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Comment by closewith | Hacker News Reader

You didn't answer the question. If the creators are deceptive, isn't the ethical course of action to stop consuming their content.

After all, SponsorBlock doesn't address the deception or the parasocial nature you complained about elsewhere. It just hides the ads that the creators inserted.

Given that SponsorBlock also allows users to skip the segments where users are offered ways to pay (like Patreon), it also seems especially hypocritical to suggest that.

Again, I don't think there's anything morally wrong with using SponsorBlock, but I think you're fooling yourself if you think it serves some public good. It just removes the only privacy-preserving form of advertising available to creators and let's people consume their work without the inconvenience of watching the ads that pay for it.

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> isn't the ethical course of action to stop consuming their content.

No, I don't believe so, abd that's the fundamental disagreement

https://giveup.ajay.app/ here's some fun satire of taking that opinion to the extreme. How dare you steal from advertiser by not following through and buying their product :)

That link doesn't address the opinion at all, because you claimed that SponsorBlock is not designed to simply block sponsorship ads. You began our conversation with:

> Sponsorships encourage deception (tricking the user into not skipping) and building up parasocial relationships with the audience to abuse their trust, the worst of the influencer world

SponsorBlock doesn't address either of these points.

If the creator is truly deceiving the user to try to get them to watch an ad or building a parasocial relationship in order to increase the chances of conversion (which is your claim), then I don't see how continuing to watch their content minus the ads is any better for the user. Of course, that doesn't really matter because SponsorBlock has a different true purpose, to remove the inconvenience of watching ads.

Once again, I don't have a problem with SponsorBlock or using SponsorBlock to avoid ads. I think you're trying to rationalise your decision to build SponsorBlock by trying to claim it serves some moral good or higher purpose. Whether that's conscious hypocrisy or internalised self-deception is another matter.

I was simply saying that sponsorships incentivize those bad behaviors

Labeling something on a timeline, or skipping it, does prevent someone from deceptively convincing you to follow through with the action they want. If you have an idea on how to fix people's attachments to parasocial relationships, I'd love to hear it, as I think it's important as well. SponsorBlock does not, and cannot, solve every problem I have with the world.

To be honest, only parasocial dynamic I see here, is his argumentation. But yeah, some people just think they deserve to have content served for free for them...

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