The internet became usable after implementing the Pi-Hole. So much noise, so much wasted bandwidth, so many unnecessary lookups, gone with a Raspberry Pi and a few packages.
While other commenters are getting into the technical weeds of things, the reality is that the OP is right. Ads don’t inform, they manipulate. They’re an abusive forced-marriage that we cannot withdraw from even with ad and script blockers, because so much of society is built upon the advertising sector that it’s impossible to fully escape them. People like the OP and us are mocked for moves to block billboards in space as being “alarmist” or out of touch, yet driving along any highway in the USA will bombard you with ads on billboards, on busses, on rideshares, on overly-large signs with glowing placards, in radio and television, on streaming providers who raise our rates on what used to be ad-free packages.
Advertising is cancer, and I’m tired of pretending it’s not. Let’s get rid of it.
It’s constant and ever-increasing. I stopped watching a 30 minute video recently after the 5th ad break just over 10 minutes in.
On desktop uBlock still works in Firefox at least. But I’ve basically given up YouTube on iOS.
Isn't it hypocritical to want YouTube to offer you its content for free? If the content is valuable to you, you should be willing to pay for it. If not, just stop watching YouTube.
But I do, by supporting those creators through Patreon. Paying for YouTube Premium sounds like a bad deal since I'm not directly supporting the creators for which I go to YouTube in the first place.
I get that YouTube doesn’t give enough of a percentage of profits to the creator, but the alternative should be a different video hosting platform that does give more profits to creators. Not patreon, which offers nothing in return. (It’s a glorified payment processor and doesn’t actually do any video hosting.)
That there are vanishingly few alternatives to YouTube in terms of actually hosting videos (I know of Vimeo and, I guess nebula? Only because it gets continually pushed on me by creators) maybe tells you that the act of hosting videos at scale is kinda hard to do profitably. Or else there’d be tons of alternative options.