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Comment by acdha | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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