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Comment by synu | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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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