and spyware (well, more spyware on top of the ad vendor itself).
I went to my banking account page, where I can make transfers and look at my money. My ad blocker had blocked a GIANT ad in the center of the screen.
I find myself watching less and less youtube. Till is no longer part of my daily routine.
I backed up a few videos that I loved using tubearchivists and move on to other platforms.
I’m into small web and the fediverse now.
I remeber when it was all about the YOU part of tubin’. Real people making real content because they wanted to show it to you.
When they first started getting paid they just made more of that same stuff, heck plenty of reviewers could even be trusted as they made the reviews on their own accord.
It was my go to place for entertainment, information and to help me decide to get brand x or y for the product i need.
Nowadays i just have it on as it’s less annoying than cable but nothing is actually interesting anymore. Mature youtubers who have turned into adhd 9yo olds just to try and stay relevant, people messing with annoying sounds effects just because they read it catches the viewers attention…video’s nowadays are an attack on my home space, constantly triggering me with noise or ads just to be annoying. It’s become exhausting to consume content.
Same goes for instagram which i very much liked, it’s on constant mute for me and the only reason i’m still around is because it’s become a habit and titties.
This is what I and many others on these forums have been trying to bring back and spread. People should exchange ideas based on logic and good humour, not money.
Ironically I’m enjoying it for the first time ever at the moment.
We were going away on holidays and would have patchy internet and I needed to make sure my iPad addicted kids has plenty of content for the the road. I decided I was too old and too busy to spend hours stealing YouTube content with shitty apps and just bit the bullet, got a VPN and signed up for a family plan of YouTube plus through Nepal for like $4 / month.
And now without ads and the bullshit I have for the first time found creators that I like, and I put on videos throughout the day. Also because it comes with music I actually use my google speaker for more than just alarms and timers because I refuse to buy Spotify.
The $4 is actually good value. I’m as surprised as the next person.
I’ve seen videos mentioning they have started cancelling plans opened on a different region to save money using VPN software, so be careful how much you rely on it.
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
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.
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.
I can’t wait for the day that saying “youtube” makes people say “what’s this? a peertube instance?”.
We probably need a few more years of network and storage improvements to make open video platforms properly viable. Video data is big and bandwidth is expensive, which makes keeping servers running over a certain size difficult.
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.
I remember the days of tasteful ad banners on the internet. Those are long gone. Now everything has to be an obtrusive unskippable autoplay 30 second ad or cover half the screen.
It is not reasonable to browse the internet without an adblocker anymore, regardless of privacy concerns…
I remember when banners weren’t tasteful and the internet was the wild west
Email spam ads in 1999…
Do we just want a reasonable subscription price?
Yay, basically. I paid for premium when I could afford it because I want the platform to keep working and I hate ads.
Premium prices went up without a lot of value for me so I quit paying. Technically premium offers a lot but the core feature that I actually cared about (YouTube without ads) never changed in value. If I had the option of only paying for that, I’d do it. To me, YT is a higher priority than any other streaming service. But they don’t provide a way for me to only pay for the stuff I care about
Me personally? I just want to watch them burn. Google I mean. This is my endgame
I love this
Yeah if we applied modern politics to corporations I think a lot of solid bbq could come out of it.
We need to start to shit on exxon like we shit on republicans
My problem is that paying for premium doesn’t actually remove the ads. YouTube fucked creators so hard that they started running their own sponsorship segments and product placements. So with premium I’m still paying to watch ads.
Well thankfully SponsorBlock still works whether or not you’re a Premium subscriber. There’s also always YouTube ReVanced for mobile (which has SponsorBlock built-in). There’s no reason to ever have to put up with an online ad, no matter the source.
Sure but I’m not gonna pay for something I still have to actively fight with is the point.
That’s not an issue with SponsorBlock because all it does it automatically skip parts of the video you specify. Google isn’t going to war with SponsorBlock, and even if they did, I doubt there’s much they can do, given the nature of how the addon works. So there’s nothing to “actively fight with”. Just set and forget.
Let creators choose: normal ads or sponsors. Not both. YouTube getting part of the sponsorship deal.
If they choose ads, YouTube goes back to 1 shippable ad after 1 second.
OR
A subscription which is just “no ads”. No YouTube music, not Google drive, no nothing. Just a cheap “no ads” subscription.
That being said, even if option 1 happens, I’m probably not uninstalling ublock. Once YouTube forced me to install it, it’s impossible to use the internet without it. Actions have consequences.
I’d seriously consider a sub that just removed ads if the price is fair. I don’t give a shit about premium, red or whatever it’s called.
Remember when good ads used to be unobtrusive? Return to that.
They were?
I’m actually rediscovering YouTube right now. A few years back it seemed like too many attempts were a huge unskippable ad, for a short video. Ads were way too high a percentage. And even when a video was a bit longer, any attempt to scroll was met with more ads, and maybe getting reset to the beginning
This time around, I typically see one ad, skippable after 5 seconds, then another every 15 minutes or so. While I’d rather not have ads, it’s not bad. Even better, content has matured enough in the years since I first tried it, that there’s actually longer stuff worth watching: the percentage of ad time is much lower, so I do get entertainment value rather than just be fed constant ads. I could watch that.
I rather see a black screen than an ad. Pretty much what I do with twitch, those corpo fuck heads can fuck off with their shitty cringy ass ads that make you loose a braincell everything it plays.
While that’s certainly a better experience, it does waste precious seconds of our time
Time not having [corporation]'s advertisements shoved in my face is time well spent
Ever since YouTube started this nonsense I moved to invidious and haven’t looked back
