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Do you use adblock? Why? Why not?
(lemmy.world)
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I always use adblock on every device I browse with, no exceptions. I honestly wouldn't use the internet without it in any significant way. When other people try to show me videos on their phones and double ads play in front or in the middle, I get so irritated I wanna scream. I have no idea how people use the internet without ad block, it's just so over the top now days.
And no, I piss on the idea that by using ad blockers you are "stealing" from the creators. That's absolute garbage imo. I never signed a contract with them to watch X minutes of ads in order to consume their content. Plus, most creators now just embed ads in their videos anyways, so ad blockers don't do anything for those, I just skip over them in my browser.
If you wanna support a creator, donate to them, buy their merch, link to their content from yours and give them free advertising/publicity. The idea that I "owe" a content creator some fraction of a cent of ad revenue by letting some random clip about ball hair trimmers or protein bars play for 15-30 seconds is laughable. If they are really opposed to their content being consumed for free online, then lock it all behind pay walls or don't release it online at all.
I know that's a hard-line position in some people's minds, but it's what I truly believe. Also, the creators that I consume a ton of content from, I've donated or purchased 100's-1000's of times more than what they would ever make off me watching all of the YT ads that play before/during their vids.
If you're skipping those manually, may I introduce you to the magic of SponsorBlock?
Essentially, it's an ad blocker for sponsor segments^1^ in YouTube videos: it automates "let's skip this part". It's not perfect because the segments to skip are crowd-sourced, but for videos that are fairly popular and not very recently uploaded it does a pretty good job.
^1^: And other potentially undesirable parts, like non-music segments in music videos. You can configure the types of segments you want it to skip.
It's not just for fairly popular stuff. Anything with any amount of popularity has a good chance of having someone who is really on the ball. I've found videos uploaded a few hours ago by a channel with less than 1M subscribers already fully tagged for Sponsorblock.