Youtube doesn't force you to watch ads. Pay for Youtube Premium and you will see no ads.

Restaurants extort me to pay for food if I want to eat there. It's shameful.

I would not say that if youtube straight up asked for payment for their product and there were no ads.

Instead, Youtube is pestering you with ads and asking for payment to stop doing so.

A big difference I see is how much money does Google make me "watching"/skipping ads in a month? I find it hard to believe it's around $10/month. What are rates now a days?

Paying for something not to happen is different than paying for something in return. Obviously.

Ah no you pay the content creators by watching the ads with your time or the subscription.

> Restaurants extort me to pay for food if I want to eat there.

> Paying for something not to happen is different than paying for something in return.

The rough metaphor about restaurants, is not an equivalent situation.

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> you pay the content creators by watching the ads with your time or the subscription

To clarify, you believe that there is an ephemeral currency of attention.

Your attention (which was to be directed at the content creator) can be redirected forcefully, unless you pay in money. I'd be remiss to call it outright extortion, but the parallel is there.

Let them eat ads.

You know what they say. If you're not paying for the product, then you probably are the product.

In the cases of both youtube and reddit, how would one suggest they pay for the developers, and their massive hosting costs? If not ad revenue, then what? Subscriptions? That's a hard veto from a high percentage of users.

Your phone doesn't allow you to run a browser that would let you use an adblocker.

Android has Firefox which has uBlock, as well as Firefox Focus. iOS has VPN based ad blocking compatible with Safari, I use AdGuard.

Or Musi for watching YT videos. Ad-free!

I don’t see any ads in Safari with Wipr.