If you were to mine by yourself, you'd get zero pay outs unless you actually mined a block. It is possible, but the odds are on par with winning the lottery.
DYOR on pools, but I can recommend f2pool (https://www.f2pool.com/) for Ethereum mining.
It's slightly better than that. A single 5700 xt mining ethereum can expect a block once every 43 months at current difficulty. That's still insanely high variance, but still far better than the lottery.
For Ethereum:
1 block every 15 seconds
5760 blocks in a day
172800 in a month (30day avg)
7430400 blocks in a 43 month period.
So about 1 in 7 430 400 odds when solo mining. Pool highly recommended specially because Ethereum is moving away from the current system of mining long before 43 months from now!
In theory p2pool is trustless so you don't have to worry about sketchy operators but I don't know if anyone has used it in years.
Slush is the only old-school Bitcoin pool that still seems to be decent sized.
Being used by criminals doesn't mean anything; they want reliable and honest pools just as much as you do.
Most of the pools listed there are easy enough to sign up and start contributing to.
If I have enough hardware to mine $10btc/day it would take on average ~70 years to mine a block (worth $300000), whereas with a pool I'd get my $10/day consistently
And since it's effectively lottery with amount of computer power you can have at home, you're going to need to be extremely lucky.
This is false. But you'd have to be incredibly lucky to find the right hash by yourself, so profit are split, luck is shared when pooling.
Edit:. Already answered, didn't refresh before replying.
Why do you want to be in a mining pool, instead of buying bitcoin?
Some calculations that make this sound viable (anyone able to verify?): https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/a/100684
Is it true that one cannot (or should not for their best interest) mine BitCoin/Eth without being part of a pool, unless one has a datacenter or warehouse full of GPUs dedicated to mining? If that's true, is there a legitimate, low-fee pool a fellow HNer can recommend? All the ones I have run into are either on Google's list of "malware domains" or are else blacklisted by my pfSense DNS blacklist because they're on the list of malicious DNS names used by crytojacker plugins and malware. I understand false positives and work around these blacklists all the time, but each of these sites feels scammier and sleazier than the next...
(Edit: It's minus 8 degrees Fahrenheit outside and I'm mainly curious to see if heating my home office with an RTX 2080 that's taking a break from ML while I'm busy with other things can generate enough heat while offsetting my electrical bill to be a more cost-effective alternative to the dirt-cheap but terribly inefficient natural gas furnace.)