Technology

Sounds like you are not being bad for the website, but for the advertisers, picking the most paying ones to sponsor your video watching time.

You might be slightly worse to the website, if instead of Atlanta, you were to travel around and decided to skip all the ads from a place where it's barely economical for them:

https://en.sni-hub.com/vpn/the-cheapest-countries-for-youtube-premium/

Save yourself some clicks: https://github.com/dmunozv04/iSponsorBlockTV

Use an app like Freetube to deny them ads entirely.

https://freetubeapp.io/

Nebula is a decent way to be bad at youtube. They don't have too many people on it at the moment, but there are some decent ones. And at least they get a cut.

Stop sharing YT videos, for a starter. For every shitty YT video there are thousands of good blogs explaining things in the same way (or better).

is there anyway I could be more disruptive to the business model?

By not using the platform. You think you're being clever but all you're doing is making them more money.

Here’s the idea: Deprive YT of their revenue and maximize their expenses.

Browse the site as usual, but never watch any videos. Instead, download them at maximum resolution. You’ll skip all the adds, and take the maximum amount of bandwidth.

The business stays profitable as long as people watch ads and don’t use bandwidth anywhere near as much as you could. Download a bunch of very long videos just to check if they’re worth watching. Ignore anything shorter than 10 minutes.

Make a channel and upload a bunch of long videos. A dash cam should be a pretty good source of data. Make sure your videos are so boring that even bots don’t like them. These videos are essentially just dead weight in the servers, but uploading them costs something anyway. Also, the storage isn’t free either, so 4K is the minimum.

You could also try reporting random videos and comments here and there. I’m pretty sure no human ever sees those inputs, but some machine learning model might. Messy data isn’t going to break the system, but you could make that speed bump a little higher.

I don't use it and plainly ignore its existence. As simple as that.

I self-host an invidious instance and combine that with sponsorblock. I only ever see the videos from channels I am subscribed to unless I explicitly search for something.

yt-dlp is a good tool for downloading youtube, and there are several GUI frontends built around that

Skip browsing YouTube, use RSS feeds of the podcasters you like. Also use Firefox with the uBlock Origin plugin to view.

Download the videos and watch offline. There are a few utilities for that.

Do the same thing, but on a device that allows blocking ads entirely. From behind a proxy or VPN, so they can't even get accurate location data from your IP.