Ads have become so invasive that most sites are simply unusable without ad blocking. If I care about the creator, I usually pay the creator in some way.

So far for every project that I care of, creator, software or news, I pay for. Everything else, like YouTube or Social Media are mostly alive because of my content or my user data. If that’s not enough then I won’t really miss it. I grew up with much smaller communities and so far every site that was complaining about AdBlock, also wasn’t worth disabling it. For some streams I turn off adblocker once in a while until I can’t take the ads anymore. Sites that complain undervalue sharing of articles, a click doesn’t cost them as much as a possible ads viewer would gain them.

I’m also in the Pihole gang. Sometimes, using an app outside of my home network reminds me, that I should buy the add free version, because I use it all the time… I don’t care too much, if an app or website shows some ads. Butin general they are designed as nuisance or trap. And I don’t like that. On my work machine I use ublock origin, since for some reason my work does not block ads on network level.

I use AdBlock because I don’t want to sacrifice 70% of my viewport to obxonious and intrusive targetted ads. I never click on ads anyway.

As Louis Rossmann said, supporting a creator directly via patreon Kofi or other means has way more impact than watching ads.

I used to disable ad blocking on Youtube so creators don’t get screwed until Youtube decided to play an ad in the middle of a concert recording. I use both UBlock Origin and AdGuard now, not because I don’t care about creators, but because I want the internet to actually be usable. Unintrusive ads are fine, but I don’t trust sites to not start with popups and auto-play video ads so they all get blocked.