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.
Which I’ve been saying into the void for a while. Ideally in capitalism demand drives supply. If their demand is lack luster (for people upgrading to premium), rather than trying to cajole people through force into buying their product, they should drop the fucking price. Instead, they want to keep it bundled with music, and thus make it prohibitively expensive, while simultaneously competing in two seperate markets simultaneously. Give the people a video only tier, at a truly reasonable price, and begin (read: continue) to rake in cash. It’s very frustrating.