They’re testing something and you’re one of the lucky winners to be sampled. Usually it goes away in a day or until uBO catches up and deploys an update.

I've had this happen when using VPN. I also tried disabling ublock, but I get this behavior for 5-10 seconds before the video loads. I get no such behavior on Chrome.

This is probably another attempt at Google degrading the experience for people not using Chrome.

Yes. They did that years ago.

The ad-blockers are constantly working into evading the ban. You may need to update your ad-blocker of your browser.

When YouTube does anything weird I switch my VPN to a neighboring country that's less popular. Suddenly YouTube loads everything without problem.

Youtube is run like shit. I get frequently told to turn off my adblocker... when I don't even have extensions installed. It's already annoying as fuck dealing with ads but it's some kafka-lite bullshit to be told you're not watching them.

I use Firefox and uBlock Origin and for the last week or more every Youtube video I open takes about 10 or so seconds to open, just sitting there spinning.

It's a cat and mouse game. They're constantly doing this. Just wait a little while and ublock should find a way around the block.

It happens every so often. Give it some time and it start working again.

Yeah I read an article yesterday that they're rolling out new stronger ad blocker detection.

No trouble using FreeTube.

seems to work for me rn but youtube's web ui has been extremely slow for the past few years. videos take more than 15 secs to load and start... to the point where running a terminal and doing yt-dlp & mpv is much quicker/easier.

They periodically update the back-end code to try new things, and they A-B test, so that some users get an update and others don't. Then they monitor their logs, and maybe even social media, to try to determine who's seeing what and when, and if anyone's having trouble.

They may even generate a pop-up asking you if you're having trouble, and especially to tell you that you have to watch ads.

Anything that works in their favour will be rolled out to everyone. And then the good people (person?) at UBlock Origin (which is the one you should use if you're going to use UBlock) work their butts off to find a way around it, in a never-ending arms race.

Anecdotally, I recently noticed that one of my accounts/profiles that has UBo wasn't able to load more than 2 seconds of 360p video. I thought that was it for my viewing. Was getting a "null" tooltip on the settings cog and everything. Then I force-reloaded the tab and everything was alright again. They'd clearly changed something on the back-end for me and I was using an outdated interface (a day old! the humanity!) that couldn't handle it any more.

But back to the topic of ads: One day they might find a way to completely lock out ad-blockers. That is the day you learn to use the stats for nerds right-click menu on an ad video. From there you can learn the video ID of the ad and visit it directly. That way you can find the advertiser's account if not also the comment section, where you can leave a comment telling them exactly what you thought of their ad. Maybe also give it a thumbs down.

Eventually the cowards will turn off their comment sections, or else YouTube will prevent people from finding specific ad video IDs, but that's what other social media is for.

Got a turboencabulator ad in the middle of your Elsa vs Spiderman binge? Let Encabulator Inc. feel your wrath.

Be sure to include something like "as a result of seeing this ad when I didn't want to, I will not be buying or recommending your products for the period of " and then do your best to follow through on that.

They can make us watch the ads on their platform, but they can't make us like it.

No issues for me with Firefox and uBlock Origin. Do you have origin or just uBlock?

Right-click the link and open it in a private tab, or copy the url and open a private tab, and paste it. You'll have to re-enable your web extensions. Google is cracking down on ad blockers.

For some reason, though, I stopped having to do that. I have no idea what I did. I'm using multiple ad blockers. I'm using multiple extensions that alter YouTube. I have no idea why they suddenly stopped caring about my web extensions.

I also have other extensions that skip sponsors, add down votes, etc... those have been SUPER spotty recently.

No issues on my end with ublock origin + Firefox

How long did you wait when this came up? I believe it might be just blocking the video playback until the expected (by youtube) length of the (blocked) ad has finished, after which the video starts playing as usual.

It's just you. I'm using Firefox 138.0.4 64-bit (linux) and uBO 1.64.0 and youtube works fine for me.

Don’t know if it’s related, but thus got posted yesterday

https://www.techspot.com/news/108232-youtube-shuts-down-ad-blocker-loophole-tightens-restrictions.html

Yep, both that one and another adblocker I use for a few days now. I tried yet another plug-in called something like Ad Block for YouTube that works with blocking the non-video ads but I’ve still been getting video ads with it that only play the ad’s audio with a plain black video screen for the length of the ad; spamming refresh on the page tends to bypass the video ad. Hopefully the plug-ins will adapt soon.

Still works for me (Chrome + uBlock), though I have beeing seeing the "Experiencing interruptions?" pop-up and slow initial loading a lot since 2 days ago (and it's not on my end).

You're not alone. But since YouTube is such a shitshow anyway I'm kinda glad to be pushed away for being privacy and security conscious. Invidious instances are a good point of transition while adapting to Peertube and such. Sure, most video content is uploaded to YouTube, but that's also part of the charm of using alternatives. There's less garbage to filter and some geniunely good and passionate (not algorithm driven) creators to discover.

This happened for me on Brave. I deleted all cookies and logged in again. Worked fine after.

Then it happened after a week... Cat and mouse game.