FBI recommends using an ad blocker (2022)

Thank you! I actually tried to find an illustration, and your link fits the bill perfectly.

uBlock Origin has some advanced filter syntax that can sometimes deal with sites like this. It can intercept, modify or replace JavaScript functions, objects, network requests, parsing data, cookies, etc. That being said, writing filters for sites like these is somewhat of a dark art, it usually involves reverse engineering the page's JavaScript to the point where you understand what it's actually sending and checking for to function correctly, then figuring out a way to bypass those checks by selectively modifying the JavaScript's functionality.

Things like this are why I worry a bit about the proliferation of things like WASM, while JavaScript isn't great, it actually gives a great amount of control to the end user, to both see, understand and the ability to actually modify what is running in their browser. With WASM, all of this becomes highly impractical. Instead of a (semi-)readable, modifiable block of interpreted code, with the ability to inspect and modify the state at almost arbitrary points, you just get opaque binary blobs that you basically can't do anything with. As more and more sites switch to using compiled WASM blobs for their logic, it will become increasingly difficult to observe or modify any behavior of these websites as an end user.

So, I actually think that if YouTube went poof tomorrow, totally gone, and was not replaced by a similar ad-supported medium, it'd be a boon for makers of quality video content and disproportionately harmful to clickbait chum-farms. Ad-supported video is the incentive system that delivered us Elsagate, and the scale of YouTube w.r.t. feasibility of paid hosting isn't all that it seems.

Every single YouTube creator I watch with any degree of regularity has a Patreon, merch shop, or some other way for those who appreciate their stuff to directly contribute to its production and continued existence. Many say that they rely on those sources of income a lot more than ad revenue, especially those in non-advertiser-friendly niches who have to worry about demonetization. In a no-YouTube world, even assuming p2p video streaming never works out, those folks would be able to pay for hosting with those non-ad income streams, because YouTube's scale is deceptive. Most of the ones I watch don't even have all that many views relative to the big boys - five to six digit, usually - so their viewer:contributor ratio is a lot higher than that of a successful clickbait slop video with ~zero genuine dedicated supporters but a lot of incidental ad views. This dynamic implies that creators with dedicated followings would have a decent shot at supporting themselves even if they had to pay for bandwidth, because their bandwidth spend to revenue ratio is a lot better than average.

The thing about YouTube is that slop outweighs quality content by such a massive margin that if you do napkin math around the raw cost of hosting n hours of streaming video, you end up with a way higher number than you'd have if you stripped out the bulk of the material that wouldn't be economically feasible in a non-ad-supported environment.

A corollary is that without competition from low-quality ad-supported material that couldn't hack it in a donation-centric environment, the good stuff stands out that much more. It's kinda like how you can't really post a recipe without it drowning in an ocean of algorithmically generated fake-ass life stories about grandma's cookies with seven ads before you hit the first ingredient. Without those, organic content, even paid/donation-supported organic content, has a much better shot at encountering the kind of eyeball that'll shell out for the good stuff.

I think the existence of spaces like Bandcamp (for now, anyway, fingers crossed re acquisition) demonstrates that donation-supported streaming can be economically viable. I've spent far more on Bandcamp albums I could have just kept streaming indefinitely for free than I ever did on CDs, because I know that the bulk of that money is actually going to the people who made the stuff I liked, rather than getting siphoned off into corporate middlemen a la legacy record businesses / Spotify and its ilk. Direct-to-artist support in places like Bandcamp has enabled a flowering of high-quality, niche content. People may complain about a simplistic top 40 or whatever, but I'm running into more music right up my alley than ever before, and that's largely due to the newfound ability to cut out the middleman and go right to the creator. YouTube is like the old record industry; it benefits the lowest-common-denominator painfully-focus-grouped artist far more than it does the auteur.

>ad-blockers exist because internet users are again voting they would rather the websites disappear

Clearly not, or they would just stop using those sites. Instead they want the content at zero cost.

No, it's not bad faith at all. He's trying to use a collective blame argument: "software engineers" as a group are supposedly to blame for adware, in his argument, rather than a small minority of software engineers. It's absolutely no different than blaming all for the crimes committed by a few members, and paint them all with the same brush.