Hacker News Reader

Comment by gray_-_wolf | Hacker News Reader

Probably an unpopular opinion, but I just do not want to have a "business" relationship with google. I would not mind paying for youtube, if it was a separate company. But google does not need my money, and any money the get are used to actively making the world worse (WEI, SEO spam, Search getting worse, ...).

On a separate note, there are reports of people getting their whole google account locked for payment issues, expired cards and such. There is no way to reach a human there, and I really do not want to risk loosing my account I use on my phone as well (android :/) just because some bot decides it does not like me.

Would be fine if I could just have a separate youtube account, but no, that would make tracking harder...

Aaaand there still will be ads inside the videos (sponsored segments), and product placement.

View on HN

I wouldn't mind paying for YouTube if its subscription cost was anywhere close to reasonable.

I wouldn't mind paying for youtube if I wasn't already paying for it because they are stealing my data.

Noone is stealing anything from you, you just made this up to feel better about your freeloading.

If you gave a shit, you wouldn't use YouTube.

I'm paying $8.30 / month for the Family option. That's like 2 or 3 coffees. In other countries this is more expensive, but it's adjusted for local buying power.

Both you and the parent simply come up with reasons to avoid paying, getting the service for free.

No matter how you look at it, what you're doing is immoral, because if everyone did it, YouTube would be permanently paywalled and placed under DRM. You're a privileged individual that prefers to be subsidized by those that pay or that watch ads.

> That's like 2 or 3 coffees

Expensive coffee at Starbucks which I would never buy. With $10 I can buy coffee for 3 months. It’s way too expensive for me.

I also consider every form of advertising to be brainwashing. Last but not least, I watch 1 YouTube video per month, so you would have to adapt your scenario for me to be interested in a subscription.

There's nothing immoral about blocking ads. Avoiding paying taxes might be, yet Google does it anyway.

Blocking ads is morally OK only as long as that's the only way to consume that content, and as long as you're not trying to block anti-ad-block warnings.

If there's a reasonably priced subscription available (or another business model), and if the publisher doesn't want your eyeballs while you have an adblocker active, there's no argument you can make for the morality of adblocking. It's your computer, you can be selective about what you execute on it, but the publisher should also be free to reject your visit.

Blocking YouTube's adblock detection legitimizes all the changes that Google is making in Chrome, being why we can't have nice things. And it's similar to extensions designed to workaround paywalls, or software piracy. Sooner or later adblocking will become illegal.

A coffee costs 30 cents.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com