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YouTube warns it might make your viewing experience worse if you don't turn off your ad-blocker
(www.businessinsider.com)
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this post was submitted on 22 Nov 2023
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Well, if YouTube were truly so terrible that you think it offers no real value, you wouldn't use it at all. If you yourself don't use it, that's all well and good, but if you do still use it anyway but block ads, then you're admitting that it offers some amount of actual value while refusing to pay for it. In that case, it's hardly unreasonable for YouTube to decide to not take on the cost of offering the service to those that aren't going to pay for it. You'd probably be more than a little annoyed if your boss told you that you'll be working extra hours for free.
There’s nothing inherently valuable to YouTube other than the fact that it’s the default video hosting website because it got there first. You can find other similar websites that provide video hosting that is equivalent, just without the massive audience YouTube has. Keep in mind your argument only works for G rated content because anything that is slightly controversial, even history based content, gets demonetized and there’s an entire other website called patreon that gained popularity because YouTube wasn’t paying its content creators for their work.
YouTube has lots of options for getting people to pay for their content. If they opt to pursue ad revenue they need to accept that a subset of their audience will use 3rd party apps to get around that. Most people don’t have ad blockers so it’s really only people smart enough to download the plugins. To me this is akin to Reddit pissing in the face of their users for the sake of maximizing profits. I get why they’re doing it, but for every trick they employ to get around ad blockers someone will come up with a workaround and I’ll just download that plugin each time.
@BraveSirZaphod this is pretty much what I was going to respond to you with
I understand people need to be paid, I’m just not willing to pay in my time. The paid service is also questionable as well.
I rediscovered this guy very recently, he talks a lot about the same points I’ve been making and I think he does it in a pretty fair way, I’m curious what your thoughts are (anyone feel free to jump in of course)
https://youtu.be/4Q3ZXQZZlcE?si=bZLNupgMEnn_uWDS
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/4Q3ZXQZZlcE?si=bZLNupgMEnn_uWDS
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
YouTube is okay. I'll watch it if it's free or very cheap. I won't watch ads for it.
And they may decide in kind that they don't want to offer a service to you for free.
They've already decided that. If they make it too difficult to watch it without ads then I'll stop watching. No skin off my nose.
patreon
This is an interesting perspective. Many people are willing to put in time and effort to get around restrictions on adblockers, but not willing to give up time to ads or give up money to avoid ads.
I think if and when adblockers are no longer an option, many who fall in this category would be pushed into the paying category, while others would be pushed into grumpily watching ads.
The minority would go elsewhere to find other entertainment at an acceptable price.
Given the success of Netflix's ban on password sharing, I think you're right here. Most people really don't care about this nearly as much as the average tech enthusiast.
I mean, I'm a happy, paying subscriber to Nebula. Any content where I have a choice to watch it there, I do. It's stupidly cheap, too. Usually you can find a promo to get it for under $20/yr.
But I am also not pretending that Google owes me free & ad-free YouTube on my terms. They don't. Nor do the creators owe me uploading their videos to my platform of choice. I'd prefer both these things to be true, but I at least can understand that it is not reasonable. YouTube, frankly, is probably the ONLY killer product I couldn't do without made by Google, other than some open source software.
People should pirate all they want. I don't really give a fuck. I don't consider it some great moral evil. But pirating from YouTube is not some symbolic, ethical stand for your values. If you really think what they're doing is bad, stop using the service and pressure the YouTubers to upload elsewhere (which they pretty much ALL could do without consequences from Google). The entire platform only exists because of advertising. Period. If you hate ads as much as I do, pay for the ad-free versions.
I'm going to make myself indispensable by offering below-cost service for decades then pay people like the asshole above to shill about how much it sucks that people steal back what I stole in the first place.
The content may have value, but it's only on youtube because they appropriated all of it and now want to control our access to it like they made the content.
https://infosec.pub/comment/4467335
Sorry I have no idea how to @ people yet, not sure it’s implemented in this app yet