Not a pointed question, I just find it genuinely interesting where people draw the line.
Ultimately in all scenarios you are consuming resources from a third party, and avoiding paying for them.
This isn’t the right analogy. It’s more like someone opens up a shop where you can walk to the counter and ask for some food, and they stick a sample of some product in the bag when they give you the food. It’s not immoral to throw away the sample if you don’t want it, just like it’s not immoral to not play back the ad you get served along side a video you request if you don’t want to watch it.
Google has every right to restrict who gets to access their services (although antitrust concerns do come up) and every user has the right to control the software on their devices.
This is different, you aren't copying youtube videos and sending them to a friend using your own resources, you are using their server capacity to watch it yourself.
So you are costing Youtube money just like stealing from a store costs the store money. So the old "copying is not theft" argument doesn't hold here. It does work for torrenting etc, but not when you stream directly from their servers.
With respect to server/network resources, like I said Google is free to restrict access as they see fit.
The post you responded to didn't say that those two were the same, it clearly shows those two as different levels of bad if you read the next line:
> "Not a pointed question, I just find it genuinely interesting where people draw the line."
So your point here is just you not understanding and reacting with a meme since his post sounded a bit similar to an argument you have seen before.
Not viewing ads is a lot more like not looking at billboards on the highway or not reading the inserts you get in your free local newspaper.
Pirating movies is a method of showing disdain for extractive and manipulative IP law that lines the pockets of nasty old rich fuds while not paying the actual artists that made a work. I would not pirate an indie film for instance.
Stealing from large supermarkets is basically just preventing them from throwing the unsold food away at the end of the profit cycle. Again the only person youre stealing from is the ruling class who profit off of hunger and poverty.
Also, Google it's already mining my data thru cookies/Android and earning money because of it. Thus, it's an even match.
Remember the whole "news" part of HN works because people are allowed to link to "unpaywalled" version of paywalled content. It's what HN is about -- stealing premium content. If these kinds of links are banned HN will lose a lot of traffic.