Shurimal

Streaming platforms should compete on quality of service and pricing. But they don't. They compete in exclusivity instead. And that is the biggest problem. There is a defacto monopoly right now because you can't eg choose between Netflix, Disney Plus and HBO Max to watch Star Wars.

Another problem is their locked down nature. Ie can't get 4k from Netflix by using a PC to watch it even if that PC is specifically built to act as a media device, and can't watch it at all if your device doesn't support HDCP or other hardware DRM schemes. Gotta use a clunky interface on some underpowered, overpriced and privacy-intruding "approved" device.

For an audio enthusiast and tinkerer like I am whos setup is very, very different from typical consumer hifi stuff, the whole "legit" home cinema route is a no go due to stupid restrictions on hardware the MPAA have asserted (specifically no multichannel PCM digital output for receivers/pre-pros).

Piracy is just so much easier, faster and more flexible solution that gives overall better UX, PQ and SQ than trying to conform into the draconian frames of the "legit" route whenever your use case is deviating slightly from the industry-accepted, approved and expected norm.

But that nobody outside “angry” genres seems to be doing it is what saddens me.

There's a lot of "non-angry" (ie no thick distorted guitars and screamed vocals) music that has strong political themes and social commentary going on. A lot of folk, blues, EBM, EDM, reagge, dub is about the struggles of the working class, people of color etc, has anti-capitalist, anti-war and anti-globalisation message.

Leslie fish
Asian Dub Foundation
Later VNV Nation (early works are stylistically more "angry", but thematically similar)
Covenant
Chip Taylor
Shamen
And many more

On its tail, duh. Kangaroos can do that, why shouldn't eagles? Tigers can even bounce around on their tails!

Vivaldi with uBlock Origin works just as well as it's always been, I don't even need to do regular manual filter upgrades. Only two tweaks I did was disabling Vivaldi's built-in adblocker for YT (triggered the player blocking while logged in) and installing the pop-up blocker script for TamperMonkey.

So, business as usual. Google can go'an'fuck 'emselves.

Digging their own grave, it seems, and it's so deep they can smell the Earth's core in there.

object space is a complete mess

Starfield has, what, 1000 planets, and each time you land the engine basically auto-generates a new approx. Skyrim-sized worldspace. The reference system has to have departed significantly from previous games for it to work. Even Skyrim was gently pushing the limits of how many objects can be referenced with the 8-digit refID (roughly 16 billion entries per .esp for all world objects, NPC-s, weapons, armor, outfits, consumables, spells, magic effects, markers, helpers etc etc since absolutely everything has to have a refID).

Of course Starfield is a mess coming from the simple refID scheme of the older games. The reference system in SF must be some sort of convoluted hierarchical system to be able to place probably hundreds of billions of objects over 1000 planets and retain persistency. It won't be easy to reverse engineer.

start using alternatives like lbry and/or peertube

Sure. But actively using YT without paying for Premium and blocking all the ads will affect them more, and if enough people do it, might actually catalyze it to go Twixxer levels of enshittification, which would be just as beneficial for growing the userbase of those alternatives with the side benefit of getting rid of one of the gatekeepers. Fediverse saw a huge growth in popularity following the recent enshittification of Reddit, after all. "Build it and they will come" has a corollary that goes "Destroy it and they'll go elsewhere" :)

Dude just watch the ads so people get paid…

I don't care. Hypothetical incomes of other people are not my problem or obligation. Next you'll be saying I must eat at restaurants at least three days a week and attend all concerts and drama plays in my town because otherwise people don't get paid.

You’re not automatically entitled to free content

Correct. First I need to manually set up my tools, and then these tools get me free content automatically. But I don't care about entitlement; it's a spook. It's all down to risk-benefit. The risk of blocking youtube ads is basically nil, but I benefit by wasting less time and not having loud, imbecile and completely irrelevant audio-visual crap annoying me. I also pirate all my music, movies and shows. Because I don't care. I like free stuff. Copyright is a spook, anyway.

Vivaldi with uBlock Origin here. A simple refresh of the page makes the popup go away, often for the rest of the session. For me, it's YT without ads as usual. I might need to clear uBlock cache and refresh filter lists to make it work even better. There's also a Tampermonkey script for blocking the popup, but I haven't tried it yet.

As a side note, I've seen a lot of talk about boycotting Youtube. There are 3 things to consider with this:

1. Boycotting YT will give Google exactly what they want, getting rid of the "freeloaders" who don't pay for Premium and block ads.
2. Boycotting YT will hurt small creators who don't see much ad revenue (if any) anyway. Views and likes are what make small creators visible to the algorithm, if these drop off, their reach will diminish.
3. Boycotting YT won't affect big creators with sponsorships, healthy Patreon community, millions of subscribers and views.
   Best way of defiance here is not stopping to use YT, but on the contrary, generating as much traffick to YT as possible while blocking the ads.

That would be a murder, and yes, it's social.

If I can’t afford something, I watch ads

I can't afford to pay 20€ per month--that's more than my whole monthly phone bill with something like 50 or 100 GB of data. Cost of living is high enough as it is.

I also lack the most valuable currency there is in one's life, one that you simply can't get more of. Time. So I block ads, which cost a lot of time, with extreme prejudice.

Ads are also bad for my mental health, they just irritate me, rack up stress and easily swing me into bad mood.

Lastly, I don't give a fuck about costing money to some multi-billion corporation. I don't care about them as much as they don't care about me; the corpos see me just as a resource to exploit as much as possible then move on to another one when there's nothing more to exploit, and I see the corpos exactly the same way. Call it mutual parasitism. Yes, I'm a parasite. And parasites are the most successful lifeforms on Earth.