This is old news from a month ago.
And here’s my hot take on YT ads: They need to make money somehow, but unfortunately they are subject to “ad creep,” where they slowly increase the intensity of the ads. I’ve gotten 15+20s unskippable ads before.
But what really grinds my gears are how the ads almost seem designed to annoy you. If you commonly skip ads, that’s when you get unskippable ads all the time. And if you try to listen to YT in the shower expect the ads to come and go like radio, you come out listening to some skippable 30 minute long ad.
And I hate how the ads on mobile decide to cover the comment section. That’s ridiculous, like imagine if you’re reading a newspaper and when you get to an ad the ad suddenly expands to fill the entire page.
And the forced ads on unmonetized channels is plain cruel.
So, as much as I want to support creators (and I do leave AdBlock off on YT most of the time), I’ll come out against YT over this decision. My usage of it will drop, but only minorly.
This almost sounds like what could happen to the Fediverse. It’s decentralized just like crypto, but the majority of people won’t know or care about how the Fediverse works, they will just want to communicate online.