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.
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I think this is going to continue to the point we have AI adblockers that edit the files free of ads for us in real-time. Then hopefully the technology jumps to Televisions etc.
Google's really helping it along in that direction.
Before Sponsorblock I had an idea of abusing YT's auto-generated subtitles to auto-skip sponsor spots in a very rough manner
Someone has apparently toyed with the idea of using AI to detect sponsor segments in subtitles to generate sponsorblock segments. I don't think it went anywhere though.
The community is ridiculously fast at submitting segments IME, especially on tech-oriented channels. Tubular even allows you to submit segments right from within the app which is really handy.
I feel the benefits of automatically detecting them (AI or otherwise) would be easier to realize at a larger scale - sounds really interesting though. Training such a thing probably wouldn't be too difficult seeing as we have a massive library of timestamps in Sponsorblock's database