In theory a user with sufficient compute power could run their filter entirely locally and not rely on OpenAI, Google, Meta, or some other competitor, but that might require a home data center filled with GPUs and an enormous electric bill.
In the real world though we've already seen how that shakes out: uBlock remains possibly the most popular browser extension on the planet, for good reason. Does everyone block ads? Of course not, but ads are also pretty easy to ignore if you're not the kind of technically inclined person who knows how to make them go away.
The up end of a product like a browser extension that removes ads, marketing fluff, surveys, etc. from your experience is much, much bigger than something like even uBlock can manage. Or hell, why even stop at a browser extension? What if you just had an entire browser that runs on an AI that answers to you and only you, or at the very least, only your fellow consumers and not big tech?
Like, AI is hard tech to scale, sure, but it's not impossible and I can easily envision a company making a sizable amount of bank on the idea of sanitizing the internet for their users.
The next step is things like YouTube Premium - you pay to not see ads. But this can get corrupted which leads to things like ... Kagi - where the whole point is you're paying instead of ads.
More like: "We offer a service funded by ads, pay us if you don't want ads"
You are welcome to pay for cable and go tough grass to get your other entertainment need fulfilled instead of watching YouTube with ads or paying for premium.
Generally people who don't want ads on YouTube nor want to pay for YouTube Premium also don't understand just how much money hosting video costs.
Alternately, I'm perfectly welcome to install an adblocker or use any number of other tools that ensure that I never see their ads at all. Personally, I've been paying Google with my data for as long as Google has existed and they've taken far more from me than I was willing to give so I won't cry over the costs that they, with their hundreds of billions, have to spend to keep collecting our data and manipulating our culture via youtube. It's been working out just fine for them so far without them being able to waste my time with ads, and I suspect that won't change any time soon.
And arguably if it has been working just fine for them they wouldn't need to keep spending billions and implementing a paid tier.
Also your adblocker only prevents client side tracking, nothing is stopping Google (or any other services) from collecting "anonymous" usage data and storing it.
After all does it matter at all that user53728646288661442883 in the database was searching for a coffee machine on google and is now watching reviews on YouTube for coffee machines if there is no way to reference that user to who you are personally?
If your complaint is tracking then stop using google services, an adblocker just reduces the amount of tracking, it doesn't eliminate it.
Google offered a way out of watching ads for what is probably a quite reasonable amount of money for anyone browsing Hackernews and your reasonse is "I'm just going to keep using my adblocker and actively complain about it"
I really can't since I never see it. They've been unsuccessful in their efforts to prevent adblocking. I only recently learned through other people's complaining on forums that 45 minute youtube ads exist, so while I'd certainly be complaining if I saw one, they never affect me. I still think it's a dick move to degrade your service with the intention to piss off your users just so that they'll pay you to stop intentionally getting in their way though. Paid services should exist to solve real problems, not ones created by you just to harass people into paying you to stop (you here meaning Google, not you you)
> And arguably if it has been working just fine for them they wouldn't need to keep spending billions and implementing a paid tier.
I've seen nothing to suggest that they need to spend any amount of money implementing a paid tier. Google is one of the largest, wealthiest companies on the planet sitting on hundreds of billions of dollars. They didn't make that obscene amount of money on youtube premium sign ups. Youtube alone pulls in tens of billions in revenue (only a tiny fraction of what Google makes in total) but they keep their profit a secret. I have zero reason to believe that Google couldn't afford to continue to operate and benefit from youtube no matter how profitable it is for them.
> Also your adblocker only prevents client side tracking, nothing is stopping Google (or any other services) from collecting "anonymous" usage data and storing it.
I have no doubt that Google knows exactly who I am even if I never sign in based on the devices I use, the times I use them, the IP address I use, the content I consume, etc and combining that with data they collect from every other Google service. They'll see me search for coffee machines on Google, they'll see me look at reviews for one on youtube, Google analytics will tell them which stores I browse for coffee machines online and Google tracks me via my cell phone while I browse stores looking at coffee machines offline, before finally Google buys my credit card purchase history (https://www.technologyreview.com/2017/05/25/242717/google-no...) to find out where I bought my coffee maker, which model I bought, and how much I paid for it.
They are happily stuffing my dossier with the details of everything I search for, everything I view, what devices I use, when I'm using youtube, how long I spend watching, what my IP address is, how much of each video I view, which parts of each video I rewind to rewatch/pause at/skip past/stop watching at and countless other metrics that they'll use to make countless assumptions about me as an individual (my interests, my intelligence, my attention span, my schedule, my location, my political/religious views, etc).
You can't escape google's tracking. Paying them won't stop them either. The fact that Google has the gall to ask for money on top of all the snooping they do is frankly insulting.
This was the point I was making
> The fact that Google has the gall to ask for money on top of all the snooping they do is frankly insulting.
They will never be incentivesed to stop doing the above if you keep shooting down their attempts to follow a different business model.
Regarding them ( asin YouTube ) "hiding their profit" maybe it is because it is much much lower than you believe it is, possibly even negative and the borg overlords at alphabet puts a ton of pressure on the executives to change that, but that is speculation so you are welcome to ignore it an believe in whatever fantasy you want. I find it more helpful for my mental health to not believe people are evil.
YTP is essentially a protection racket. Pay up, or the ads can get a lot worse.
There is a point it will stop making sense to pay for YouTube but at the current prices it isn't there, if it gets there then there will be a different conversation to be had.
The issue I see with people who are able to pay but wont pay is that Google will decide it isn't worth the overhead and we end up back with ads only and significantly more aggressive adblocker prevention mechanisms.
If you watch any significant amount of content pay for it, if you don't then an ad or two really shouldn't be an issue but then likely neither is your adblocker usage so go for it.
They make billions in revenue off of youtube. Where did you see that they're losing money on it? I suspect that even if youtube was not profitable on its own it'd still be valuable enough for google to continue running it and that they can more than afford to keep the light on.
Here is the experiment I generally recommend that may help you solve this. Build a service even half as competent as YouTube and host it. Serve even one or two users a month, project your costs out to 5-10million consecutive users and exabytes of media stored and see just how astronomical that price is.
And the most popular web browser is working hard on making it useless. Chipping away at what users are allowed to block and conditioning a new generation of users to accept the loss of freedom. Expect it to continue.
> I can easily envision a company making a sizable amount of bank on the idea of sanitizing the internet for their users.
I can easily that company being bought by an ad company and buried. There are times when it's more profitable to not give consumers what they want and very few companies are going to leave money on the table when it's right there for the taking.