SponsorBlock is such a funny extension to me. I don't mean that in a bad way either.

To start with, YouTube really has gone downhill huh? I mean, the fact this has to exist at all is pretty silly if you think about it. The platform is so financially unreliable that video creators have to sell their voice and influence to the highest bidder nearly constantly just to keep their lights on.

Anyway, this extension is great. It does exactly what it says- and crowdsourcing time-codes to skip over parts of videos is actually genius- it's effectively doing the same thing other adblockers do but for skipping over ads baked into videos. It's an idea I'm sure hundreds of other people had, but never bothered with, probably because it seemed kind of petty or annoying to implement.

The best part? Unlike a traditional adblocker, which for many, kind of exist in a moral gray area due to it potentially cutting off revenue to hosts and creators of online content- SponsorBlock has no such issue.

YouTuber sponsors don't base their metrics for payout on anything other than usually a preexisting, agreed upon contract for the ad itself- with views and watch time metrics being almost entirely ignored as any sort of reference for the terms.

So, in essence, it is stupid not to use SponsorBlock, because all it does is save you, the user, a lot of time by skipping ad spots- and the creators are still getting paid exactly the same.

Tangentially, I believe eventually, more sophisticated Browser Content Blockers will come to exist that will deliberately fool ad servers into thinking the ad was viewed or clicked, resulting in a similar "no loss" model for user-side adblocking. In fact, extensions like that are popping up already, but haven't yet gained much traction- since there's not been any reason to switch to them yet, but if corporations continue to be so heavy handed with trying to invasively track that sort of thing so much- if they keep flying closer to the sun with trying to prevent adblockers from working, it's going to burn them eventually. It's really not a good idea to pick fights with annoyed programmers.

In any case, SponsorBlock is a fantastic little extension that- like I said, it's almost stupid not to use it. It harms no-one, saves you time, and at the end of the day, time is a valuable resource, eh?