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Comment by philipwhiuk | Hacker News Reader

If they didn't have such entitlement they wouldn't be blocking the ads in the first place.

The technology that constitutes the internet is fundamentally incompatible with this opinion, despite that businesses would absolutely love if they could convince people otherwise. Trying to prevent me from modifying whatever you send me for my purely private use is mostly infeasible and potentially immoral, regardless of how that simple reality affects your business model.

It is not the user's responsibility to alter their behavior to support a business's strategy. If a video hosting platform is mathematically unsustainable with the number of people who choose to view ads, along with any other sources of income, then that's just the way it is: Unsustainable (However, the answer to the question is: It's sustainable. Leadership just might not like what that means in practice).

It isn't incompatible actually. Remote attestation exists and platforms that allow rampant ad blocking will go the same way as PC gaming did due to rampant piracy and cheating: become a second tier platform that gets some stuff late and other stuff never :(

"I sent you data so you have to use all of it exactly the way I want" is the entitled perspective.

As opposed to the so un-entitled "customers have no right to negotiate use of their data".

ACCEPT THE EULA PLEB

Nonsense. I provide a service in exchange for payment, then not paying is entitlement.

If your form of payment is running malware, don't be surprised that security software (recommended by the FBI mind you[0]) blocks it. Same as if your form of payment were running a crypto miner or exploiting local IoT devices to set up a botnet.

Don't be surprised also that if your business is distributing malware that people won't be very sympathetic toward you when they take the bait you offer without running the payload.

[0] https://www.ic3.gov/Media/Y2022/PSA221221

Aren't ads in YouTube locked down to displaying a video and some plain text you fill into a template. Doesn't sound like a great attack vector. I understand this for shady file sharing sites, but in the case of yt I'm not so sure.

Adware and spyware are malware. Youtube delivers both. uBlock blocks them.

You're implying that my not watching your short video that you sent to me is equivalent to my not paying for a service you just rendered. The fact that this extremist opinion is anything but ultra-fringe is evidence of the deeply greedy, entitled, irrational, antagonistic, dangerous, bully-ish relationship some businesses have with citizens.

The internet is not a platform for exchanging services for the promise that the user viewed a short video. It is a general purpose platform, on which you happen to be able to almost implement said exchange. The fact that it's "almost" is not the user's fault - you are simply trying to do something at odds with the platform you are using. You are free to use a different platform, or adjust your strategy on the current platform in an honest manner. But trying to alter the premise of the internet in order to remove that "almost" is immoral. If you don't feel that way, that's a pretty fundamental disagreement that is likely unreconcilable.

Most Internet traffic happens with the agreement that you watch ads alongside the content you actually want to see. This is not a fringe position, it's the absolute majority of all traffic.

If you don't want to see the ads, you can just not use my service, what's so hard to understand there.

That's actually a mentality that was "bolted on" by the advertising industry after the fact, once they realized how utterly wrong they were about their assertion that "The Internet is just a passing fad. Nobody will ever want to advertise on the Internet." (That's an almost exact quote from a lot of advertising folks I talked to back in the early days of the Internet, when websites were just starting to get popular.) Prior to their involvement in the Internet, it was purely just a network of networks, not a giant global advertising platform. They "jumped on the bandwagon" and corrupted it to their needs, and everyone else's wants and needs be damned, and then they convinced everyone "It's always been that way".

There is no such agreement, only a one-sided demand. Don't be so surprised if more and more of those on the other side respond with "LOL. LMAO, even."

The problem is that for YouTube to get that payment, I have to give them, and other ad networks a major view in to my whole life.

Ad networks are currently scum of the earth, easily giving lawyers a good name.

If ad networks were riddled with crime, invasion of privacy, and other bullshit, people would be much more willing to entertain them.

Today though, they’re obnoxious AND invade your privacy AND may actually just a virus AND are of questionable legality or outright illegal.

It’s not just about funding the platform. You’re not “getting a service in exchange for payment”. Or at least, that is massively understating the behaviour of the scum of the earth ad networks.

> The problem is that for YouTube to get that payment, I have to give them, and other ad networks a major view in to my whole life.

Wait... does that mean, Google could offer "DoubleClick Premuim", where I pay to not see any DoubleClick ads whatsoever, anywhere on the web, but the websites I visited would still get their funding? I think I'd pay $10/mo for that.

Don't fall for that scam. If you pay for such a service, it only increases the value of your attention even further. You're clearly demonstrating you have enough disposable income to pay their extortion fees. It only makes them want sell to you even more. You're paying to segment the market for them.

There is no context where a rational businessman would choose not to advertise to you. Someone will at some point realize they're leaving money on the table and the policy will be reverted.

They have no limits. They'd put ads under our eyelids if they could. In our dreams. The only way to deal with such people is to block their ads unconditionally and with extreme prejudice.

> There is no context where a rational businessman would choose not to advertise to you.

...except, the businessman wanting to show me an advert doesn't have a choice. The website chose DoubleClick; I'm paying DoubleClick not to show me any ads. Websites that don't choose DoubleClick either get adblocked, or I avoid, thus making less money from me.

There is some expected value that DoubleClick will get from me in the course of a month; that's not infinite, and if it's a reasonable fee (like, $12/mo) then they'll get a lot more from me than if I use an ad-blocker.

Then they realize you're paying about $150 a year to avoid ads. That fact alone increases the value of your attention. Thus you gotta pay them even more money to avoid ads. Which increases the value of your attention further. At some point the value exceeds what you're willing to pay and it's back to ads. Then they start selling your personal information to the highest bidder which includes the fact you have enough disposable income and a willingness to pay not to be bothered. The only possible outcome is rent seekers pouring out of the woodwork to try and grab a little of your sweet disposable income.

The only way to deal with these people is to reduce their profits to zero, not come up with ways to increase them. We simply decide that ads are unacceptable and that's the end of it. They either adapt or die.

> That fact alone increases the value of your attention.

OK, but does it increase my value to more than $150/year? I mean, just how much are people willing to pay for me to see ads?

I mean ultimately, if someone is paying $5 to show me an ad, either they're going to go bankrupt, or it's going to be pretty darn good. If paying $12 once means I'm on the "costs $5 to show this person ads" list, then that's probably still worth it. :-)

Who knows? Maybe if the value of your attention increases too much they'll socialize it among themselves or something. Instead of 1 company paying for an ad slot, 10 of them will band together and pay 1/10th of the cost to share the same slot instead. I'm sure they'll find a way.

Pay-per-view creates a perverse incentive to make SEO noise and make it more difficult to find what you want. You would be mostly paying to make your life worse. Better to just block ads, encourage and help others to block ads, and hope those sites die.

I certainly understand the perverse incentive, but that's already the incentive we're working under. And how do you propose we fairly compensate people for the value they've created when making content? How can we support artists, journalists, and so on to do the work that we enjoy?

If everyone did as you suggest, spammy SEO sites will be the last to die, because the effort invested to make them is so much lower than the effort of quality content.

If they're worthwhile and looking to be paid, you pay them. If they're not worth paying, they go out of business, and SNR improves.

From what I've seen on youtube, almost all professional "content creators" make very shallow entertainment (or thinly veiled ads), which at least personally usually just makes me feel disappointed in myself for having wasted my time if I indulge.

> And how do you propose we fairly compensate people for the value they've created when making content?

> How can we support artists, journalists, and so on to do the work that we enjoy?

We either pay them before the work is completed or in an ongoing manner to support their activities. Patronage. Crowdfunding. Plenty of people seem to be achieving success via platforms like Patreon and GitHub Sponsors. This is ethical.

Google Contributor did offer something like that for a while.

Google has repeatedly experimented with that. It always fails because the amount advertisers subsidize your internet experience is more like on the order of hundreds or thousands of dollars per month, not ten.

Yep I agree, the ad supported Internet was a mistake and we should never have stopped paying for the services we use. I just hope that these changes will increase people's willingness to pay, then other platforms who aren't owned by the largest ad broker might have a chance.

Attention and personal information are not a valid payment methods. Either charge money up front or accept the risk we're going to delete your ads and block your tracking.

Why aren't they valid payment methods?

Because our minds are sacred. They're not empty spaces they get to insert brands and products into at will. I consider that a form of violence. Their surveillance capitalism should be literally illegal. They should be scrambling to forget all about us the second we're done transacting with them, not amassing vast amounts of information into data lakes.

As a user, I have a right to control what is executed and rendered on my devices. It's not the user's fault that internet advertisements have become a security threat, a significant visual nuisance, and now an environmental issue [1].

Additionally, for those with neurological issues, I imagine using a browser without content blocking must be unnecessarily difficult. It would be a tragedy if these users lost control over the content rendered in their browser.

Additionally, for those with family members who struggle with discerning scams and other forms of manipulative advertising, content blocking is a legitimate tool for mitigating this risk.

[1]: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/340321563_Energy_Co...

I allowed ads for a long time, believing a site should be able to earn revenue for the content they provide.

I started blocking ads when ad networks failed to properly vet their ads and allowed malicious ads to be distributed.

Do you allow ads on sites with more responsible ads?

Honest answer, I have no interest in doing that research. I wouldn't know how to make that determination with any degree of confidence. Even if I could, I feel like it would require that I constantly monitor how a site delivers its ads.

Fortunately, I am at a point in my life that if I really like something, and they offer an ad-free subscription, I can support them that way.

Yep. All two of them. ;~)

> when ad networks failed to properly vet their ads and allowed malicious ads to be distributed

All ads are inherently malicious.

Like those entitled tv viewers who switch the channel.

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