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Comment by shortformblog | Hacker News Reader

Please don’t do this. It disrespects small creators. This isn’t like hurting big companies that can afford the hit. This is the digital equivalent of stealing money out of the till of the corner shop.

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That analogy is the digital equivalent of breaking into my house and relieving yourself on the carpet.

Any time someone is paid to say something to me, I reserve the right to not listen. If I value what someone has to say, that value is non-transferrable. I'm not handing out permanent easements to my brain to anyone who can grab my attention.

I pay for YouTube in money so I don't have to pay the cost of listening to people pretend they care about mattresses. The creators do not find the platform lucrative enough, so they put ads that aren't marked as ads in their videos in order to get paid twice. Sorry, three times if you count Patreon.

I'm sure you'll agree that's the digital equivalent of running a nursing home that charges both the residents and their families for the same care while also keeping the proceeds of Monday night bingo.

This is a startup community, and there’s frequently a focus on having diverse revenue streams so as to offer financial stability. Suddenly a YouTuber who has 15,000 followers does it, and they’re a horrible person? That’s literally what you’re saying.

Do you watch all the sponsor content in 1x speed without skipping? This is the digital equivalent of not reading the ad “articles” in a magazine.

If you don’t like the sponsored content, skip it by hand. Don’t automate it.

Why not automate it, I've already spent countless hours over the past 2 months working on this software, I'm not wasting that time.

This punches down. Don’t punch down.

The people who take these sponsorships are punching down by abusing their reputation to hawk this kind of crap, often also in ways that make it unclear that they're being paid to do it.[0][1]

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20781415

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20780305

They’re trying to make a few bucks. You’re trying to get their content for free without supporting them, and doing double-backflips to try to convince yourself that you have the moral high ground.

You don’t.

How is this different from using an adblocker?

There is no tracking involved with a paid sponsorship. This is not like some crazy adtech here. This is literally someone just trying to pay some bills by hawking a product—the ethical concerns are significantly less.

Yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.

I've thought of that a lot. You can look through my comments on this thread and my comments on https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/cl5t45/i_made_an_a...

This was all built because of unethical ads, not because I was tired of seeing sponsors. I still don't think blocking every sponsor is the best option ethically, I think whitelisting is something that should be done to make it more ethical. I also think people should consider whitelisting channels from ublock origin (I do that).

More info here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20780728

Nah. I'll be configuring my useragent to show me what I want to see.

I wouldn't say that. Only big creators get sponsors. I guess it depends on what you mean by small creator. And this isn't taking money, it would just be not putting any in.

I’ve seen channels with as few as 10,000 subscribers have sponsors. This is literally screwing with some person’s job.

'Big creators' seems to be fairly ambiguous. I've seen plenty of sponsorship segments on <10,000 subscriber accounts, which (I'm guessing) is probably the threshold where the creator is starting to make noticeable money from Youtube, but not quite enough to go full time. It's the big creators who seem to not have the sponsorship segments in my experience, because they have enough income from other parts of their brand.

People use adblock now, I don't see how this is much worse. In my opinion, this is more ethical than adblock since it allows easy whitelisting and has an easy to click unskip button.

Web ads generally come with tracking software baked in. Paid sponsorships do not.

Most of the "Big creators" I see rolling sponsorships on youtube are nowhere near even the size of even smallest of creators on cable tv.

Many of them are literally one to three people with a camera.

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