Technology

I just stopped using YouTube. I can get all my music elsewhere.

They need to stop rapidly changing the terms of the agreement. This is the problem endemic to the platform. It's starting to lose shape because the ads are the problem.

If this was an issue with the quality of content:

ideally creators would get to choose their ad roll spots. This would make it less jarring to the watcher. It's also terrible that you can get ads for something like BP on a video that's basically surmised as "That time BP poisoned a lot of children". (See climate town) l. Also, if the ad revenue split was better, creators wouldn't then have to shoe horn in extra ad spots into the content of their videos.

However, I don't think it's a problem with quality of the content, but the quality of the ads.

I believe Adblocking is not piracy issue to the end user as much as it is protection measure from malicious content. It's up to the user to qualify what is "malicious" or not in the end. Users who use adblock do not have a good relationship with online advertising not because it annoys them, it's because it threatens them. This is less so just a YouTube problem and more of a entirety of Google's business model problem.

Becoming a better ad platform is a tough challenge when advertisers by practice operate in a manipulative bad faith space. We don't trust ads.

I get YouTube Premium because I pay for YouTube Music, but I've tried watching ad supported YouTube on a computer I wasn't logged into as I was troubleshooting my main computer. I can tell you that I wouldn't even bother with the ad blockers. If there was something on YouTube that I really wanted to watch, like an old concert or something, I would just download it with JDownloader and add it to my Jellyfin server. If that doesn't work, if just move on. There's a lot more entertainment available for free than I could ever possibly consume in three lifetimes.

At the end of the day, its pretty clear to me that Youtube is going to lose the war on adblocking.

Lol, no, they aren't. If they wanted to they could just throw everyone with an adblocker out. The only reason they aren't doing this right now is not wanting to piss off their users (and some vague EU data privacy laws).

The absolute best you could accomplish against them as a user is hiding the ad, but you'd still have to wait instead of being able to skip.

Besides that: I thought about getting YouTube premium (+ music), but now they're already jacking the prices further up. So I'll just keep using uBlock Origin and if that no longer works cut back on my video watching time.