Are ad blockers to blame?
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YouTube ads are not actually advertising anything. They are a form of extortion. They appear randomly in the middle of dialogue. They are intended to be nothing more than an annoyance. “Pay for a subscription and we’ll stop the torture.”
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So far 
Brave is still squashing all the YouTube ads for me. Just don’t install the YouTube app and use Brave web browser
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Firefox does it for me. I don’t remember now how I got the version on my phone to block ads. I installed it after finding out that Brave is owned by some nasty tech bro.
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Vivaldi works fine and is not owned by some nasty techbro - so far. It’s also the only one that so far has commited NOT to put AI on their browser.
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For me it’s FSF’s Privacy Badger and uBlock Origin (not to be confused with some add-ons with similar names).
Also, don’t forget to turn off or delete your Advertiser ID (Settings → Privacy → Ads on Android, delete the ID), and turn off all Google saved private information. The FSF’s Surveillance Self-Defense guides are top notch.
Facebook Container and HTTPS Everywhere are just along for the ride on my desktop, but HTTPS-only is a built-in Firefox option now.
One of these days I’ll set up ad blocking at the router.
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I have long been in the Chrome ecosystem, so when I wanted to move away from Google I went with “Ungoogled Chromium”, which is available using Chromium Launcher with appropriate configuration.
It’s usually a few versions behind the current browser, and it has some warts (printing hasn’t worked in a few releases; all extensions have to be side-loaded) but it is completely de-Googled as far as I can tell and is otherwise vanilla Chromium. Also I believe committed to continuing to support Manifest V2.
My plugin profile includes UbO, Privacy Badger, Ghostery, NoScript, and a few others.
I assume that the whole thing will stop working at some point. I guess I’ll switch to Firefox or Vivaldi or something when that happens. Also I have a PiHole and a new router gathering dust somewhere that I need to actualize.
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I’ve been using Firefox with Ublock Origin, and it’s worked great for years.
But recently, Youtube just totally bogs it down. Not the video playing, once it eventually loads that is still fine. But the page loads abysmally slow, scrolling is jerky and painful, even trying to type a comment you can type an entire line before the first character shows up on screen. I’m sure Google’s doing that on purpose.
So for now I’m using Chrome with Ublock Origin specifically for Youtube.
I have to keep it around anyway for a few other websites that were built by developers who obviously never tested in anything but Chrome. (Financial institutions or work benefits company, etc.)
Also while I’m complaining, my town uses some rickety old 3rd party site that looks like it was built in the early 90s (and actually looks really shady and suspicious) as the only way to pay utilities online. But it works. Well, it did.
The site has a max limit on the number of characters you can type in for your account number. But the town changed all our accounts to have longer account numbers, so you can no longer directly pay your water bill online.
Unless you know to open up developer tools and manually modify the site’s character limit in the source code, which actually does work.
That’s like those sites that disable copy/paste functionality so you can’t use your password manager to enter your password. Like they were deliberately trying to make it an awful experience and less secure at the same time.
/rant
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And Firefox wouldn’t exist without another nasty tech bro.
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He’s not there now though, and that counts for something. I remember in the early days of TOP bbs there was a discussion about Brendan Eich stepping down from Mozilla after it came out he had donated to banning same-sex marriage. And some commenters – some who would have awful takes for years to come – complained about “free speech”, as if that’s all trying to take away rights from other people is, and about how if we didn’t like the guy then how could we justify using his work. But that’s how invention is, right? He helped make things but that doesn’t mean he owns them forever, and when it turns out he was at odds with the progressive vision of the organization it was put in better hands.
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I meant Marc Andreesen, though.
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Oh, I know. Turns out there was more than one. But I think the same principle applies to both…things can outgrow the people they started with.
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Oh no you don’t, I heard an elephant killer invented the light bulb, since then it’s only candles for me!
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Thanks
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Seriously, someone said that if you don’t accept Eich’s opposition to gay marriage then it’s hypocritical to use Javascript. The right will make up any excuse to say we need to put up with bigotry.
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If you don’t accept the Pharoah as divinely-appointed ruler of the earth, then it’s hypocritical to re-use Egyptian characters in your Sinaitic/Phoenician/Hebrew/Greek/etc. alphabets.
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Mentioned this to my wife. Her response “I would be taking a fucking baseball bat to the dash”
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Let me guess – you have to pay a subscription fee to turn them off?
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