I totally forgot how terrible a non-ad-free YouTube experience is
So I've been using youtube ad blockers since pretty much when ad blocker extensions were first available. Lately though I've been getting hit more and more with these messages that YT was sending out every 5 or so videos telling me that adblockers aren't allowed. No problem, just gotta wait 5 seconds to x it out and then close my video. The straw that broke the camel's back though was when instead of a close-able pop-up, they just posted it in front of a video and wouldn't let me watch anything until I disabled my adblocker.
So I disabled it and... wow. It's just so, so, trash. 2 ads before a video plus midrolls and every video ever. I tried listening to a playlist of songs and was getting a midroll ad every single time. Imagine trying to just listen to music for 3 minutes and getting interrupted by a commercial for a chevy silverado! Half the ads were for youtube premium and they specifically mentioned that it would get rid of all the ads. It just felt so damn predatory. I couldn't enjoy anything that wasn't already demonetized.
And you know I'm fine with ads I guess. I could live with an ad before every video, but the fact that I was getting upwards of 5 ads in a 10 minute video was just plain absurd. I also hate that youtube got rid of the yellow markers to show you when an ad was coming up, so now it's just out of nowhere and always interrupts a key part of the video.
Quit using shitty browsers? I see zero ads on YouTube in Firefox with ad blockers. I mean there's about a million other reasons to not use Chrome as well, but use this anger as your catalyst.
Sorry about that, this is just the usual case when I see this complaint. Let's figure out why you're experiencing this because I'm a HEAVY YouTube user and I want everyone to have as good of an experience as I do.
Just wanted to come back to this and say while I checked and didn't have any addons besides ublock that should be helping (with many of the extra lists checked/enabled in settings), I do have tampermonkey with these scripts and maybe they're helping:
Simple Sponsor Skiper
YouTube CPU Tamer by AnimationFrame
YouTube HD
YouTube polymer engine fixes
YouTube Web Tweaks
YouTube(Chinese characters) YouTube AD Blocker
Along with some others that I don't think would apply.