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Comment by scbzzzzz | Hacker News Reader

I see there is lot of dilemma in comments here regarding blocking ads. blocking ads is not piracy, blocking ads should be norm. I am ok with seeing ads, until they don't track my behavior, they don't try to manipulate my decisions based on age,region,sex,location, earning status. I am "ok" with ads shown in TV channels, because they show the same for all above mentioned categories.

let me make a simple analogy, how do you feel if a circus publicizes as free, has a billboard to show ads, and in background they hires a detective to follow your every move 24/7 , note down your interests/dislikes so they can show you personalised ads based on the interests. creepy right, That how i feel these companies do.

just because someone/company spent money and posted a billboard on public space, doesn't mean you have to read through it. It is the risk they assumed, just like youtube/creators made the decision to host videos for free on a public space. it is a bad decision from their part and they have to live with it and not gaslight people.

I hate to see youtube die, It is a wonderful archive for society. if you want you can buy premium/see ads so that society wont lose some thing valuable. but not because of creators/YT losing revenue.(that's the risk they assumed when they started the business).

and then there are people who say, you can turn off ad personalization, I did since last 5 years and you know what I see. Some Scam apps/NSFW ads content. and there is no way to report the ads unless I turn on ad personalization.

I would like to repeat statement from louis rossmann , don't accept the premise of the corporates when the premise itself is shaky.

View on HN

One aspect you didn't mention is the ability to not look at the ad billboard.

If I see a giant ad billboard, I can not look at it, look away, close my eyes, block it with my hands, etc. In a distant future I'd buy glasses that blur ads from my sight (if that could be done without a company seeing everything I see).

For me ad-blockers are the same with some automation. It's a way for me to not give up my time and attention for something I never asked for in the first place.

Moves like this one from YouTube are one step closer to that dystopian nightmare depicted in Black Mirror where you have to watch the ad no matter what. You close your eyes, and the ad pauses and only goes away after you finish watching it. It's absolutely insane.

We somehow got gaslighted into believing there's something good with advertising and there are just a few "bad actors" (where did I hear that before?). I firmly disagree. The entire world would be a better place without ads.

A funny edge case of those glasses might be accidental blurring of people's faces, if their face is prominent enough in advertisements.

Hahaha, haven't thought of that! I'd probably call that a feature and not a bug.

To add another example,

I arrive late to the movie theater, I'll arrive anywhere from 15-30 minutes late.

why?

Because I paid to watch a movie, I did not pay to watch advertisements of movies. There's typically 15-30 minutes of ads in front of movies nowadays.

When I was younger I didn't have this policy because there were far fewer ads, but they keep cramming more and more.

YouTube use to have a single pre roll of just a handful of seconds. Now there are multiple which take 10 seconds each, unskippable and also ads on top of the video an in between segments. They have just become to greedy, like a Pythagorean cup, take too much and you will end up having nothing.

Thanks for Pythagorean cup analogy, interesting read. I didn't know such thing exists.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythagorean_cup

Every HN thread about YouTube and ads, we see the same ads/tracking/Google apologist fallacies:

1. Equivocating adblock with stealing

2. Using adblock deprives content creators of funds

3. Users of adblock are entitled whiners who just want free stuff

4. Without ads, YouTube cannot exist

It is getting tiring.

What's tiring is trying to figure out why people just don't use sites/services that show them ads. It's extremely simple and from my experience pretty effective at avoiding the ads those sites/services display.

Or just use an ad blocker. Also extremely simple.

How simple is it for a normal person to use an ad blocker on their TV, where they want to watch YouTube?

And don't "just pihole" me, mister!

At least for Roku, I recently found and had good luck with https://github.com/iBicha/playlet

Very cool!

Smarttube is one of several apps that work just like YouTube but without ads.

Also skips sponsor Blocks

Who says people who use adblock don't do that? I certainly avoid those sites, that's also why I self-host Invidious and often use youtube-dl.

But no, people have a problem with those things too, because at its core, they disagree with allowing users being able to choose what their browsers download.

Who says people who use adblock don't do that? I certainly avoid those sites, that's also why I self-host Invidious and often use youtube-dl.

If you are using a different front end for a service, you aren't avoiding using that service...

Why can't you just choose to use a different video sharing platform if you don't like what Youtube offers? Why bother using Invidious and youtube-dl?

Yeah, I kind of anticipated that argument hence the second half of my comment.

I would use a different streaming platform (and I do for some creators like Louis Rossman). But at this point, and you may already know this, YouTube has a monopoly on the video sharing/streaming market and mindshare. You simply can't avoid YouTube in 2023, else you forfeit watching 98% of all video content produced on the internet.

The maintainers of frontends like Nitter/NewPipe/Invidious/Scribe.rip know this. And I'd bet most of them wish their applications had no reason to exist. If YouTube or Twitter were simply good, privacy-respecting and performant products, there would be no reason to use these (or adblock).

> don't use sites/services that show them ads

Cable TV shows ads. Spotify Premium shows ads. Paramount Plus shows ads.

Roads have ads (billboards), but so do the subways.

Even paperback books often have an ad in the back for the next book in the series.

If you think it is possible to avoid ads, it is because you are so surrounded by ads that you are tuning them out.

Cable TV shows ads. Spotify Premium shows ads. Paramount Plus shows ads.

I don't use those services. Problem solved. See how simple that is?

Roads have ads (billboards), but so do the subways.

Sure, that is a problem. But I don't consider a roadside billboard to be a "website or service" as I mentioned in my original post. So, I don't see how that comparison applies.

If you think it is possible to avoid ads...

I didn't say it was possible to avoid all ads, I asked why are you using a service if you don't like the service itself? Just don't use it. You haven't stated why you feel that's so difficult to do.

> why people just don't use sites/services that show them ads

The point I'm trying to make is that everything shows ads.

Most content is only available on services that show ads.

How do you consume media?

Because they're a monopoly. Finding creators without using YouTube is very hard, at least for me. It's hard even inside YT.

But most creators are exclusively on YT because that's the only choice that matters.

There is Nebula now that does have some nice content, but they're orders of magnitude smaller (plus their UX is very rough) so it's hard to even call them a competitor.

That's why monopolies - capitalism's inevitable end goal - destroy everything they touch. In order to argue "you can choose to not do X" requires the choice part to be true. Sure, we can argue people can completely forego X. But that's basically a nuclear option that even if they wanted to do, will be hard. People will still send you YouTube links.

One example of this is WhatsApp. I hate it and don't want to support Meta, but 100% of my peers use it so I have to use it.

Having said all that, when YouTube starts to price hike subscriptions and/or showing ads even for paying users (inevitable because of profits), I'll force myself to stop using it.

In fairness, there’s also the misguided assumption that services cost nothing to host and ad revenue cannot possibly offset the costs.

In fairness, there’s also the misguided assumption that services cost nothing to host and ad revenue cannot possibly offset the costs.

No see, you can't bring that up because they already called that reason "tiring". Thus it is invalid now and you need to come up with a different one.

Disregarding your sarcasm, I did not call it tiring, and I've also never seen anyone make that misguided assumption.

4. Without ads, YouTube cannot exist

In my view, you did call it tiring and were thereby stating that you had seen someone make that assumption.

Saying "without ads, YouTube cannot exist" is not the same thing as saying "services cost nothing to host" at least in my view.

https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/3/21121207/youtube-google-al...

YouTube us very profitable. It’s just that they want even more and they believe forcing users to turn off their adblockers will get them there. Smells monopolistic to me.

Your link says nothing about the profitability of YouTube, just about the revenue.

They don’t publish that number, but you know it’s in the billions.

Here’s alphabet’s gross income (155b USD): https://www.wsj.com/market-data/quotes/GOOG/financials/annua...

And here’s an estimate of YT’s profit margin: https://mannhowie.com/youtube-valuation#youtube-profit-margi...

My point wasn’t about the specific number, it was a qualitative one: people in this thread claim that YT needs to kill Adblockers to pay for the service and survive. They don’t. They’re already making billions without crippling web browsers to disable Adblockers.

I certainly don't know that their profit is in the billions. Neither do you, unless you're a high level Google executive.

The source you have for estimating the profit margin is just total guesswork. It's estimating the costs purely by taking the operating costs of other companies with different business as a percentage of their revenue, and then applying that same percentage to YouTube. That's an absurd methodology. You could just apply it to any business and show they're profitable.

(As an example, for years AWS was profitable and GCP wasn't. But applying the methodology from your link would have resulted in the belief that GCP was wildly profitable. And those business were far more similar to each other than Netflix and YouTube are!)

Also, you are making a point about a specific number: You are claiming the profit is greater than 0. It could be true! It could also not be true. We just don't know.

Yes ad-revenue offsets , I want to point out, premise it self is wrong. their business model itself is not sustainable (as per my understanding)with present free +ads/paid model. you are just subsidizing their bad decisions forgoing your privacy/time/money.

even with ads, hosting free video content is not sustainable. just look at the trajectory, internet users are stagnating, time of a day is limited. which means all users watch-time is constant. it is profitable now, but not forever(if above premise is true)

but youtube has to host all the data since its inception, and new content is added everyday. (maintenance cost increases day by day + but income is stagnated)

only way out is to charge/limit content creators. or else it will be (never ending increase of number of ads/price increase).

I have never met anyone (or seen a comment on HN) that has purported that. Sorry, but this seems like a strawman.

> Every HN thread about YouTube and ads, we see the same ads/tracking/Google apologist fallacies:

If I'm understanding your comment in good faith, it appears to be dismissing a number of viewpoints that don't advocate for adblocking and labeling them as "apologist".

The intent of my comment is to call out that there are a number of viewpoints that do not consider the costs of running services and equate adblock as a binary "good" vs "evil".

My intention wasn't to dismiss viewpoints, my intention was to highlight what I view as fallacious arguments.

I can agree that there are those who do not consider the costs of running services, but I have never seen someone suggest that services "cost nothing to host".

Google aren't exactly a struggling small business

Just as tiring as everyone pretending that YouTube doesn't offer a directly paid solution to the ads problem.

true, but they bundle with youtube music and other services that i don't use. I don't see value paying for everything. there is no option to buy just youtube - ads(atleast where I live). it is a manipulative tactic. you are gaslighted for not seeing ads on internet (public space) and when you want to buy the service, they bundle it with other services.

Premium is $24/m here!

Maybe I am dumb, but it does seem that if they offered a dirt cheap "just no ads" plan for like 2-5$/m they could probably get a higher conversion rate, maybe the actual 10x they'd "need" to match the current price.

I think a lot of people watch youtube as a "second screen" thing like people historically left the TV on for some kind of connection, or when going to sleep, etc. That kind of content is probably not worth 24/m to most, but 2$?

Where is 'here'? It's $22 here in the US, but that is for the family plan (6 people, so just under $4 per person).

> but 2$?

Yeah, I highly doubt that covers the cost of serving up videos ad-free while also being able to provide anything of substance to the creators (which earn more per user from premium viewers than from ads).

Au, 15usd/m.

> but 2$?

>> Yeah, I highly doubt that covers the cost of serving up videos ad-free while also being able to provide anything of substance to the creators (which earn more per user from premium viewers than from ads).

Well if 2$/m with a 12x conversion rate doesn't cover, then neither does $24/m at a 1x conversion rate, so the current wouldn't be sustainable either?

Of course you also have to pay for Youtube Music which is inferior to Apple Music and Spotify.

If they'd bust YouTube Premium apart from YouTube Music it'd be cheaper and a more inviting proposition.

YouTube Music is hilariously bad. I doubt there's a person alive who is using that out of choice.

And it costs more than the amount of revenue my viewing of ads generate them.

Youtube actually got rid of their directly paid solution to the ads problem and now forces it to be bundled with other services, because (and I can not stress this enough) Google does not want you to pay directly for content.

Youtube Premium exists so that Google has something to point to when it wants to say that paid services aren't viable. That's why they charge way more than creators get out of ads, that's why they force it to be bundled with other services, that's why they introduce restrictions like simultaneous viewing limits and login requirements and app restrictions that make the service tangibly worse than the experience of anonymously blocking ads.

Youtube does not want you to pay for content. It wants to monetize your data and serve you ads. It wants your consumption to be a passive habit, it does not want you to be actively engaged with funding the creators you care about.

Youtube doesn't offer a paid alternative to ads. It offers ad-free viewing as a side-perk when you buy other significantly more expensive Google services.

YouTube Premium is the ad-free offering that they keep adding stuff to. I've been on it since it was Red, and I've enjoyed it the entire time. The price has gone up from the original $9.99, but not dramatically so. YouTube Red originally launched with music, so that's not new, and Premium has other nice features beyond ads, like video downloads and what not. So, I'm not sure what "bundled services" were added to YouTube premium that you are talking about.

Oh wait, I can watch some movies for free, on YouTube.

Oh wait, I can share my membership with my family for less than the original cost of YouTube Red... the horror.

Those all seem related to watching YouTube videos, and not other services, so not entirely sure what you mean.

I don't know, honestly, it feels like you don't want to pay for the ad-free experience at the price point they set. And that's fine. They have a price point, and you don't want it cheaper. 100% fine, but that's all there is to it.

I subscribed to Youtube Premium when it came out, back when it was still called Youtube Red. I've written a couple of times in the past about why I eventually gave up on the service. I can dig some of those comments up if you want me to but the short version is: not only am I willing to pay for content, I have subscribed and paid for content through the exact option you describe and it wasn't the cost that drove me away.

I will also point out, Youtube Premium is not primarily an ad-free Youtube service (and neither was Youtube Red, it also came bundled with Google Play Music). It is a paid video service and music service that happens to also contain ad-free viewing. Youtube Premium Lite did exist as an ad-free Youtube service. Google axed it.

They axed it because Google doesn't want that -- it does not want to have a service that is priced around specifically the cost of removing ads from Youtube. Of course they axed Youtube Premium Lite, because Google wants to have a cable package, and then to be able to point to that cable package and say "see how expensive ad-free viewing is?"

It would be a long conversation to talk about why that bundling is problematic, both from a competitive standpoint (see Amazon Prime) and from a "support creators" standpoint (the amount of money going back to creators is much lower than they'll get from direct support). But I'm going to keep going back to -- there is no option to pay specifically to remove ads from Youtube; Google killed that service and it's now only available as part of a bundling system with other services.

I'd like to pay less money and not get music. Just no ads. YouTube Red launched with Google Play Music, which I enjoyed. But that's gone now, and I'm paying for YouTube Music which I do not use.

There are a lot of claims in there with pretty much nothing to back them up. From my perspective, Youtube Premium is the shining example of a "streaming service" done right. One tier, all the features. They aren't upcharging you to a second paid tier to remove ads, 4k streaming, unlock more videos, etc.. like a lot of the other streaming services do.

If I had to cancel all of my streaming services except one, Youtube Premium would be the one I keep. And that's say a lot given that it's the only one that makes all of its content "free" (with caveats of ads, tracking, etc..) for unpaid users.

> One tier, all the features.

That is literally my complaint with it, that's exactly what I said. You can not pay Youtube specifically to remove ads.

What do you want me to back up here, you're agreeing with me about what the product is: it's a music/video streaming service that contains ad-free viewing on the side. Do you want evidence that ad-free viewing through Youtube premium is worse than with adblockers? That's pretty straightforward to provide; just look at the experience of Youtube's official apps vs NewPipe, interruptions between computers, lack of anonymous viewing -- it straightforwardly factually supports fewer viewing options than adblockers do.

I'm not saying you shouldn't be happy with the service if you like it, I'm saying that if a company is bundling a Spotify alternative with their ad-free option and requiring you to pay for both, then they're not offering an ad-free option on its own.

And that's especially the case if the company did offer an ad-free option in the past and then stopped offering it. I think it's extremely reasonable to theorize about why a company might make that decision.

> is bundling a Spotify alternative with their ad-free option and requiring you to pay for both

It's literally just youtube without the video component. You can find everything song ever on youtube as a video. This is just saving you bandwidth and battery. It would be more expensive for them to offer ad-free youtube without the music-only component, because people would still use it to listen to music, but now with video attached to every song.

> lack of anonymous viewing

How is anonymous viewing possible with paid accounts? They need to know if you're a subscriber or not. Even services that aim for anonymity like Mullvad require you to login with your user id to use it. Should there be a "trust me, I'm a paid subscriber" button? You can just delete watched videos from your history.

> This is just saving you bandwidth and battery. It would be more expensive for them to offer ad-free youtube without the music-only component, because people would still use it to listen to music, but now with video attached to every song.

I think you're oversimplifying Youtube Music (and ignoring that Youtube Premium does include exclusive content), but assuming it is just Youtube without a video stream -- does it strike you as odd at all that the inclusion of a cost-saving feature would cause an increase in the price of the service for customers? Does that make you doubt at all whether or not this product is priced around the actual cost of ad-free content?

> How is anonymous viewing possible with paid accounts?

There are ways to do this using things like blinded tokens, but to fair they're complicated and Google is unlikely to pursue them. It does get at the inherent tradeoff here -- the way Google has structured Youtube Premium it is impossible to use it in a privacy preserving way.

And I think even ignoring the other problems with Youtube Premium and even ignoring the bundling issues, there is a little bit of a disingenuous nature to these arguments of "don't like ads, just pay" when everyone understands that by the very nature of the product, paying does not remove many of the negative aspects of Google advertising that people are trying to avoid.

In a way, I'm being overly charitable here; Google bundles ad-free viewing as part of an extended package, but the other problem that I didn't complain about is that buying that package literally doesn't get rid of entire problem and in fact requires you to use Youtube in a way that makes the problem worse, because at least when you're signed out your data isn't getting quite so explicitly linked to you as an individual.

Shining Example???? Holy shit...

I have paid for premium for years and my youtube experience is still utter garbage.

I still see ads because they are baked in every video now as well, not to mention I can't always use my account (other people's devices), not to mention my expensive Premium home screen is now blank because I don't subscribe to channels and I turned off history (neither of which are needed to be able to populate a feed of non-random stuff, since they were already doing it fine for years), and when it wasn't blank, it was utter shit the last few years showing me the same 11 videos I already saw every day), but somehow, only the last few years, somehow, before that, it was able to do at least reasonable feed of new stuff with no subscriptions and no history. And Then we have their capricious censoring and dmca strikes which impoverishes my landscape by deleting half of the actually interesting content and stunts all the rest into avoiding any possible topic that might get their livlihoods killed, because practically anything could possibly be painted as either dangerous or someone else's copyright. But the trashiest of the trash stuff, but which sells ads, that shit flows never ending. Half of my favorite creators have Kafkaesque stories like Fran Blanches. That's what I get for my Premium dollars, infuriating stories about how the people I just paid fucked someone nice and terrorized everyone else they haven't fucked yet.

The value of Youtube premium is exactly this: It's pulling out 8 of your fingernails instead of 10.

I recently ended my YouTube premium sub because they started...... showing ads.

I think this is the long play that most people aren't seeing, or are willfully ignoring.

Just like Netflix did, eventually youtube will jack up the price of the ad free option and introduce ads to the basic subscription.

Enshittification ad infinitum.

here is the thing, I have yet to see any proof that by paying to removing ads from YouTube that they are removing the main problem and that is the constant tracking.

If the root of the problem exists its not fixing the problem and its just fixing it for non technical people, since most don't understand the real problem or how it works.

Youtube Premium is a joke, it's priced at probably 50 times the revenue that Google gets for the average user.

I'm even wondering if they feel like it's a real option internally and not just a small gimmick to capture the most paying customers.

It doesn't solve the tracking problem, which is something adblock does.

uBlock Origin unironically provides a better value and experience than YouTube Premium does.

Would anyone be condemning people who paid for youtube premium and also blocked tracking with ublock?

That is a good question. I would hope not, but I suppose an argument could and would be made that you are still violating the TOS by blocking trackers, and by blocking them, you are depriving YouTube (and its creators) from another means of compensation by stifling the effectiveness of adverts.

I actually did this for a while (not condemn people :) -- I paid for Youtube and then never signed in and continued to use 3rd-party apps and uBlock Origin).

One big issue is that your payment then is basically just to Youtube -- and it's kind of impossible to avoid because the point is to stop Youtube from obsessively tracking everything you view and do, but in the process you stop Youtube from knowing which videos you're watching, so the creators are no longer getting their piece of that pie.

It's a tricky problem, I'm not sure how to solve it using Youtube Premium's model (that's not true I can think of ways to solve this using some kind of anonymous token system, but Youtube's never going to do that).

It's part of why I advocate now for supporting creators directly (and by extension not caring about Google's profits, although that's secondary). But you could still buy Youtube Premium on the side if you specifically want to support Youtube; it's just if you're using 3rd-party clients I don't think that gets rid of the obligation to help the creators themselves.

They killed their most reasonably-priced ad-free option (without bundled music service):

https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/25/23889917/youtube-premium-...

Everyone in here wants to have their cake and eat it to. The proper channels are political, but half the folks here want to have laissez faire government and also the free to violate contracts they don’t like.

I get it, but it’s not actually a sensible way to run a society.

It’s not something I’m going to fall on my sword over, because I’m actually very sympathetic to privacy concerns, it just rings a bit hollow when we’re talk about the convenience of YouTube verses more open alternatives with less content.

"I am ok with seeing ads, until they don't track my behavior, they don't try to manipulate my decisions based on age,region,sex,location, earning status."

I think you have not tried to view pages without an adblocker. Nearly impossible to navigate, they blur news and ads, nasty pop-ups etc. I have no idea how someone without an adblocker is able to use the internet. And in Europe you also need the "I don't care about cockies" plug in.

True (i am not ok with those ads(I am taking about youtube ads above), I forgot about the irritating ads/pop-ups/redirects . I have firefox+ublock on all my devices/even on incognito.I recommend the same for all, no allow acceptable ads nonsense etc.

When I see someone raw dogging the internet, it physically hurts me. It's gotten so bad.

Personally I think he dilemma is justified, just because I use an ad blocker doesn't mean I necessarily agree with it on principal.

However like you said, the problem is not the ads themselves it is the tracking that comes along for the ride.

There isn't any inherent reason that ads have to be so privacy invasive (I guess it is hard to not have ads at least log your requests when they go to a different server but that alone is normal I guess).

It is unfortunate that is seems the ship has sailed on actually privacy focused ads and instead of being tailored to the user they are just tailored to the content on the page/video/whatever. I would allow those ads if they existed.

It sucks since I do think ads are important, website operators need some way to make money and it is clear that most people are not going to pay for the things they have grown accustom to getting for free. But the current solution is so privacy invasive that you have to block it.

We have no moral obligation to be advertised to just as we have no moral obligation to be advertised to in order to consume content we didn't pay for.

> It sucks since I do think ads are important, website operators need some way to make money

They can sell physical goods and services, no one is preventing them from making money.

> They can sell physical goods and services, no one is preventing them from making money.

Youtube does indeed offer a way to pay to not see ads. That you're still talking about blocking ads would imply that you're only theoretically in favor of Youtube selling services.

If you are going to quote me, maybe quote the entire line?

> and it is clear that most people are not going to pay for the things they have grown accustom to getting for free.

The unfortunate reality is that many people have been conditioned to get content for free. We can complain about it all we want but the vast majority of people are not going to suddenly going to start paying for something that was once free.

You're right nothing is stopping them from selling physical goods and services, but wether or not that actually turns into making money is another story.

I feel like if you are getting free content an ad is a fair tradeoff. IF that ad is not invading your privacy.

> the vast majority of people are not going to suddenly going to start paying for something that was once free.

Then they didn't really want it did they?

People used to run websites for non-monetary reasons, the ad model completely changes the landscape.

I don't know if that is really a strong argument, I feel like there are likely a lot of people that just simply couldn't afford to subscribe to all of the content that they get online.

It isn't reasonable to expect that you would pay every website when you go to it.

However if we are really going to make the argument that they didn't want it... well why are they going there? If they didn't want it, they would have never gone to it, they would have never seen the ads, and this entire conversation is moot.

I also don't really buy that websites were run for non-monetary reasons except in the very very early days of the internet. Running a website isn't free, sure you can easily enough stick some static content in S3 and it's dirt cheap to run. But it's still money that you are spending putting something out there. That is before even looking at the time you spent working on it.

you're not hearing me.

people used to build websites for reasons other than money, people would just be consuming different content.

> why are they going there?

because it's free.

> Running a website isn't free

Making money is not the only reason to spend money on something. That's the point.

so what you are saying is the only people that deserve to put content on the internet are those privileged enough to be able to afford to put it out for free while they pay to run the servers?

Or privileged enough to have the technical knowledge to be able to run it very cheaply?

Or have the privilege to spend the time making content with out any concern of finances? People that can chose to spend time making free content instead of needing to work another job or some other source of money.

I'm sorry but it is a fantastic ideal that people would just do things without any concern about making money but that isn't the world we live in. If I were to make content I would at least like to break even so I am not spending money for nothing.

Privilege is the word of the times, 10 years ago you would have couched it in different language and in 10 years it would be yet another set of wording.

Apparently it's a fantastic ideal that people will do things for motivations other than money. I'm going to suggest that if you believe that you either hang out with the wrong people, or people just don't like you.

> However like you said, the problem is not the ads themselves it is the tracking that comes along for the ride.

Not only tracking, ads can carry malware and viruses from malicious sites. They also can bog down the browser like Fandom wiki for example. Ads company are part of the problem since they don't screen them for malicious stuff.

I don't mind ads in general. I don't like it when they are in my face, lagging my mobile browser (Fandom wiki), demanding for notifications (redirector sites), autoplaying twitch stream (Fandom wiki), plastered the front page of search result (Google), and misleading games ads (mobile games).

I do have a few site that are whitelisted in uBlock because those site uses ads that are reasonable. Unfortunately, the rest of them are blocked because they can't keep it in moderation. I understand they need to make money to provides free contents, but that didn't mean they can use the ads like it is a wild wild West.

> Not only tracking, ads can carry malware and viruses from malicious sites. They also can bog down the browser like Fandom wiki for example. Ads company are part of the problem since they don't screen them for malicious stuff.

Very much this as well, I know that when I first started using ad blockers it was because of just how obnoxious the ads on IGN were.

Most mobile game ads, and similar ones are just insane.

I guess I should have been more clear that I am more thinking the old google Adsense like ads from 10 (more?) years ago that were just simple text or maybe an image. No popups, new tabs, annoying videos (YouTube I would give an exception since you are already watching a video), etc.

I am fine with unobtrusive ads to the side, ad banners, etc. But not with peacefully watching a quiet video about the greatest one-shots in Golf history and being interrupted by a blaring loud ad for a crap mobile game. It really is the loudness that bothers me the most. Newspapers didn't used to shout at you. If ads go back to being as unobtrusive as newspaper ads and didn't siphon your personal data, I would unblock them. Ironically, I think 4chan is the only site I visit where I have all ads allowed, because it is still only showing simple quiet banner ads.

I think there was a company doing that (Carbon?) I first saw them on Laravel’s site. And I did read their ads. Like I read the ads in the few magazines I read, because the products are themed with my current activity. I don’t think someone would complain seeing cars ads on a blog centered around cars if it is done in a calm way

> and then there are people who say, you can turn off ad personalization, I did since last 5 years and you know what I see. Some Scam apps/NSFW ads content.

I don't want my personal data to be in the wrong hands and that's why I disable ad-personalisation. But I don't agree that seeing ads for scam apps, NFTs, gambling or get rich quick schemes is better than personalised ads. The reason you are seeing those ads when personalisation is turned off is that they are the only kind of scheme which can scattershot their advertising while still remaining profitable. I'd much rather live in a world where the ad system knows exactly what I need or want and shows me appropriate ads. That way advertisers waste less money and there is more money available for the service provider or the content creators to provide value back to me. The only reason we don't live in that world is that Google and other companies have been shown to be untrustworthy when it comes to handling their customers' personal data.

true I agress, I hate facebook/google a lot for developing tools to track users and target ads based on their personal data. yes, it optimized advertisers money but at the cost of our privacy. I know, If it is not fb/google someone else will develop the tools. I wish world governments will establish some doctrine on targeted ads and ads in general.

I am ok with seeing scam ads on shady small website, but for a company of google/FB scale . No. they should be more responsible. they have tools/money to be more responsible and yet they are not. the only reason I think is they are forcing people to turn off ad-personalisation this way.

by responsible I mean, we should have ability to report scam-ads even if we didn't sign-in/opt out of ad-personalisation.

every time , i try to report a scam-ad on youtube, it asks me to turn off ad-personalisation to proceed.

>I'd much rather live in a world where the ad system knows exactly what I need or want and shows me appropriate ads.

Er...just fucking no thanks.

Can I ask why? Is it because you find ads for things you don't want easier to ignore? Or is it because you'd prefer to see no advertising at all?

I prefer not to have my children psychologically manipulated into unhealthy behaviors for the financial benefit of others.

assumed in your logic is the idea that we should care about being fair to people who pay for advertisements.

I don't mean to make that assumption. I'm only interested to know why people would prefer to see ads for things they are not interested in vs things they are interested in.

people don't want to be spied on, if they have to suffer ads they'd rather suffer generic ads than be spied on.

If I'm truly interested in an ad I probably already knew about the product category and would look up the information I need without an ad. If I didn't know about a "need" the ad has effectively induced a demand in me, which means that it probably did one of (a) emotionally manipulating me (by inducing subconscious fear, or FOMO).

If anyone in my personal life did that in order to achieve a self-serving goal I'd call them emotionally abusive. But suddenly I need to accept it because someone paid for it? What?!

Fantastic summary of why advertising is inherently immoral. And if they just stuck to the facts that would be that but they just can't help themselves on the manipulation front and it's so incredibly obvious that they are doing that. Guilt tripping people and making them feel bad about themselves is apparently perfectly ok if you are in advertising.

I like these points. Would you expand that to talk about targeted vs untargeted advertising? For example, does a targeted ad feel more manipulative or less? Is a targeted easier to ignore or less?

Personally, I find untargeted ads more obnoxious but perhaps that's because of the point mentioned earlier that they tend to be for more obnoxious services such as gambling.

> The reason you are seeing those ads when personalisation is turned off is that they are the only kind of scheme which can scattershot their advertising while still remaining profitable.

Do you know this for a fact, and if so, how?

I could state my claim more precisely and say that the services you are more likely to see advertised to large audiences are those with broad appeal or with high profit margins. In my experience those services tend to be things like banks or morally questionable things like gambling.

Or ads, like many online ads were originally, could be based on the content surrounding them rather than the person looking at them. Ads need not be scatter-shot without personalization.

> I hate to see youtube die, It is a wonderful archive for society

The actions of the past few weeks have proven it's a terrible archive for society. If there is anything you enjoy on there I'd suggest you archive it from there while you can because they'll be putting the same effort into blocking yt-dlp before the end of the year once people start taking advantage of that to bypass the ablock-block.

I agree that some of the content on YT is of great cultural and useful value.

The usual answer when the profit motive enshitifies something that is considered culturally valuable is to serve the public through a non profit organization instead of a publicly traded company.

I realize I am saying this on a forum created for technical folks who hope to win the startup lottery so I don’t expect much…

I don’t like advertising because it doesn’t even pretend to be informative firstly and secondly it’s not entertaining. Just inform me of what the product or service does and then if that is impossible just do a joke. I haven’t seen a YouTube in ads in years that doesn’t show some aspect of our society I don’t care about such as medications, crypto, how stupid a consumer who doesn’t buy their product is, etc.

That’s what I am avoiding with ad blocking. My life is better without all these things. I’m actually living a better life without ads.

I agree. There's a certain amount of personalization I'm willing to accept - like if I'm in the market for a 3d printer and I start getting targeted ads. Where it goes off the rails for me is if I search for information on a certain cancer, and then I start getting targeted ads for medicine and services. At that point the veneer of innocent advertising is blown away and I don't have to accept it.

Yes! I want to ask the people who believe this, if they would also assume it's piracy if I turn off my television when the commercials come on.

Ok cool but this is the real world and companies need money to stay in business. This open source free internet principle works great, until nobody wants to do the work for free, which is accelerating due to global recession.

Mark my words, by the end of this economic downturn you’ll just be happy that you’re not getting charged for a web browser… if you’re lucky.

oftopic but. yes, I agree. Software development costs a lot.

but I think you missed something important. The thing is, we are collectively paying for internet-infra through broadband charges/taxes.(we collectively own it). we don't have to subsidize greedy companies making bad decisions with our time/money/privacy.

the business models/decision of the companies is at fault, they made it monetarily free, and when they find they can't make money, rather than fixing the problem with their model, they try to own/charge internet which is not theirs. (drm etc)

I argue otherwise regd economic downturn, if it is not for selfless opensource developers the internet/business we see , will not exist. even many of these so called businesses use their work and make unimaginable pool of profits of their work, with zero concern for society.

In a more reasonable world, web browsers would've been more-or-less done once we had xhtml/xslt and flexbox, and they wouldn't cost $500M/year to maintain. The insanity we have today is largely thanks to the influence of... the ad companies.

Well no, web technologies have evolved for the better, and browsers enabled that. Security patches have to be shipped. That takes resources to build.

I would be perfectly happy paying for a browser (60% or more of my computing) if it was aligned to my incentive (better extension than safari’s and no third party like pocket)

Google makes money, but shareholders believe in a fantasy of infinitely increasing revenue.

To be precise, this is not "blocking" ads, this is simply not making HTTP requests for ads. It is the web user's choice whether or not to send an HTTP request.

Servers "block" HTTP requests, not clients.

The biggest issue with generic or burnt in ads is that they're not targeted ads. The value of an ad which isn't targeted is more than an order of magnitude less than one which is targeted.

Traditional free-to-air broadcasting (mostly) works financially because they pay once for the transmission, it's a largely fixed fee to cover an area, and then they get paid for the audience they potentially reach. Even still the broadcasters have to pay to have market research agencies run surveys to figure out what's being watched and by whom. When pay TV providers became able to get telemetry from set-top boxes the value of the addressable market rocketed because the audience was no longer hypothetical, it could be measured, analysed and segmented.

The reason you get crap ads when personalisation is turned off is because the advertisers who have money want their advertising dollars spent on addressable market, not on random NPCs. A non-addressable ad is cheaper, so that's the market for who's buying the ads. I hate ads, so I have YouTube Premium Family, that works great because I can see content without interruption and I support the independent content creators. I also run PiHole because some sites and services are just so loaded with advertising that it's annoying, so I might well be hypocritical here.

But the biggest issue that people don't understand, or think they understand but totally under estimate, is the technical challenge of delivering every video on YouTube everywhere in the world with fair quality. I build streaming infrastructure at scale (not for Google) and I'll tell you that it's really expensive to do what they do and yet people take it for granted. They feel entitled to watch YouTube because Google represents the evil establishment, without recognising the challenges they face.

I don't agree with the idea that it's good to write apps that mooch off YouTube just because they're a big corporation. Yup, it's not piracy, it's probably on the lighter side of the grey area of unauthorised API abuse. If you want to build a competing service to Google that comes without personalised ads and has great content, I wish you all the best but when you get the CDN bill, you'll understand. There's a cost per viewed minute that's probably unsustainable. Heck, even traditional broadcasters who have launched their own streaming services have struggled to make money, and that's with targeted advertising enabled.

> I am ok with seeing ads, until they don't track my behavior

Once again, people blaming sites for things browsers should handle. It's not YouTube that does the tracking; it's your browser allowing it to happen. YouTube is not fetching data from you. YouTube is using the data you send it. This comes from the browser, allowing it to happen. The misplaced blame is why we are in this state.

Maligned usage is what they’re doing. Cookies is good for storing state as HTTP is stateless. Bu if you storing some marker so you can track me around the web, it’s in bad faith. Just like a program can use 4 GB of RAM if that’s needed but something that is just greedily taking memory is what we call a malware.

This can be solved in the browsers while still keeping cookies. And it's not the sites forcing this, it's the browsers allowing this.

> I am ok with seeing ads, until they don't track my behavior, they don't try to manipulate my decisions based on age,region,sex,location, earning status.

How do they try to manipulate you? Appeal to you, sure. Not wanting them to have your data, absolutely. But manipulate?

Much advertising is psychological manipulation.

The creation of a vacuum that didn't previously exist but now needs to be filled.

Or the pointing out of a vacuum that previously went unnoticed, but is now noticed and therefore must be filled.

How don't they manipulate you?

They are designed to get you to buy things you don't need, and they do that through manipulating human traits. They make you feel you will be lesser/incomplete/not as good as unless you have such and such product. This is not "appealing" to people - it's stone cold corporate manipulation with only one goal in mind.

People have way less control over how they react to what they take in then they think they do.

2 instances I would like to share from my personal experience.

when I am in freshman year, I wanted to host a website and started looking online for best service, I was bombarded with google cloud ads across all websites. I thought google cloud is the best service.(I was never shown results of AWS/IBM watson, when they are far better than Google Cloud at that time). you always use web for exploring options and these ads can manipulate to pivot to one service, when it is not always the best.

after that I tried an experiment with my friends from my collage dorm. we have a proxy for our university. so only tracking I assume is done through respective google accounts.one of them has an Iphone (buys a lot on amazon), others use android. we searched for "best watches to buy", the recommendations/ads(top results) for iphone user is ~1k$(premium brands) and we were shown results of watches around 100$ etc.

I would say above results are manipulative because they will pivot our further searches, the search is not showing best watches/blogs about it. but showing results that the AI think will have higher rate of ads - buy conversion.

The above results definitely will have an impact on further searches, The iphone user will pivot his search to the top results he see which might not always be best.

Abso-fucking-lutely they do.

I recall at the time of the EU referendum in the UK, I was being bombarded with video "adverts" about how Turkey was about to enter the EU, and if they did, it would be a corridor for terrorists, we'd had some incidents around that time, and so it was targeted to play on people's fears.

If only for a second, it gave me pause for thought.

I'm not here to comment on any of that, but that was the time when I realised, we _are_ being manipulated by targeted "advertising"; in what I consider the most underhanded and disgusting ways.

I'm much wiser to it now, I was always cautious before, but now I've seen the manipulation of others, and their fears; I'm constantly shooting down bullshit that family, friends and acquaintances are being targeted with on social media etc.

Fuck advertising, and targeted advertising even more so. I'll block it, and if I can't I won't use the platform, it's that simple.

The entire point of all advertising is to get you to think or feel a certain way about something or someone. If that can't be described as 'manipulation', then I don't know what can?

As other's have said, they hire highly skilled psychologists to increase patterns associated with consumption. It's an unfair fight, like throwing a civilian in the ring with Tyson. I guess you've got a chance, but why is that fight even allowed in the first place?

Edward Bernays manipulated the populace into smoking by branding cigarettes as 'Torches of Freedom' for Feminists who were eager to push back against the social taboo.

He did a whole lot of other manipulative tricks, his wiki page is intense.

Ads are known to exploit and enflame insecurities and doubt to garner sales.

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotional_branding

>*Emotional brands have a significant impact when the consumer experiences a strong and lasting attachment to the brand comparable to a feeling of bonding, companionship or love*. Examples of emotional branding include the nostalgic attachment to the Kodak brand of film, bonding with the Jim Beam bourbon brand, and love for the McDonald’s brand.

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays

>Edward Louis Bernays (/bɜːrˈneɪz/ bur-NAYZ, German: [bɛʁˈnaɪs]; November 22, 1891 − March 9, 1995) was an American theorist, considered a pioneer in the field of public relations and propaganda, and referred to in his obituary as "the father of public relations".[3] His best-known campaigns include a 1929 effort to promote female smoking by branding cigarettes as feminist "Torches of Freedom", and *his work for the United Fruit Company in the 1950s, connected with the CIA-orchestrated overthrow of the democratically elected Guatemalan government in 1954*.

If you don't consider deliberate induction of emotions that imitate love, fear or hatred in order to sell product manipulative I don't know what to tell you.

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