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Comment by phone8675309 | Hacker News Reader

Their product is the platform. I’m not there to consume the platform. I’m there to watch videos uploaded by a third party. I could care less who hosts it.

If you want people to view your ads then don’t serve content using a protocol that have user agents that run on my machine where I am in control of what they do, or at least if you do, don’t be surprised when I run user agents that do what I want them to do.

Google's alternative is to embed the ads directly into the video at presentation time (which also won’t work so long as I can fast forward).

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It's sheer hypocrisy that makes you think you're in the right. The platform costs money to deliver content to you.

You could care less who hosts it yet you care to type YouTube.com into your address bar to find the content you want.

In any case, if you think the company doesn't deserve your money, simply don't consume videos via their platform.

If you really mean it, simply stop using the service because the more you use it, the more they retain market share and get to serve more ads to other users. So effectively, you're contributing to their growth.

Live by your word and don't use YouTube if you detest Google that much.

There's no dignity in double standards.

Wonderful. So when, as an individual, I watch a company:

- evading most taxes,

- offering 0 support to users,

- breaking the user experience to force users through their “app funnel,”

- shutting down independent developers without recourse,

- bullying any small fish in their path,

- conspiring to depress labour salaries, and

- shirking any societal or moral obligations,

...that’s just business.

But then when, having observed their psychopathic behaviour, I decide that I don’t want to be part of funding this evil entity, now I’m holding a double standard by accessing the content this monopoly has become the sole gatekeeper for.

Give me a break.

(Leaving untouched the fact that their business model revolves around collecting as much private information as possible.)

You're okay with enjoying free food from an armed robber as long as you're not the one he's robbing even though you know the food is funded with proceeds of crime.

As long as it's the only place where I can have food, yes.

You're strawmanning ahmedalsudani's argument. They are not saying that Google is an armed robber, nor is using YouTube anywhere near as essential to survival as food, so this is a bad analogy.

They're effectively saying Google is an unethical company and yet they continue to use the platform of this unethical company, a platform whose existence is solely dependent on the unethical practices of Google (as it has been mentioned over and over that Youtube is running at a loss).

yesplorer is using the time honored "won't somebody think of the corporations?!" deflection.

i don't care about Google. All I'm saying is if you hate the organization, don't be a parasite and us their platform. It's just about principle.

No, sorry. Don’t make your content freely accessible on the web if you don’t want to bear the cost of hosting it. Don’t serve it over a protocol that explicitly doesn’t require a user agent to mindlessly obey the commands given to it by virtue of running on someone else’s machine.

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