The network effect kinda prevents you from finding coffee at an honest place.

(The content is on YouTube and nowhere else)

Until this changes and one can choose to go somewhere else, I wouldn't worry too much about the terrible cafe's income, because it is one of the richest entities in the world, it already shouldn't be that rich and powerful, and if it disappeared, it would finally let one go find coffee somewhere else.

The other possibility is to stop drinking coffee, of course. Though you can't really do this with everything.

YouTube is hardly the only website on the Internet. And besides that, YouTube splits ad revenue 40/60 yt/creator anyway. So I suppose those creators are all in on the scheme too?

> YouTube is hardly the only website on the Internet

Indeed, but it's the video hosting platform. Initiatives like PeerTube try to fix this, but most videos can be only found on YouTube.

> So I suppose those creators are all in on the scheme too?

Mostly yes. Creators today rely on:

- sponsors

- youtube ads

- donations

- merch

- other revenues, for instance if they have a business and their videos bring customers

At least you can often donate if you skip the ads and the sponsors, so there is a way to pay the metaphorical coffee.

But the service is free. So I will watch (without ads) until it becomes paid. And then, it depends on whether the value is still there.

So is the coffee at my local "pay what you please" cafe.

If that cafe was part of a megacorp that was doing shady business and driving small business in the ground, as well as exploiting others, I’d drink that free coffee every day!

And rather than blocking me access, like in “please pay to watch it”, they squiggle and babble incomprehensibly. Note that I’m not freeloading Nebula etc.

Your analogy was shallow from the start. Continuing it makes little sense.

Seems perfectly reasonable to me. If one really does believe the place to be evil (and not merely bad at what it does), then actions that cripple it financially and make it more likely to go out of business are commendable if anything.

Of course, better yet is to take it up a notch and advocate for other people to also use ad blockers and to help install and configure them. Thankfully, with how invasive ads are, the advertisers are basically doing all the agitprop; all you need to convince someone to use an adblocker today is to show them how websites look with and without it.