Any suggestions on alternatives for blocking adds?
youtube-dlp is your friend then - https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp
Also mpv, it can use yt-dlp as a backend to play videos from urls: https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv
Sadly it works for YouTube. Yesterday I noticed a friend disabled uBlock Origin on YouTube. They don’t care that there’s workarounds, they’d rather watch 2 min ads than read up about something they are not interested in.
Did you tell your friend ads waste far more time than the 3-5 second delay you get on Firefox with ublock? I mean, I get someone would hesitate to install another extension like User-Agent Switcher because you don’t really want to trust it, but even then just using ublock is still faster than watching ads.
You assume people are rational, they are not