"Leave A Like, and Subscribe!"

In many ways, I miss the frontier days of the Internet.

Yes, waiting for twenty minutes while our slow service buffered a video from the likes of JibJab or Stupid Videos was a pain. And yet -- when the buffering was done, we got our video and that was that.

Right now I'm using the Brave browser exclusively as a YouTube video watcher, because to watch YouTube with anything else means having to install ad blockers and disable them from time to time when Google gets tired of subsidising my video watching.

I understand someone has to pay the bills. There are vast computers somewhere storing all of that video content, and the electricity to run them and the (maybe) salaries they pay the maintainers aren't cheap.

But I went to Brave when Google again put the thumb screws to ad blocking and interrupted an 11-minute video with a 14-minute unskippable commercial.

I should be willing to watch an ad or two to help keep the lights on.

Google should read the room and not drop commercials that are longer than the video being watched.

Another disadvantage: I'm not signed in to anything on Brave, meaning I have to manually keep up with the channels I like to watch, and I can't like or comment on anything. I don't want to sign in because I assume in some way that's going to bring up the entire ad conundrum again if I do.

So content creators don't get the likes they want from bums like me, viz:

And that makes me feel bad. I mean, not bad enough to go back to using other browsers or signing in, but bad enough. I guess I should donate to their channels or something.

Or maybe Google could stick to their fifteen-second ads. I mean, I'm Gen X and grew up watching ads on broadcast TV, so I'm used to commercial breaks. But I'm also from the Gen X whose families did not pay for cable. I wasn't able to use the Internet on a regular basis until I left home and went to college.