[pbasista]

The below remark is unrelated to the main topic of this thread.

Why would you even watch a YouTube video with ads?

There are ad blockers, sponsor segment blockers, etc. If you use them, it will block almost every kind of YouTube ad.

[taude]

all the ad blockers I used to use stop working, and it became an annoying game of cat and mouse that I didn't have time for. Luckily, most of the time I can "skip" the ad in like five seconds, and it gives me a moment to catch up on incoming Slack messages.

[pbasista]

The only ad blocker I have used for the past couple of years has been uBlock Origin, more recently combined with SponsorBlock.

There has been two or three instances that I can remember when it did not block YouTube ads correctly for a couple of days. But those were quickly patched and it started to work again.

[nake89]

When has ublock origin browser extension ever stopped working? On a locked down mobile OS like iOS you can use the Brave browser. No cat and mouse game.

[shimman]

There are ad extensions that just turn those 5 second ads into like 200 ms ads. They just speed them up, it's great. Looks like a random flicker.

[massysett]

I used to use ad blockers.

One day I visited DistroWatch.com. The site deliberately tweaked its images so ad blockers would block some "good" images. It took me awhile to figure out what was going on. The site freely admitted what it was doing. The site's point was: you're looking at my site, which I provide for free, yet you block the thing that lets me pay for the site?

I stopped using ad blockers after that. If a site has content worth paying for, I pay. If it is a horrible ad-infested hole, I don't visit it at all. Otherwise, I load ads.

Which overall means I pay for more things and visit less crap things and just visit less things period. Which is good.

[akdev1l]

Not safe, before even knowing if a site has the content you want you can be redirected to malware through ad networks

not even joking

[pbasista]

> If a site has content worth paying for, I pay.

I do that as well. For me it is almost exclusively the case with the news sites.

> If it is a horrible ad-infested hole, I don't visit it at all.

Same.

> Otherwise, I load ads.

There is no "otherwise" for me. I simply do not want to load any kind of ads or "sponsored" content. I see no reason, either moral, ethical or other, to ever do that.