Step 3: sponsor block. It uses crowdsource info to skip in-band advertising on YouTube.

(If you’re on safari, I’d also recommend Vinegar. It replaces the YouTube player with a regular HTML5 player, which removes all ads and lets you use PiP)

> and the do-not-feed-the-trolls heuristic, which advises one to not reward malicious actors with attention.

Step 4: delete your user accounts on all services run by advertising companies (ie YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Gmail)

Step 5: go to your local library, pick up a book and consume high quality content instead of filtering through tons of garbage for a few gems.

I second this.

Aside from YouTube and gmail; I’ve long since (probably 4+years ago) got rid of social media and couldn’t be happier. My attention span sky rocketed. I noticed I can comfortably sit and read heavy technical books for a while before getting distracted which I couldn’t do before

So, how much effort is it to setup and maintain PiHole? Conceptually it sounds great, but if I set it up properly it's going to impact not just me, but everything in the house, which mean my wife.

And Fiddly and "F-with it" stuff just is not attractive. There's enough internet rage when everything is (supposedly) working as it should much less with something like PiHole potentially mucking things up.

So, just curious how it is to live with PiHole.

Setting up a PiHole is very easy- see https://github.com/pi-hole/pi-hole/#one-step-automated-insta... for options. The hardest part will likely be pointing your router to the new local DNS IP (or at least is was for me, thanks to clunky netgear UI).

On maintenance: there is an included admin console from which you can whitelist or blacklist domains. The external adlists are updated automatically.

The only time I've been frustrated with my PiHole is when I forget it exists and try to use analytics tools (Logrocket, FB analytics) for work. Otherwise haven't noticed any adverse effects on my web experience.

I have been running a pihole on a raspberry for several years and I cannot recall a single time it gave us problems.

Depending on how comfortable you are with Linux and networking, setup could take from an hour to perhaps a day? Also do note that you can start testing it yourself, and only switch the entire household to it when you are confident it works.

I strongly recommend you give it a shot :)

pihole is very stable - deploy it on a cheap pi/nuc/etc that lives near the router and forget about it forever.

as a failsafe you can set your router's main DNS server to the pihole and set the secondary DNS to something like google or cloudflare. this way if pihole ever goes down you just see ads instead of the whole network being knocked offline.