I use an ad blocker, and YouTube has finally caught up with me, saying I could watch only 3 more videos unless I disabled my ad blocker.

I don't know if they actually would have cut me off. I didn't try "private browsing" or changing browsers or anything like that. It just gets too tedious to play those games anymore. I'm too old.

So I signed up for "Premium," the subscription-based, ad-free experience. Supposedly it's better for "creators."

Well, before I signed up for Premium, I had this very consistent audio problem when watching YouTube videos. I suspected that it might have been a passive-aggressive punishment for using an ad blocker, but I didn't investigate it any further. What happened was that about three quarters of the way through any video, and nearly all of them, the volume would suddenly mute. I'd bump it back up, and that solved the problem.

Since I signed up for Premium, I have a new, inconsistent problem. The audio will jump to max, at random intervals throughout the video. It makes it pretty much unwatchable.

I did a search for that, and apparently it's been a thing for years, with Google, er, Alphabet, claiming at various times it's been fixed.

I'm in my "free" month of Premium. If I can't figure out some way to resolve this issue, I guess I'm going to cancel the subscription and watch a lot less YouTube.