Hacker News Reader

Comment by genocidicbunny | Hacker News Reader

I wouldn't be able to enjoy my usage of it. I have a strong moral objection to ads, so to me paying to get rid of ads is akin to paying off the bully so they will stop beating you up. Next week they might decide you haven't paid enough, or that it doesn't even matter that you paid up -- they're bored and want to beat someone up.

I'd rather give the bully a whack in balls instead.

View on HN

Asking people to provide compensation for a service isn't bullying. They even give you a choice on how you pay. You hate ads, they give you an option to avoid them and now you hate paying to avoid them. You're trying to makes yourself sound self righteous and you just sound like you believe you are entitled to others resources.

I'm not trying to be righteous, my moral compass is mine.

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.)

You're trying to ascribe your actions to a moral cause instead of a financial one.

You're trying to ascribe my actions to a financial cause instead of a moral one.

Luckily for me, the only one that knows what to ascribe my actions to is..me.

Yes because they are inconsistent with the actions of a moral position you claim and entirely consistent with the actions of someone doing something for financial reasons.

Except it's not a service that costs much money to run, so much as it is a giant silo exploiting the fact that lots of video is uploaded there. Don't you remember YouTube in 2005 before Google's purchase? It made ends meet all by itself, apparently.

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.

No it didn't make ends meet it raised something like $35m from vc and was running at a loss of around $1m a month which is why they were so quick to sell to Google despite the growth.

They also started ads in 2006 before Google bought them

> Don't you remember YouTube in 2005 before Google's purchase? It made ends meet all by itself, apparently.

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.

Convenient to forget the video creators.

Creators have patreon now. It's a perfectly ethical way to make money. Doesn't even depend on copyright to work.

Bullshit. They're the ones who think themselves entitled to our attention.

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.

You're being entitled to their services. They give you a way to avoid ads and still compensate them. If you don't want to do that it has nothing to do with ads you are just a leech.

Leech? That's funny. You wanna take a peek at the numerous accounts under my name?

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.

Yes a leech. They give you the option of paying with money or attention. If you choose neither but still use their service you are a leech.

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.

Okay, paypig. I don't have to "justify" anything. I'm not obligated to watch ads, it's that simple. If they don't like that, they better have their server return 402 Payment Required instead of a free video. Otherwise I'm gonna be right here making full use of those servers as much as I want. And if they send me ads I'm deleting them. And if they block my ad deleter, I will delete their blocker. And I won't lose a second of sleep over it.

You complain about them feeling entitled to use your computer how they want while trying to justify doing the same thing to them. You are a cheap hypocrite trying to build up your actions into some kind of noble cause when the reality is you just want something for free. You want to leech. You call me a paypig but I just believe in supporting the people providing me value because i understand that someone has to or the services go away and people like you exist harming the common.

As the parent pointed out, there's a simple way for Youtube to deal with me "feeling entitled to use their computer" -- either don't make your computers publicly available via a standard web api, or return the appropriate response via that standard web api, which would be an HTTP error code.

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.

You are proposing making the internet worse to try and justify your leeching. They give you a way to use there service with out ads and magically you have an excuse not to do that to. You are a drain, if you're happy making the world worse that is on you mate but stop trying to make it into some holy noble cause. You're just being cheap and selfish.

I appreciate seeing your argument devolve down to just a personal attack instead of actually addressing the points I raised. I feel much more intelligent after this conversation with you.

You raised no points. You said you don't like ads. It was pointed out you can pay to not see ads and you said that was just as bad(because reasons? You're morally opposed to ad based systems but you aren't opposed enough to stop propping YouTube up with traffic. Your morals stop exactly where they would start to inconvenience you, they are pretend). And that if they really want you to compensate them for taking their resources they should make the internet worse by making it impossible for anyone to choose viewing ads over paying. You're selfish and trying to find a way to justify it that doesn't boil down to selfish and cheap and you won't find it because that is literally your only justification.

> 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 raised plenty of points. You just dismissed them, doubled down and started name calling. Welp.

I'm curious, you mention that you run several companies in your profile, are they ad-driven for their revenue?

They are in that paid traffic is essential for them but I don't directly receive income from ads for any of them. At least not in a way that an ad blocker would negatively impact my income.

> You are proposing making the internet worse

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?

They aren't pretending it's free. You are.

My browser requests a video. They send me a video. Money has not exchanged hands. Free.

> doing the same thing to them

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.

You're trying to make yourself sound cooler than just someone that expects someone else's work for free again. You're not, you are just a leech.

Sure thing, paypig. Pay them some more, maybe the trillion dollar corporation will finially notice that you exist. When they put ads in the paid service tier.

You’ve been regularly commenting on a website that’s an advertising/marketing channel for a VC firm since 2018.

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?

HN doesn't force me to watch or read the ads. I can always ignore the posts that are mainly advertising.

So perhaps my moral objections are to obnoxious, in your face, unavoidable advertisements.

If you read the headlines than you've read ads for thousands of products and they are unavoidable since they are inline.

> I can always ignore the posts that are mainly advertising.

This is the reason advertising works. Because people think it doesn’t work on them lol.

I've been reading HN since around that time, and it's hasn't made me sympathetic toward VC. If anything it's hardened my views against consumption, greed and advertising.

Good advertising will do that to you. Make you think you hate it while it works on you.

It’s your behaviour I find far more in line with a bully.

“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”

"I gave my product away for free, bundled it with some garbage no one cares about because they paid me to do it and am now angry because people are throwing the garbage in the trash where it belongs and the garbage men don't want to pay me anymore."

Even more so. You gave me a product, and I took parts of it and threw it away. Once you gave it to me, your right to define what I do with it ended in my mind -- or to put it more concretely for Youtube, you sent me the bytes, I ignored some of them. That is my right and prerogative as the owner of the computer. Don't want me to ignore any of the bytes, don't send me any of them.

Exactly. We own the machine, in its realm we are gods. We dictate what it does or doesn't do. If it is our will that ads not be displayed on our screens, then by god it's not going to happen.

It's actually offensive that these corporations even think they have any say at all about what goes on in our machines. The nerve.

I'm more offended at the people that support said corporations -- I can understand the profit motive for the corporation, but not prostrating yourself to them. To think that it should be okay to be forced to pay a month sub to a megacorp to control what I do with my computer, my hardware...is unappealing.

Always nice to find like-minded people on this site. You might enjoy this mantra I like to recite in every ad blocking thread:

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.

> Always nice to find like-minded people on this site.

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 might even be more than two of us!

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com