> And we will all have lost.

Or we will all be gone elsewhere ?

Who? The people paying thousands of dollars for locked down mac devices they never modify, the ones giving all their data to social network and clicking on ads or the ones sending money to the NPC streamers to watch them licking an imaginary icecream?

HN is the opposite of their market.

Youtube just isn't valueable enough (in my mind), to get away with that.

The new generation knows mostly the web through jailed devices called "smartphones".

They will have no idea, and just assume that's how things are.

HN bubble strikes again.

I'm well aware that I'm an outlier here which is why I stated "in my mind". Not sure why you feel the need to write "HN bubble strikes again" except for a lack of reading comprehension or an attempt at trolling.

I also assumed that by saying "in my mind" you mean "in my opinion". English is not my first lamguare, but I think this is a reasonable reading?

If you wanted to say "youtube is not important enough for me" then your post reads weird - what is youtube going to get away with? Losing you personally? I think they'll get over it.

If the day comes when it's impossible to watch Youtube without ads I'll have to leave, despite how important youtube is for me currently. I just can't watch ads. It's impossible. I don't watch a single TV channel with ads, it's too painful. So, advertisement-supported "moving pictures" (or sound, for that matter - I never listen to radio channels serving ads either) is out of the question, with no exceptions for me personally.

Tv says there are plenty of people who will suffer ads.

Spotify free offer is also proof of that.

My understanding is you can pay a relatively small amount and get ad-free youtube. At least google ads. You'd still need sponsorblock.

That said I do like a well designed sponsor. Map Men for example, I'd rather not watch them.

Yup. Only way we can possibly win is by writing computing freedom into actual law. Make it literally illegal for them to use cryptography to violate our freedoms. Service providers should be required by law to interoperate with our computers, no matter what software we choose to run. If we reverse engineer their little apps and make free software versions, they should have to suck it up. We used to be able to buy whatever phone, modem or router we wanted and hook it up to the network with no issues. Software should work the same way.

I'm thinking about a corollary to Net Neutrality (which is allegedly coming back thanks to the new Biden-appointed FCC commissioner) which states that public web sites need to be accessible by the public. I've ranted about this a few times on HN. This isn't about working around bugs and quirks in umpteen different versions of umpteen different browsers, but making sure we don't start actively coding hard stops again: "Your browser is too old" messages, endless Captchas, purposely giving one browser a clearly worse or even unusable experience. Incompetence would be embarrassing but not illegal. Whenever I find the time, I really want to send the FCC a registered mail packet with my proposal and lots of examples of why this is already necessary.

And yes, the web sites will need to suck it up. You can't choose your visitors...which may occassionally be a bot or screen scraper.