And if they have your data, they didnt steal it, you signed it over or they bought it from someone you signed it over to, personal data is rarely stolen, mostly just handed off and then people act like they put a gun to their head to get it.

I'm grateful I have the basic technical knowledge of how to install an adblocker.

Here is every single way I can think of to block YouTube ads:

uBlock Origin + Firefox

NewPipe on Android

Libretube on Android

uYou+ on iOS

FreeTube on *NIX and Windows

yt-dlp + mpv

YouTube Revanced

Invidious self hosting

Piped self hosting

And finally, last and definitely least

YouTube Premium

Donate to the creators who make content. Google does not deserve a penny of your hard earned money.

I have zero sympathy for people who don't use an ad blocker

Well we found the average YouTube user.

Enjoy paying to be fucked by the corpos!

I read that Google is rolling out some ads on premium so that might need to get removed from your list.

youtube sucks ever since googol bought it.

Then stop using youtube. It sucks ever since googol bought it. Haven't used it since.

Enjoy it!

ChatGPT will give me wrong information as always

Since you're already in the Fediverse, I'd suggest looking into PeerTube for your videos rather than going to YouTube as your primary platform.

I currently have a channel, but am going to switch to PeerTube when I have my backlog built up again so I can post in a steady schedule. (Workin' on it...) The only things I'm going to put on YouTube are videos going, 'Hey! I have the video up here! Follow the link!' so that people can actually find it and Words of the Week shorts 'cuz I don't want to feed their AI bullshit that I can't get away from with proper stuff and it's just stick figures and rudimentary drawings with words from the dictionary. Unfortunately, it's not as user friendly to search for stuff on PeerTube as it is on YouTube. I'm hoping that gets fixed sooner rather than later. It'll make things better. sigh

I can afford it too, but I won't pay for it on general principle when it costs more than Prime and Tidal combined.

You can skip or avoid ads on YouTube, so meh.
What really grinds my gears though, is the stupid, fucking algorhythm, which routinely offers me videos I just recently watched, vids in languages that I can't speak, "current" affairs stories that are years old, and channels/vids that I have specifically blocked. I curse YouTube daily, but will bless anyone who has a viable alternative....

I have no issues on Firefox or Brave. I never see ads.

I believe you're thinking of premium lite, or whatever they call it.

Open it via Duckduckgo, the player will show it without any ads or tracking.

WHY DONT WE HAVE A MAINSTREAM ALTERNATIVE YET

I guess there's no reason not to post to other sites as well?

I can afford to pay the protection racket, I just choose not to.