Their business model and their belief that there’s an obligation to view ads when consuming content are not our problem.

Advertising in general and Google in particular are so immoral that morally you should rip every YouTube video and distribute it freely outside of their platform while actively looking for ways to force them to fundamentally change or close.

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Workaccount2 4 days ago | parent [-]

>Their business model and their belief that there’s an obligation to view ads when consuming content are not our problem.

The problem is that you feel you have an intrinsic right to the content. Like the content is a public good, and youtube shimmied it's way inbetween so it can shove ads in your face.

But that is not what the deal is. The content is made by creators explicity for youtube, and you are the one making a decision to go to youtube to view privately owned content that you have zero right to.

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AegirLeet 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

YT decided to build their site on top of the world wide web; a technological foundation that inherently gives users a lot of control. If I decide that I don't want to render some specific HTML element, then I'm not going to render it. If I decide that I don't want to execute some JS, then I'm not going to execute it. That's fundamentally how the WWW functions. So I simply instruct my browser to not display things that annoy me, such as ads. This is "working as intended".

YT didn't have to build their platform on the web. Nobody forced them to. They could avoid all of these issues by setting up a dedicated client application using a custom protocol with ads already baked into the video stream, for example.

I don't feel like I have an intrinsic right to any content on YT. But I do feel like I have an intrinsic right to use the web the way it's supposed to be used. Which, of course, includes simply ignoring any HTML, CSS, JS or other bits that I don't like. I'm free to send whatever HTTP requests I want to YT, YT is free to respond with whatever they want and I'm free to do whatever I want with their responses. That's just how it is.

If YT doesn't like that... again, nobody is forcing them to use the WWW. They are free to use some locked down technology that better fits their specific needs.

Claiming that I am morally obligated to look at ads on YT is like claiming that I'm morally obligated to look at ads in a print magazine. I hold the magazine in my hands. I flip the pages. I guide my eyes towards the things I want to look at and away from the things I don't want to look at. This is not a surprise to anyone, it's just how reading a magazine works. Same thing with YT ads and the WWW.

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Workaccount2 4 days ago | parent [-]

Right, so we should just role the internet back to BBS boards and IRC, when it was all free and no ads.

You need to extend your logic to everyone, or define who can ad-block and who must watch the ads. It's great you have decided that you don't need to cover the cost incurred serving you a video, can you please tell me the logic we should use to pick who must pick up the tab you left behind? The volunteers who never skip ads?

Surely you have thought your philosophy through.

	▲	barnabee 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		Nobody must watch ads, that's the point Businesses that rely in it don't have an innate right to exist. It is ok for some businesses that are viable now to not be in a future, better world. It's ok for some people who are rich now not to be as a result of that. It's ok for there to be less total content, too. Perhaps that's even desirable when so much is bottom of the barrel stuff (and sometimes 100% a net societal negative) because that's the only way to fund something with a handful of ad views.

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barnabee 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> the problem is that you feel you have an intrinsic right to the content

Not at all.

I no more claim the right to force someone to serve any given video to me than to force authors to send me copies of their books, musicians to perform for me, etc.

The tl;dr of my position is basically: you don't have to make it free, but you can't pay for it with surveillance capitalism (or at least you can't force anyone to participate when you try to do so).

If you serve data to me over the internet, I have a right to process that data however I want, including ignoring parts of it, and that that cannot be made subject to some contract or deal. Similarly, I can rip the ads out of magazines, skip ads in recordings of TV, etc. etc. and there's nothing the "content creator" can do about it.

Ads are not a deal or an obligation, they're the hope that if you show enough of them it'll be good enough for someone's business that they're willing to pay you for doing so. If you make the ads unbearable or show so many of them that too many people take steps to avoid them, that's your problem.

Make ads acceptable to enough people or find another business model[0].

[0] Not particularly relevant, but I pay for YouTube Premium and plenty of others, both platforms and individual creators. I still aggressively run all possible ad and tracking blockers against every site/platform. It's not about getting free content, it's about avoiding and ideally ending user tracking and targeted ads aka surveillance capitalism.