Watching on every device without praying that this week’s ridiculous workaround continues to function for only like $15/month feels like a bargain.
I don’t mind they offer alternative ways of monetizing than a subscription. A lot of folks can’t afford to pay like I can. But I deeply value the option to pay.
I’m not a fan of ad blocking on services you use that offer a pay option. I am fine with blocking in general, but if they offer the chance to just give them your money and you can afford it, you should. Every service should offer a chance to just give them your money instead of data harvesting and ad spamming as the only option.
I’m a huge supporter of open source and free software for over 35 years now, but people who make a living off their software, media, art, music, etc, should be supported as well. There’s nothing wrong with making a living doing what you love, but there’s something wrong with expecting people to give you their labors and services for free.
Where is the eula that spells out in simple language the details of the devil’s bargain that these data thieves offer?
They are selling trinkets to the natives that have no idea what they are giving up.
https://www.eff.org/fr/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interop...
GDPR means all tracking is overt. I have a page where I can see all the things Google tracks about me and what they are used for and I can disable different categories such as location or watch history or search history or browsing history etc.
I'd rather give the bully a whack in balls instead.
I'd be fine with YouTube being a purely paid service. Either pay, or the server returns a 500. I might even be willing to pay for it then, knowing that the only ads i might encounter are sponsor segments in the video themselves (that i can also skip right on by.)
Luckily for me, the only one that knows what to ascribe my actions to is..me.
OK, video quality is higher now but, but they could make the lower-quality video freely accessible -- and so could lots of other possible video-upload sites without charging $15. The value-add is not why you're paying $15.
They also started ads in 2006 before Google bought them
They were burning VC funding the whole time. Youtube didn't become profitable until a few years ago even with Google ads being there it took that much scale and added ads for them to start breaking even on it.
No one "asks" people to see ads. They're the ones who show ads to people in the most underhanded, intentionally attention grabbing manner possible. When you are charged a price, it's obvious and they are up front about it. Meanwhile in advertising land they make it a point to hide the ads in prose so you don't even know you're being manipulated, the videos cut into the ad abruptly so you can't react and it's not like links have big signs in them warning you about ads inside.
Charge people money up front. If you send us ads, we'll delete them. Our attention is not currency to pay for services with.
Maybe stop offering some bullshit "free" tier before expecting people to pay you. Because that's what ad-supported YouTube is: free. It's absolutely free for everyone. They just happen to send you noise alongside the signal. Easily filtered out.
Not to mention the fact Google's still extracting value out of you via surveillance capitalism. Better pay for the creator's patreon instead, that's a perfectly ethical way to make money.
It's not free, they've made that clear, just because you are able to take something without paying doesnt make it free. You can justify being a leech all you want it doesn't impact me because i neither work for YouTube nor produce content for it but it also doesn't change what you are.
When the server returns a 200 and the video to my request of 'video for free please', that is them choosing to accept my request for the video. Just as the common refrain goes that 'if you don't like ads, you can just not use Youtube', the argument that 'if Youtube doesn't like me blocking ads on my computer, they can just not serve me the videos' applies equally.
> I feel much more intelligent after this conversation with you
You're welcome. Hopefully you'll feel like being less of a leech too.
We're proposing they stop pretending the service is free when it's not. If they keep giving us free stuff, who are we to refuse?
First I'm a leech, now I'm a literal cracker who hacked his way into the trillion dollar monopolist corporation's servers and forced them to serve me videos at their expense. Even mined some Monero on their data centers while I was at it.
Are you for real my man? I'm not even gonna read the rest of your comment.
Seems like it’s more accurate to say that you have a moral objection to either ads you don’t like or things you have to pay for?
So perhaps my moral objections are to obnoxious, in your face, unavoidable advertisements.
This is the reason advertising works. Because people think it doesn’t work on them lol.
“I want what you have and I’m going to take it from you in any way I desire regardless of your thoughts on the matter”
It's actually offensive that these corporations even think they have any say at all about what goes on in our machines. The nerve.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38329083
Refined these over years here by discussing the subject with like-minded people. I always post smaller versions of it when people start trying to shame us for not tolerating ads.
There might even be more than two of us! HN unfortunately due to it's inherent bias (vis-a-vis their origin/benefactors/audience) will tend to skew a little more against this train of thought.
> You might enjoy this mantra I like to recite in every ad blocking thread:
I agree with the vast majority, but some of the phrasing I think betrays a certain militantness on the issue that might turn people off. Specifically, your point about it being mind rape. I agree with the point you try to make with that, but that can conflate it with some other unsavoury topics that make it easier to try to attack your argument. The way I see it, it's not quite mind rape, but it is assault and battery on the dignity of the human mind.
There are many. Someone here once told a tale of a hero who picked up a paintball gun and drove around the city blasting billboards.
A brazilian city banned billboards:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cidade_Limpa
https://99percentinvisible.org/article/clean-city-law-secret...
I want to propose a similar law for my own city. The advertising is obnoxious.
> assault and battery on the dignity of the human mind
Agreed.
Remember folks... when running away from a bear you don't have to outrun everyone, just the slowest person
And similarly, to get people or organizations to pay, you just have to make it much more expensive for them at every moment to hack or fork your service than just pay you. It gets harder the bigger the organization is, but works like a charm on the long tail!
If you've got an open source platform, it's a major consideration because a competitor can just fork your service and start offering it. So you have to have enough of a network effect and lock-in (e.g. ethereum nodes only taking ethereum gas as payment) that the fork is not as accepted for years, despite being faster and better (e.g. polygon). You can centralize trust (Amazon), Liquidity (exchanges) and ease-of-use through vertical integration (Apple).