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Comment by convalescindrey | Hacker News Reader

> I block ads because they're psychological warfare that corporations wage against me. I don't care how unobtrusive the ads are.

I hate ads as much as the next guy. But that's the economic model most of the web is built on. Anybody without a youtube premium subscription who rants about youtube ads is just hypocritical. How should this be financed? Either you give your money or your eyeballs. Nobody is going to work for free so you can watch cat videos.

Please don't come with morals here. Expecting things for free is just as morally problematic.

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I have an argument:

They made people to expect stuff for free. It was their market strategy to offer basically free service to get people locked in. It is their fault they should pay for it.

It is called bait and switch which is a blatant fraud. Only that they stretched it into long years.

Now they switch by introducing pains option and making free one unusable by shoving ads every minute.

> It is called bait and switch which is a blatant fraud.

Sorry, this is just not true. If you let yourself get baited, then it's your responsibility. Don't lift the responsibility from the general populace of mostly mature adults. If they like to see ads then it's their problem.

If enough people get baited, that creates a network effect and locks creators into that, no matter how much of a smart fish you are. Most people don’t like to see ads. They like to see the content without thinking too much about a platform it resides in.

It's easier to criticize the baiter than the baitee, but that may be barking up the wrong tree. Tech companies are acting within the economic and regulatory framework. Criticizing them for doing so is not helpful. Ironically, I'd guess that the majority of the HN crowd is actually making their living directly or indirectly off that.

Mostly mature adults addicted to cigarettes, caffeine, alcohol and cheap dopamine.

Voting for whoever shouts louder.

Don’t overestimate being mature. I’m 35 and look at my aunts and uncles turning 65 and 70 it is so much different view from when I was 15 to 25… it is just people.

I agree! I'm very disappointed with my fellow humans too! But what do you want to do? If you reduce how much the general population can impact their life then you are doing democracy a disservice. As sad as that is.

Your comments are consistently dark on this topic.

Is that why you're using a throwaway, or new account, because you know defending adtech is dubious?

It's this kind of lack of integrity people are unhappy with.

I don't follow. I don't have integrity because I'm consistent in my replies?

I also don't see how turning this discussion into ad hominem against myself is meaningful. Attacking that I'm using a throwaway? Seriously?

Yes, my comments may be dark. It's because my view on society is dark. It just does not help to blame big tech for the laziness of people to not want to pay and watch ads instead.

face it, the youtube offering is just kinda shitty. its like with piracy of music, movies and such, it is a distribution problem. Does it make it legal in the case of music/movies? probably not. Is it legal to adblock? in most places, yes.

could one make an argument of it not being morally justified? maybe.

does youtube, in the way google/alphabet wants to run it suck? most definitely. Is it possible to easily work around some of the biggest stuff here? yes.

well this is what a great many people choose to do, and youtube had better accept reality and deal with it. If they make it impossible to block ads, that is probably within their rights (assuming they implement some technical solution themselves), but that will come with some consequences

I don't know what you're saying here. Bait and switch is fraud. When adults fall for fraud it is still the fraudster who is in the wrong, not the victims.

And doing their very best to consume or annihilate all competition.

If the current economic system doesn't allow for a web where I can watch cat videos for free without being psychologically terrorized by megacorps, then perhaps the economic system is the problem.

You want an economic system that provides you cat videos for free?

I'm quite ok with markets and capitalism. Should be regulated, but if you get your wish then there will be 300+ Americans who also want a wish. I rather have people pay for their wishes.

This model not only profits from the aforementioned, but also aggressively competes with other activities people could participate in instead of watching ads mixed with highly monetized cat videos. The implied question here is what would happen if it fails? The answer is something else, not the end of the world. If it can’t be financed (or at least behave) otherwise, maybe it simply shouldn’t.

I agree! So, stop using the service then.

Apparently most people don't care though. So, whom are you criticizing? Youtube for providing a service that's populare despite their way of financing which you personally don't like, but others don't have a problem with? Or the other viewers for not joining your boycott?

The model of shouting in your face, of course. And not only that, but also $subj.

The ads interrupt the videos in really obtrusive ways: not at sensible commercial break points like TV ads or before the movie like in a movie theater, but frequently with timing that totally destroys the mood and experience of the surrounding seconds or minutes of the video. And they're getting longer and longer - I recently experienced half a minute of two back-to-back ads partway through an 8-9 minute video, and I'm not at all sure there wasn't also an ad before the video in addition to that. What an awful ratio of content to ads.

It bothers me far less to have ads at the start of a video, between videos, or even at transition points between coherently separate segments within a video than what YouTube is now doing. That's not hypocritical.

(Tangent: I do have a YouTube Premium subscription, but for irrelevant reasons we usually watch using my wife's account and she does not have one. So I see the ads anyway. Maybe that's the reverse kind of hypocrisy to the one you mean, where I'm wasting my money instead of being stingy?)

Check out enshitification. No one went into google or youtube knowing that in 20 years time, their service would be overrun with ads. Everyone has been lured into cheap services by the deliberate and dishonest behavior of the providers.

> How should this be financed?

As a consumer, I do not care. If I can get a thing for free AND ignore your suggested content, I will do it 10 times out of 10.

If you don't want to offer a thing for free, then don't offer a thing for free.

If your business model is to offer a thing for free and then to somehow profit from that, well then it is your problem. When you give away a thing for free, expect people to take it for free.

They're not offering it for free. They're offering it with the arrangement that you pay for it by rendering ads. The fact that you can get away with violating that arrangement is frankly a starkly amoral attitude

It's the exact same logic as stealing from a roadside honesty box (or a corner shop who can't easily detect petty theft) and then saying "tough! Their business model isn't my problem! I could take it for free so clearly I should be allowed to" when morally called out for it

I disagree entirely that stealing from a corner store and not rendering ads are comparable. In one instance, I take an item that another person has paid for and expects to sell it at a profit. If I steal it, I am depriving the store owner of that item and the profit they would have made.

If I choose to view free content and not render ads, no one has lost anything. While yes, the site owner does not get the profit from "selling the ad", it is not theft in the same way if I were to walk into a store, look around, and not buy anything is not theft.

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