Those are just people who expect things for free. Free loaders will always exist and they will always try to come up with justifications for why their free loading is actually noble and not just selfish.
They are providing a service to the people protecting their services with recaptcha and you're solving those issues because you value what's on the other side so no I wouldn't consider that free loading.
A service that's easily defeated by automation and thus mostly devoid of value outside of training Google's AI products. I think the technical term is "false sense of security".
Sorry, I should've just left it at trivially defeated. My preferred method is to just use a different browser and/or clear my cookies. Meanwhile I spent around 30 seconds on DDG and came up with 5 chrome store captcha solvers, 2 github projects, and 1 paid captcha solving service.
Right, it's not even good at anything save for using my CPU and my time to train Google's AI products. As a human if I get blocked (a.k.a. it refuses to acknowledge anything I've "solved" correctly) I can clear my cookies and bypass the block. Whatever benefit you think you're getting, you're not.
The benefit I'm getting is it stop almost all bots from submitting forms on my websites. It works basically flawlessly for that. I'm guessing you either don't run any websites with traffic or have never tried it if you think its worthless. I'm sure there are ways to bypass them but no one I care about has bothered so it doesn't matter. The lock on my front door doesn't have to stop a professional lock picker to be useful. The captcha on my website doesn't have to stop someone trying to get around it for it to be useful at stopping almost all the bots that don't even bother trying.
I literally am stopping bots though, it isn't hard to see the results or the differences between results into my systems with it on and off. It's weird that you're trying to argue against my actual experience.
Of course you do, you've managed to justify to yourself that your leeching is both giving it to Google and somehow supporting content creators. The internal inconsistency could only possibly lead to a good nights sleep.
Some people just really like to believe and repeat anything a corporation tells them. It's so much easier than forming your own unique thoughts. Buy coke!
If the "price" to load a webpage were that you run a crypto miner or give a site access to upload whatever files it feels from your computer, would you do it? Or would blocking such malware make you a free loader?
So I presume you browse with a vulnerable webp library or something in case sites you do browse would like to use that functionality? You can't know whether they wanted to use it if your browser silently blocks their attempts.
Correct. Web adware/spyware is drive-by malware and a frequent funnel for scammers. Malware blockers are simply prudent. Intentionally allowing their programs to run would be insane. A normal person doesn't stop to consider whether blocking malware is somehow freeloading.
You will justify wanting things for nothing no matter what. Luckily for the rest of us, people like you are the minority so there are still enough resources for us to get the content we enjoy. But keep telling yourself that your not supporting the creators you enjoy is some moral victory.
There's where you are confused; I generally do not want things from "the creators" (e.g. I simply don't understand the audience for something like LTT. Non-technical people LARPing as nerds?), and don't see "creator" as a separate class of person.
To the extent that youtube has anything interesting on it, it tends to be random 1 minute recordings from some dude that just fixed something, or recordings of e.g. lectures that were being given anyway, and they felt like posting it somewhere free. These aren't people asking for support. They're unlikely to get more than a few hundred views.
See also [0]. There's already an infinite wealth of top quality works out there, already for free. It'd already take a lifetime to scratch the surface of the best ones. The "creators" you speak of are irrelevant.
