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Do you really believe that the ability for people to play YouTube without ads benefits the user? I mean, it sounds great on some level.

Perhaps browsers should just ship with ad blocking by default. Everybody the world over can use the internet and have a better experience without anybody ever seeing any of those pesky paid ad things.

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>Do you really believe that the ability for people to play YouTube without ads benefits the user

Umm, yes? Google themselves even offer this as a product: Youtube Premium.

My impression is that it's not people paying for Youtube Premium who are complaining about Google targeting people with ad blockers. I suppose Netflix used to offer only paid, ad free video streaming, so it isn't really out of the question for somebody to wish that were youtube's model; however, I can't help but imagine that if YouTube said they were switching to that most people on this site would be even more upset.

I think there are some end-user benefits, but they're more side-effects than the reason the technology was invented.

What is the basis for assuming that something like this was created in bad faith?

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