I'd rather move towards a web (largely) without ads than continue to be the product sold to advertisers rather than the consumer served by the platform. The constant escalation of the ad blocker-ad server war has also contributed greatly to ballooning complexity in all sorts of technologies.
I hope YT Premium is a step in that direction, but only time will tell.
Well you are both the customer and the product with YT Premium. Yeah you don't see ads, but they are still tracking everything you watch and using that to deliver targeted ads to you on other platforms.
Not looking at an advertisement is not “being a leech.”
I glance away from billboards, I refill my drink during commercial breaks, I show up when the movie starts instead of when the preview starts. These are normal behaviors, not leech behaviors. The ads are not very sophisticated, so I don’t need sophisticated measures to avoid them. On the web, the ads have ratcheted up the intensity (tracking, targeting) with technology and in response I have augmented my ability to ignore with technology. That’s fair.
You have framed this as a contrast between leeches and normal people, but this is actually a contrast between normal people and bootlickers. It is perfectly fine if you want to guzzle Kiwi Black, but understand not everyone wants to do that.
This is an extreme comparison, but there's more action in avoiding ads with an adblocker than by passively averting your gaze in physical media. It'd be more like if you chopped down billboards, installed a jammer into your router to deliver phone stats to tv ads, and blaring noises before the movie starts.
I don't think it's that extreme, but it's always hard making comparisons between physical and digital.
>You have framed this as a contrast between leeches and normal people, but this is actually a contrast between normal people and bootlickers.
I prefer the framing that doesn't chastise those who are simply ignorant or have their own morals. I recognize adblock is technically "theft" so I don't want to go on a high horse insult the "normal people".
It's more like you have some magic AR glasses that can replace billboards with a blank space, and (presuming the theatre didn't let you in past the beginning of the ads or something) putting in earplugs/earbuds, closing your eyes, and asking your friend to nudge you when the ads are over.
Blocking ads and trackers is no more theft than blocking crypto miners. Malware is malware. You'd be crazy to consider running it as some bizarre form of payment.
Not quite AR because the loss isn't perceivable for hardware ads. No one will come to a billboard and reasonably say "how many people look at this space"? No one can say outside of metrics on traffic.
You can track a bunch of metrics for software and perceive ad blockers, so the loss is more explicit.
>You'd be crazy to consider running it as some bizarre form of payment.
I wont say reality isn't crazy, especially these days. But that's the reality, yes.
The technology is basically there for signage to track who looks at it (maybe not billboards, but that's a resolution thing).
In any case, why would I care about how people who are trying to scam me set up their business deals? If I don't run their script, they didn't "lose" anything. Their malware was never allowed to run on my machines in the first place. They failed to steal something from me.
Perhaps. It'd fall under another cost benefits analysis. I imagine it's not worth the cost. Software scales elegantly, unlike hardware, so it's another area where the metaphor breaks apart.
>why would I care about how people who are trying to scam me set up their business deals?
1. Because you are spending much of your energy and time getting around them. Because by silent consensus people would rather consume ads than pay for their content. Keep your friends close...
2. Because it's an indirect contract. I don't care if you don't care, but I'd at least wish people would be honest and admit that they aren't in some moral high horse for evading such a contract. People get so pompous as if they are combatting the behemoth by taking 10 seconds to download a program.
The house always wins. We're allowed to steal because the cost to catch us is less than the cost to lock the doors. And the company is profitable anyway. The main downside to this is similar to hardware: pricing is a bit more expensive because stores expect X% theft/defects/refunds. I'm sure the same thing happens where content creators get paid a bit less, and YT premium costing a bit more to offset adblock users.
I spend almost no time getting around them. As you say, it takes 10 seconds to install a malware filter to block them.
There is no contract with me at all. It is not theft. It is preventing others from misappropriating my computing resources, and in fact the US government recommends citizens use ad blockers. It's basic computer security.
You've been lucky in that case. Or you simply visit mainstream programs and never had to deal with not-ads-but-still-intrusive elements that you make custom domains to filter out. Google is doing A/B tests going to war with ads so it may be a bumpy few months.
>There is no contract with me at all. It is not theft.
Hence my wording:
>Indirect contract are those where there is no direct contract between parties but the law presumes that there is a contracts between the parties and such could be enforced.
>is preventing others from misappropriating my computing resources,
You chose to access their servers, I don't see how YouTube is "misapproiating your resources". You're basically getting a service and refusing to pay for it. That's theft.
It's like I said, I don't care if people still from a trillion dollar corporation. But people who really only think software can't be stolen really shouldn't be considered a software "engineer", as many here claim to be.
>in fact the US government recommends citizens use ad blockers. It's
1. The fbi is not the government. For good reason given their history.
2. Their context was for malware, not for getting around undesired ads for an otherwise "free" service.
As far as I can tell, this "indirect contract" thing does not exist as a concept in American law, and runs completely counter to the idea of a contract. Contracts must have mutual assent. How could you ever agree to a contract if you don't even know it exists? Do you have an example of case law for this?
On misappropriation, do you think it's okay if e.g. a blogger puts a crypto miner on their page? If you choose to request a web page, is it okay for them to run background workers on your computer, and in fact it is theft of service if you do not allow it? Do you also need to give them e.g. location, accelerometer, microphone, and local filesystem access if they'd like to have it? Why are ads special among malware payloads in that you must run them? Why are computer ads special unlike physical ads (e.g. in the mail or inserts in a free newspaper) where people toss them in the bin without opening/looking at them? Or an ad-blocking DVR?
Many of e.g. Google's tracking domains are simply blocked on my network. I don't have any idea of what web pages are going to try to get me to load them, but it doesn't matter because none of them are allowed to. It's ridiculous to say that I must allow my computers to reach out to malicious servers and run scripts they deliver. Must I allow random North Korean servers to run scripts too?
The FBI is part of the government, and the context was that certain search engines (e.g. Google) were presenting ads for scams, and so to protect yourself from fraud, you should install an ad blocker so that you do not see ads.
On morals, I'll put forward that if you have children, it is in fact a moral imperative to remove as many sources of advertising from their lives as you can. Ads attempt to shape them into worse people (pushing them to embrace materialism and hedonism), and their influence should not be tolerated.
Edit: I’ve posted this argument on HN before, but if you insist on expanding the accepted definition of theft, then malware, crypto miners, video ads, and other garbage that is frequently served via ad networks are also stealing from me, by wasting electricity and possibly also taking my personal data. So I block ads to prevent this theft. Who is in the right in this case?
That's a false dichotomy. Rationalize not paying for content with whatever logical contortions you can come up with, leeching content and not paying for it clearly isn't going to encourage the creation of additional content. Pay for it via Patreon or some other platform if you don't want to give money to Google, but the leech problem is why so many things suck. Even BitTorrent sites hate leeches.
> Additionally, Fox alleged that Dish infringed Fox's distribution right through use of PTAT copies and AutoHop. However, mentioning that all copying were conducted on the user's PTAT without "change hands" and that the only thing distributed from Dish to the users was the marking data, the Court denied Fox's claim. Citing Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc., the Court concluded that the users' copying at home for the time shift purpose did not infringe Fox's copyright. Then, Dish's secondary liability was also denied.
1. less annoying for non-desktop devices. Especially when casting content onto my TV
2. moral niceties: Premium viewers apparently help give more revenue to content creators, and I tend to watch smaller channels. It's nice knowing I can disproportionately help those kinds of creators out.
Also, apparently Google is in the middle of its latest clash with adblocking so even that can get unreliable.
Well, YouTube premium will work on every device you can sign in to YouTube on. Adblock is available for the most part, but isn't easily available everywhere.
don’t know any for YT ioS, i used to live with ads on mobile but after getting premium, even though i use an ad blocker + firefox on desktop, i never canceled it for a reason
I, for one, will pay for good things.. but also, it’s worth it if you watch a lot of YouTube on things like AppleTV or Fire Cube. Ad blockers won’t work there.
