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Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

You're getting really unfairly dunked on for a sensible point. The Purpose Of A System Is What It Does, and what televised sports unarguably does is relentlessly slather its consumers' eyes with advertisements--and also shows some sportsball every once in a while, between those ads. Saying "I like televised sports but not ads" doesn't make a lot of sense. The entire purpose of televised sports, the only reason for its existence, is to saturate you with ads. People get uncomfortable thinking of themselves as willing projection-screens for ads, and get mad at the messenger.

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Humans aren't money-optimizing machines. And we don't watch (or play) sport to watch ads.

Companies can try to optimize for profit, but too much focus on the bottom line corrodes just about anything else the company wants to do in the world. And ultimately, the most profitable companies are usually the ones who make a profit on the road of caring deeply about something else. (Eg, Steve Jobs' - who cared about making great products made Apple into a massively profitable company).

> The Purpose Of A System Is What It Does

A complex system will have a complex mix of goals. Some of those goals will be mutually contradictory. For example, some people in NBA obsessively want to maximise profit, while others are there because they love the game. If you take money out, the NBA dies. But the NBA will also die if nobody loves basketball enough to watch the games!

A healthy complex system will navigate its multiplicity of objectives well. For example, as a human I need food. And I want to get work done today. Maybe I'll take a notebook to the cafe. Or maybe I'll relax at the cafe so I'm fresh when I get back home. I don't let either objective override the other.

The criticism here is that the NBA is letting its objectives simplify. The needs of marketing are overriding the team's choice to have creme colored uniforms. Of course this is worrying to some people.

> "And we don't watch (or play) sport to watch ads."

As long as we're talking about professional sports, players do definitely play them because of the ads. This is what pays pro athletes multimillion dollar salaries in the end - no matter what motivating lies they tell themselves (and get told by others), that is the practical purpose of the show they're putting on. Young athletes go through years of preparation, workouts, and practice with the expectation that some time afterward they'll get recruited to that sport's main league which will pay them enormous amounts of money in order to get out on a field and perform so that they'll attract millions of people to watch ads.

Slash athletes salary 10x and you’ll still have same talented athletes putting in great effort.

Most sportsmen are in it because they love competing and given activity. And lower salaries with less focus on advertising may make the activity itself better.

E.g. cycling where many pro races are shaped to be advertising-friendly first. The rest be damned.

Yep. We do the things we do for lots of reasons. Do I write code for money? A bit, yeah. But I also love it. And I connect to a community through my work, and get esteem from people, and it helps me have an impact in the world. Money is important, but so are all those other things.

And I’m sure athletes are just as complex as I am.

A friend of mine is fond of saying that we have 10 reasons for doing everything we do. We know 5 of those reasons consciously and we’ll only admit 2 reasons out loud.

You would only watch sport in person if it wasn't for ads. ESPN and TNT ain't paying the NBA billions for the TV deals so they can not sell ads.

The purpose of sports is to entertain us. One day someone smarter than me will make a machine learning thing that deletes brands and ads from video in real time. I'm going to enjoy watching them seethe about it, perhaps even more than I enjoy watching stuff.

You can build a super smart AI that can swap it out if you want. Sorry to spoil your perverse enjoyment there, but nobody will care about it. Everybody knows about ad blockers. Advertisers included!

For things like logos on jerseys, it doesn't really matter. It only has to be slightly inconvenient for most people not to want to do it, which is good enough for most advertising purposes. Public places of viewing like sports bars can't do it. Media pics will have that logo. People will even buy the jersey and carry the advertiser's brand around IRL.

So don't do it only because you want to see someone seethe, you'd risk being quite disappointed by their indifference!

Yeah, they're so indifferent to ad blockers that they actively find ways to detect and circumvent them, to the point people have to make ad blocker blocker blockers. Google is so indifferent that they forced everyone to use restrictive new browser extension APIs just to cripple ad blockers.

Oh sorry yeah they definitely care. Not just Google, also publishers like NBA care because it dents their revenue. But even they know installing ad blockers is a reasonable human behavior and spending $ to get around them an accepted cost of doing business.

Thank you for this much more eloquent version of the argument I was having trouble articulating! Proof that downvotes are useful ;-)

Would you be amazed if I told you I could connect you with someone right now who would tell you they enjoy tv sports and would like them even better without ads?

That point would be made only if you'd connect the parent poster with someone who is willing and capable to provide TV sports without ads.

The purpose of a system is what it does as a whole, even if (end despite that) one part of the system (e.g. sports viewers) would like that purpose to be different. A system fulfilling that purpose would be enjoyable by many, but it doesn't exist, and ads are a major irreplaceable part of the system that does exist - key parts of which are not only fans and casual viewers but also teams (and their budgets), players (and their salaries), and TV stations.

Ads are an inseparable part of the experience with professional sportsball. You can't have the sport without the ads, so it's like complaining that you like watching NASCAR races in-person from front-row seats, and that you love the gas-guzzling carbureted engines they use, but you don't like all the noise from the engines and tires and wish they were all silent. Sure, you can wish for that, but the laws of physics prevent it. It's the same here; the ads are an inseparable part of the experience.

So saying something like “I like the modern internet for the most part but not the ads” would in your opinion be a similarly nonsensical statement?

Basically, yes. You're not going to get all these free services (search, email, etc.) for nothing; the price is the ads. Of course, some of us don't look at ads much, thanks to ad-blocking technologies, but enough people are too lazy or ignorant to do that, so that's how all this stuff is financed.

If we eliminate ads, you can say goodbye to many "free" services people take for granted now, or expect to need to subscribe to them for a monthly fee. Of course, that could work, but it'd be very different than what we're used to I think.

I’m not sure. I pay for YouTube Premium because I watch a lot of content there and hate ads. Presumably, they added that option because there are people who exist who don’t like ads and are willing to support a different model. I even had a paid NHL subscription where commercials didn’t run.

The fact that we are even able to have this very conversation to discuss the pros and cons of ad-supported models seems to point to the fact that someone can like an ad-supported business’ services while not liking ads, and it is not a ridiculous or nonsensical position to hold.

Anyway, it seems we’ve diverged quite a lot from whether or not you can be a fan of watching tv sports and also not like ads.

Your YouTube Premium still isn't going to eliminate ads: surely you're still seeing all the embedded ads that "content creators" add to make more money? You're just cutting out the really annoying randomly-inserted ads from Google/YT.

I think it's the same with pro sports: it's all about profit, so they're going to shove ads in there somehow. Sure, maybe you can buy a subscription and avoid the most annoying ads, but you're not going to escape the embedded ads: sponsor logos, digitally-inserted ads, etc.

If you just want to watch sports without ads, the only way is to watch sports that don't have a profit motive, which excludes professional sports.

If you're curious there are other threads in this topic where people are discussing different (existing) tools for removing sponsors from YouTube videos or podcasts, and using ML to remove digitally inserted ads, for example. I like to stay up on this kind of ad-blocking tech and remove ads from content I like as completely as possible.

Maybe I'm a unicorn here (it would be surprising to me given the number of people working on ad-blocking tech, but who knows) but I truly, sincerely do simultaneously like ad-supported content and do not like the ads, and am happy to pay creators directly through subscriptions and use technology to otherwise get rid of them.

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