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Comment by alwayslikethis | Hacker News Reader

At this point, I consider blocking ads to be a moral obligation. By giving in, you enable Youtube to abuse users further

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What's the point of blocking ads when they're already not present? Or are you saying that we should block ads and refuse to pay? How is that sustainable in the long term? If you're against ads, shouldn't you support monetization models that don't involve ads?

We treat google how they treat us, as exploitive as possible.

You're just rationalising. You know it's not a defensible position.

Sure it is, you're not even involved in the transaction. Just because someone pays Google to show an ad doesn't mean you have to look at it. USPS is funded by ads going through the mail and I throw them straight in the trash without remorse. I bet you do too. Bet you don't feel guilt about going to the bathroom or fast-forwarding your DVR during commercials either. Ad space is sold on the possibility that someone will see it and you don't owe anyone valuable ad real-estate.

It's wild how many people unironically think "drink verification can" is in any way acceptable.

> Just because someone pays Google to show an ad doesn't mean you have to look at it

Just because someone has an internet connection doesn't mean google has to serve them videos, either.

Such is their prerogative. You'll notice that nowhere are people saying "Google should have to give you a switch to turn off ads for free."

You act like that's a gotcha when "I owe you nothing, you owe me nothing" is the state I'm arguing for.

I’m confused. Google doesn’t serve every internet connection videos. The serve people asking for videos.

At no point did I suggest people should be forced to view ads.

I can't actually remember the last time I got mail-mail.

I think it's somewhat defendable when youtube doesn't give you an option to pay for what you'd be "stealing". Overall i agree with you, but lets not pretend that Youtube doesn't feel exploitative in the corporate behavior here. Especially considering the data they're stealing from me, harvesting and selling, etc.

Ie show me the ads i'm missing, and let me pay for the view. It would be what, $3|5|7/m or w/e in value? Instead they're trying to strongarm you into an upcharge of $14/m for additional services. Show me the data they're harvesting from my viewing patterns and the added revenue they're getting from that. Tie that into my "cost" each month and reducing how much i owe.

But of course they won't do that. Because this isn't an exchange. This isn't a service we're paying for, it's a data harvest where they want to have their cake and eat it too. This is scummy in the same way that my music software, Spotify, is trying to expand revenue streams and shoving more crap (podcasts, audio books, etc) down my throat.

If Youtube isn't going to try and play fair then i'd rather leave (and will) than pay them.

>I think it's somewhat defendable when youtube doesn't give you an option to pay for what you'd be "stealing".

https://www.youtube.com/premium

Not the person you're responding to, but from how they phrased it I suspect they'd be annoyed that they're having to pay for YouTube Music as part of Premium.

Exactly. I want to pay for what i'm supposed to be paying for. Not subscribe to extra services i don't use.

You're not just paying Youtube/Google for the ad, you're paying the content creators as well. You can always buy the music directly from artists if you don't like Spotify's revenue model. Or ditch Spotify and use the free Youtube Music subscription you get with premium, maybe combined it'd be worth the $14 to you.

Youtube music is actually pretty remarkable. I'm a jazz musician. One of the remarkable features of YouTube is that if you're looking for a particular recording of a jazz tune (e.g. Lou Donaldson's The Masquerade Is Over, on the Blues Walk album, 1953), it's just there. The depth of the collection is quite amazing.

And as an added bonus, if you subscribe you get no ads on youtube! :-P

If YT music is so great they could make it optional instead of making me pay for a second music streaming service that I don’t want or need.

I hope they get a big fat EU fine for (illegal here) joint sales.

> You're not just paying Youtube/Google for the ad, you're paying the content creators as well.

That would only be true if Youtube proportionally split my subscription to the videos i watch.

If anything, i'm advocating for exactly what you said - more than Youtube is. Ie show me how much i owe, and then whatever money i give youtube goes to content creators and the service provider. It's proportional to the service i consume, and is ultimately fair.

Instead what we get is something (in my view) massively upcharged. Bundled with service(s) i don't use, and set at a price point that i suspect well exceeds my usage of the service.

It sure is. I'm still watching their ads on every other site, but youtube ads for gambling and soda that interrupt while I'm watching someone talk about Bezier curves ? Na-ah.

All this performative righteousness is only going to end up hurting your cause in the long term. If a major site offers an ad-free option, and people refuse to take it, what does it tell the executives? What does it tell other publishers who are considering their monetization options? How do you think a business should respond to users that neither refuse to watch ads nor pay, can't be bargained with (see above), but nonetheless think they should be entitled to service? Companies aren't owed a viable business model, but consumers aren't owed a free service either.

the amount of ads on youtube has grown exponentially and i highly doubt this was because of profitability issues.

The problem is higher than zero intrest rates the free money dried up where before all the platforms were chasing infinte growth and free money meant they could run deficts as long as they grew they now need to make a profit now that debt costs money plus investor cash got sucked away to Bonds, CDs, and money market accounts giving a safe 5-7%. This is why every service went to shit at the same time in the past year.

In a hypothetical world without adblockers, wouldn't YouTube need to show a lower amount of ads per person to make the same amount of revenue?

No, look at cable. Companies will turn the dial up on ads as much as they can, consumers have shown that they'll tolerate the current level of ads on YouTube, Hulu, Netflix, etc.

It's no different than price points, not showing the amount of ads the market will bear is leaving money on the table.

That trickle down fever dream has been on repeat for ages now but still hasn’t come to fruition.

Has YouTube ever turned a profit?

Profit numbers for YT have never been broken out in financial reports.

They still mine your data…

Are you complaining about ads or data? The only way to avoid giving them data is to not use them, which also lets you avoid their ads and you don’t need a subscription. Simple solution.

i love paying for nebula and support my favorite creators there and blocking everything else on youtube

I don't care if Google is sustainable in the long term or not, just like they don't care if they serve me malicious content and malware via their ad networks, or take money, and show me ads, from groups that want people like me dead.

In my area they started to put ads to meet hot russian women in youtube. I reported and they said it's supposed to stay there.

We're back to 2002-style ads about meeting hot singles in your town, where you can get free "natural" Viagra, and content taken directly from weird political chain letters that are written by people who, while barely literate, are loud and opinionated.

Maybe we don't want the business models of data hoarding multibillion dollar corporations to be sustainable. Maybe there are good alternatives that don't rely so much on exploitative practices. Just a thought.

Those are great reasons not to use YouTube. If you’re worried about data mining, your ad blocker has no effect there – you have to stop using YouTube if that bothers you.

What if I considered it a moral imperative to financially damage FAANG companies in any way I can? What if I was fine paying money each month as long as it went towards harming Youtube?

How do you think that’s relevant to the question of data mining?

Or use it in a way that doesn't give up your data quite so easily. I recommend Minitube for Linux desktop and NewPipe for android.

It’s wishful thinking to hope that they can’t mine that. If you connect to a Google server, they’re analyzing your activity. Not running their JavaScript disrupts ads but they still get information about what type of videos you like, when and where you watch them, and what kind of devices you use.

True enough. I've thought before it'd be good to cache and mirror YouTube videos as they're watched, and then provide them through IPFS with an index that's shipped around so people can pre-filter their searches and page hits against that index first. Lots of work, obviously. More than I have time for, alas. But I'm confident that'll happen eventually.

IPFS seems like a poor choice for that: wouldn’t it be giving the copyright enforcers an API to query to look for potential people to sue?

True enough. Things like Tribler would be good, if they did intra-tribler connections.

If you have a moral obligation why would you even use YouTube?

I have zero problem paying for premium. I like it when the products I like, you know, survive.

If YouTube dies another party will take their place and hopefully learn from their mistakes. But YouTube won’t fail because it’s backed by Google and they’ll squeeze their monopoly for all that it’s worth.

Competitors DID learn from their mistakes. The problem is they then built not a better YouTube, but Tiktok.

I think this is a bad take, because YouTube is a rare web service that allows you to just pay them directly. Then you aren’t the product anymore

They still data mine every move you make.

How many hours daily you spend on YT?

Me? About 0

Honestly, I don't think preventing ad blockers is abusive. Hosting videos for free is simply not sustainable. It does not work. We aren't entitled to getting everything on the internet for free.

Bittorrent would like to have a word.

I am in the same boat. They are providing a service. Ads suck so I pay for. The evil angle is tiring. If they are so evil why even use YouTube at all.

Because we’re addicted?

I’m serious, but philosophically, the onus is clearly on us to get rid of our addiction. But Youtube is a quasi-monopoly of random micro-conferences. Nebula and Vimeo aren’t on the same market. So basically we specifically like Youtube. But I’d never pay Google after what they did to James Damore.

If Costco decided they wanted to make a profit on their 1.50$ hot dogs and cranked the price up to 3$, they would lose a ton of goodwill and many of their loyal customers would be upset.

Google isn’t exactly struggling to make ends meet. They seem perfectly okay to be losing money on search. YouTube is no different.

The hot dogs are getting more and more noticeable as everything else there seems majorly overpriced. $10 for some half sandwich?

It's a tangent, but that $10 roast beef sandwich is gigantic. I was surprised when they rolled out such an expensive food court item, and so I bought it, and I couldn't finish it. I took half of it home to eat later. I am not a light eater.

Pizza is also cheap.

We don't want them to be losing money because that prevents competition since no one can compete with that. It's a monopolistic practice.

Then why did Youtube/Google start hosting videos for free? And continue to do so for so long, if it was "unsustainable" ? That was the deal they offered, and that people bought into. Now that they've achieved the soft lock in of network effects, we should accept them completely altering those terms? In the antitrust sense, this is called dumping.

Avoiding using services whose business practices you disagree with feels like a bigger moral obligation but what do I know?

That would be a fine argument of Google did not own the long-form general topic diy online video space. Since they do and there are no alternatives they can suck it until they (if ever) improve their business practices.

The alternatives are to not watch it, watch it under their terms, or do something you’re not supposed to do because you’ve convinced yourself that you’re right.

I’m under no obligation to watch ads and may filter network traffic onto my network however I deem fit.

Whatever makes you feel good about yourself.

Stealing is never a moral obligation. The only moral choices are not using YouTube or paying for it - and if you truly believe YouTube abuses users, you definitely shouldn’t be encouraging more people to use it, which your presence does by telling creators they get more traffic there.

Youtube are the ones stealing. I pay for premium, but people who don't and still block ads are not wrong.

YouTube offers their service under specific terms: watch ads or pay directly. If you don’t like it, your only ethical option is not using it. It’s not a basic need and anyone can live a happy and full life without it, there’s no need to pretend that not keeping your side of the agreement is somehow just if you squint hard enough.

Youtube offers a service to advertisers. The users are both the content providers as well as the content consumers, which cancels out. Youtube sells something which is essentially parasitical on the uploaders, who actually create the value that they get to sell to advertisers, but you can say symbiotic instead of parasitic as long as the uploading and downloading are free.

The mail example is great. The post office has no right to withhold your other mail between someone else and yourself, because you threw away the ad flyer someone paid them to deliver.

Meanwhile, I pay for premium and still have to suffer ads, because every video has ads in-band in the content, and I have to watch youtube on someone else's device probably 30% of the time, and have my content (what I would consume not produce) censored and inhibited by bs ai "community standards" and dmca takedowns I didn't approve of, and even without ever looking at an ad, they are collecting and selling profiling data of me which I also don't approve of. So where's my option to strong-arm youtube to force them to fully meet my "terms" and get what I'm paying for? How come it's not reasonable for me to somehow make it that if they don't please ME, that their own server side somehow breeaks unless they conform to what decide is a reasonable fair transaction?

None of this "terms" argument holds up. All they have is might, not right.

So why do you still use their service if you don’t like them so much? Whether or not you approve of the rules someone sets for use of their private property doesn’t affect their legal rights, so it seems you shouldn’t be helping them.

I use many things that aren't perfect, lacking any better option.

I didn't have time this week to become Jeff Bezos and buy Google and fix Youtube.

That begs the question of why it’s so critical to have an unlimited supply of mediocre video – you don’t need to build a competitor, just find another outlet for your spare time which is hardly a challenge.

It does not beg any such question, merely you presume.

I will write down my ethical obligation to Google on a piece of paper and wipe my arse with it. The only ethical obligation that exists is on American legislators and regulators to bring down the hammer of justice, smashing Alphabet and co-conspirators into one hundred thousand grains of sand and blow them into the wind.

And thanks for the life advice acdha, but I'm quite happy to continue 'stealing' every single second of content that I want from Google and pointing out that the platform is filled with trash, incentivizes trash, and we would all be better off if it was gone.

Hey, it’s your life. I’m just asking people to be honest about what they’re doing. That said, if you really think we’d be better off without YouTube I’m not sure how giving them your support and attention is going to get you closer to that goal.

It's not my goal, and I'm not sure what yours is in this passive-aggressive commenting style that you employ.

What is YouTube stealing?

Lots of things in different ways, but for one example, ad & premium money from videos that they demonetize.

Not to mention literally stealing original content and granting it to anyone else who simply claims copyright without proving it or being able to prove it since it's not theirs.

Then there are all kinds of indirect ways as a consequence of their various policies and how they implement and enforce them, like showing me ads after taking my premium money, or collecting and selling the profiling data of my watch/like/dislike data, etc.

Paying for your own Internet, accessing something publicly accessible, and downloading your preferred subset of bits of what's available on your own hardware is not stealing.

Compelling my own property to behave against my wishes is the moral failing.

YouTube is not publicly accessible: they offer it under specific terms, namely that you watch ads or pay directly. If you don’t want to accept that deal you don’t have any more right to use their private property than you do to complain that the local movie theater wouldn’t let you sneak in when you didn’t like their ticket prices.

YouTube has no problem serving content to my yt-dlp client without ads, payment, authentication or terms of service.

That doesn’t mean it’s allowed, only that they haven’t blocked it again. You can’t use your neighbors’ pool without permission just because they don’t have a guard checking IDs, either.

Turns out, I can.

Up until they notice and decide to call the police.

I use an adblocker, call the police and tell them I told you so.

If you found people who make a habit of swimming in your pool without permission then I imagine you'd be the one calling the police.

Not legally, no. This thread is the lower stakes version of what happens when the owner gets tired of free loaders and starts enforcing their legal rights.

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