LinusTechTips: Ad Blocking Is Piracy | Hacker News Reader

LinusTechTips: Ad Blocking Is Piracy

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7 pointsorphea15 comments

While I understand their point, I wouldn't call this "piracy".

Ads have become too invasive in recent years. Not only they make certain websites painful to read, they also enabled a whole industry dedicated to invade users' privacy.

And I admit that the main counterpoint to this would be to just stop consuming content from these creators. But ads are so pervasive these days, I would argue that going down that route would make most of the mainstream Internet useless.

It's not just privacy concerns but other even more serious security concerns. I ad block mainly to remove an attack vector.

LinusTechTips videos are a lot more pleasant to watch if you have uBlock Origin and SponsorBlock installed, and you are selective about which sponsored videos you watch.

I control what my computer displays (period). Good luck trying to take that away from me.

If we could trust common and popular ad networks, that'd be one thing. But considering how many, like Google's, allow scammers to insert whatever Javascript they want, to load content from wherever, to be used to push Trojans and phishing sites, we owe them nothing.

I have no problem loading ads to support sites I like, but I won't because the amount of memory and CPU they require is ridiculous, and none of the advertising networks make a point to punish scammers.

Doesn't he make money from videos that promote emulation? That's copyright infringement.

Not as long as I own my own computer. Does my computer use CPU to display your ad? Yes. Do I get to control my computer? Yes, we're not a socialist state yet, nor are we a fascist state. It's mine. I will do what I please.

Yeah, sure. Just like since my car is mine, I spend my weekends driving over my neighbors' mailboxes and no one has any right to complain because I'm just using my car as I please. Only socialists and fascists could complain about that.

Not the same thing - broken analogy.

If anything is the case, web advertisers are using my car to drive to my mailbox and stuff it full of crap. Just like email spammers of the past, web advertisers are externalizing the costs of their ads onto all of us. They are morally in the wrong.

Of course it's not the same thing. It's an analogy. The point is, your ownership of something simply does not entitle you to use it however you please. And frankly, what you're demanding in this case is more like the right to use other people's hardware precisely as you please. Serving your requests uses their CPU time and you're refusing to hold up your end of the deal. To go back to a car analogy, you're going to a drive-in theater and refusing to pay.

Have you ever gotten a drink during a commercial break? Then I guess you’re a thief and a pirate who isn’t holding up their end of the deal.

He’s certainly welcome to bar adblock-users from his site. That’s technically possible, if his CPU time is so valuable. Same as a drive-in theater keeps out people who don’t pay.

But he’s not requiring ads. He’s requesting that people choose to watch them. Those ads are insultingly intrusive and obnoxious, and we are saying “no”, per our right to use our computers as we see fit. Huffing about how terrible it is that people are refusing to subject themselves to that garbage won’t accomplish anything. I’d say a better solution would be to identify monetization approaches that aren’t repellent.

Disincentivizing bad ideas is how progress is made. That’s just how a free market works. If treating his users badly is turning out to be unprofitable for him, I would classify that as a feature, not a bug.

Socialism doesn't disallow private property of consumer goods.

I just threw that in as a lightning rod. In the USA, at least, "socialism" or "communism" or "radical left" is just something that conservatives use to label anything they don't like.

> If you have premium there are no ads to block. Why bother blocking ads on YouTube? :p

> Premium is a huge benefit to creators. It pays us way more. - LS

Now I'm starting to wonder how much they make from premium viewers

AVE did a breakdown some time ago. Watching annoying ass ads was worth something like $0.007 per view aka Google taking home 90% aka no need to feel guilty over it. One patreon supporter easily offloaded >1-10K free viewers.

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