Bad news for me, I use youtube a lot with an adblocker and it's essentially ad-free. It's going to be a bad day for me when they start cracking down. It doesn't surprise me, but it's a bummer.

There's a couple reasons why I use subtitles all time. Firstly I'm getting older and can't hear as well with background noise. If my wife is banging around in the kitchen I can't hear dialog from the TV. With subtitles on I don't have to mess with the volume.

Another issue is media producers (TV and film) have this idea they need to blast you out of your chair with sound effects and music. So if you turn up the volume enough to hear the dialog clearly, you're going to get blasted by everything else. Trying to manage that with the volume control is damn near impossible. Interestingly I've noticed "dialog boost" appear on occasion in sound track options from my streaming provider. I use it when the option is there. That kind of indicates a global problem.

An issue related to sound leveling is actors used to come out of theater where they learned to annunciate loudly and clearly. It seems actors don't get proper stage training anymore and now it's okay to mumble and fail to annunciate. A decent director should never allow that.

The wording on those applications would definitely raise a flag for me. They totally sound bot generated.

I've joined a number of instances looking for the best performer, hops, pings, server response. That's what I've been saying in my applications. Interestingly, my first sign-up was on Beehaw before I knew what I doing and they are the only ones that rejected me, about a week after I applied. Made me think, what did I say that was so awful? No biggie I already had some good instances to sign into.

That's a good indicator when you find your instance blocked by a lot of other instances. I think the lesson is don't leave low hanging fruit out there.

It actually amazes me there's people out there doing these bot infestations. I mean there is some effort involved. Why go to all the trouble, what's the payoff? And how are they able to find new unadvertised instances so quickly.

Man I have the in-laws from hell so I know what you're dealing with. Same problem, when they visit it's like non-stop activities and I don't want to spend the whole time with them. They're like supercharged tourists.

Fortunately my wife feels the same way and doesn't force me to participate in every activity. But if I didn't participate in some then like you say, I'd look like an asshole. My wife does what she can to give me space so it's tolerable. I do dread when they come to visit though. It's the polar opposite with my own relatives, we can lounge around and talk for hours in a relaxed way, it's very easy going.

I rely on my wife to provide some insulation, maybe that's something you could ask of your wife. If my wife didn't do that for me I don't know if I could tolerate the in-laws coming to camp out for several days at a time.

You'd need a way to cluster the instance and the software doesn't provide that. You'd have to use some kind of 3rd party solution which would be more expensive than simply upgrading your server. Better to just co-op people into a server upgrade.