I see there is lot of dilemma in comments here regarding blocking ads.
blocking ads is not piracy, blocking ads should be norm. I am ok with seeing ads, until they don't track my behavior, they don't try to manipulate my decisions based on age,region,sex,location, earning status.
I am "ok" with ads shown in TV channels, because they show the same for all above mentioned categories.
let me make a simple analogy, how do you feel if a circus publicizes as free, has a billboard to show ads, and in background they hires a detective to follow your every move 24/7 , note down your interests/dislikes so they can show you personalised ads based on the interests. creepy right, That how i feel these companies do.
just because someone/company spent money and posted a billboard on public space, doesn't mean you have to read through it. It is the risk they assumed, just like youtube/creators made the decision to host videos for free on a public space. it is a bad decision from their part and they have to live with it and not gaslight people.
I hate to see youtube die, It is a wonderful archive for society. if you want you can buy premium/see ads so that society wont lose some thing valuable. but not because of creators/YT losing revenue.(that's the risk they assumed when they started the business).
and then there are people who say, you can turn off ad personalization, I did since last 5 years and you know what I see. Some Scam apps/NSFW ads content. and there is no way to report the ads unless I turn on ad personalization.
I would like to repeat statement from louis rossmann , don't accept the premise of the corporates when the premise itself is shaky.
One aspect you didn't mention is the ability to not look at the ad billboard.
If I see a giant ad billboard, I can not look at it, look away, close my eyes, block it with my hands, etc. In a distant future I'd buy glasses that blur ads from my sight (if that could be done without a company seeing everything I see).
For me ad-blockers are the same with some automation. It's a way for me to not give up my time and attention for something I never asked for in the first place.
Moves like this one from YouTube are one step closer to that dystopian nightmare depicted in Black Mirror where you have to watch the ad no matter what. You close your eyes, and the ad pauses and only goes away after you finish watching it. It's absolutely insane.
We somehow got gaslighted into believing there's something good with advertising and there are just a few "bad actors" (where did I hear that before?). I firmly disagree. The entire world would be a better place without ads.
What's tiring is trying to figure out why people just don't use sites/services that show them ads. It's extremely simple and from my experience pretty effective at avoiding the ads those sites/services display.
Terms of Service can be rejected by not using the service.
Everyone in here wants to have their cake and eat it to. The proper channels are political, but half the folks here want to have laissez faire government and also the free to violate contracts they don’t like.
I get it, but it’s not actually a sensible way to run a society.
It’s not something I’m going to fall on my sword over, because I’m actually very sympathetic to privacy concerns, it just rings a bit hollow when we’re talk about the convenience of YouTube verses more open alternatives with less content.
"I am ok with seeing ads, until they don't track my behavior, they don't try to manipulate my decisions based on age,region,sex,location, earning status."
I think you have not tried to view pages without an adblocker. Nearly impossible to navigate, they blur news and ads, nasty pop-ups etc. I have no idea how someone without an adblocker is able to use the internet. And in Europe you also need the "I don't care about cockies" plug in.
True (i am not ok with those ads(I am taking about youtube ads above), I forgot about the irritating ads/pop-ups/redirects . I have firefox+ublock on all my devices/even on incognito.I recommend the same for all, no allow acceptable ads nonsense etc.
Personally I think he dilemma is justified, just because I use an ad blocker doesn't mean I necessarily agree with it on principal.
However like you said, the problem is not the ads themselves it is the tracking that comes along for the ride.
There isn't any inherent reason that ads have to be so privacy invasive (I guess it is hard to not have ads at least log your requests when they go to a different server but that alone is normal I guess).
It is unfortunate that is seems the ship has sailed on actually privacy focused ads and instead of being tailored to the user they are just tailored to the content on the page/video/whatever. I would allow those ads if they existed.
It sucks since I do think ads are important, website operators need some way to make money and it is clear that most people are not going to pay for the things they have grown accustom to getting for free. But the current solution is so privacy invasive that you have to block it.
> However like you said, the problem is not the ads themselves it is the tracking that comes along for the ride.
Not only tracking, ads can carry malware and viruses from malicious sites. They also can bog down the browser like Fandom wiki for example. Ads company are part of the problem since they don't screen them for malicious stuff.
I don't mind ads in general. I don't like it when they are in my face, lagging my mobile browser (Fandom wiki), demanding for notifications (redirector sites), autoplaying twitch stream (Fandom wiki), plastered the front page of search result (Google), and misleading games ads (mobile games).
I do have a few site that are whitelisted in uBlock because those site uses ads that are reasonable. Unfortunately, the rest of them are blocked because they can't keep it in moderation. I understand they need to make money to provides free contents, but that didn't mean they can use the ads like it is a wild wild West.
I am fine with unobtrusive ads to the side, ad banners, etc. But not with peacefully watching a quiet video about the greatest one-shots in Golf history and being interrupted by a blaring loud ad for a crap mobile game. It really is the loudness that bothers me the most. Newspapers didn't used to shout at you. If ads go back to being as unobtrusive as newspaper ads and didn't siphon your personal data, I would unblock them. Ironically, I think 4chan is the only site I visit where I have all ads allowed, because it is still only showing simple quiet banner ads.
I think there was a company doing that (Carbon?) I first saw them on Laravel’s site. And I did read their ads. Like I read the ads in the few magazines I read, because the products are themed with my current activity. I don’t think someone would complain seeing cars ads on a blog centered around cars if it is done in a calm way
> and then there are people who say, you can turn off ad personalization, I did since last 5 years and you know what I see. Some Scam apps/NSFW ads content.
I don't want my personal data to be in the wrong hands and that's why I disable ad-personalisation. But I don't agree that seeing ads for scam apps, NFTs, gambling or get rich quick schemes is better than personalised ads. The reason you are seeing those ads when personalisation is turned off is that they are the only kind of scheme which can scattershot their advertising while still remaining profitable. I'd much rather live in a world where the ad system knows exactly what I need or want and shows me appropriate ads. That way advertisers waste less money and there is more money available for the service provider or the content creators to provide value back to me. The only reason we don't live in that world is that Google and other companies have been shown to be untrustworthy when it comes to handling their customers' personal data.
Or ads, like many online ads were originally, could be based on the content surrounding them rather than the person looking at them. Ads need not be scatter-shot without personalization.
true I agress, I hate facebook/google a lot for developing tools to track users and target ads based on their personal data. yes, it optimized advertisers money but at the cost of our privacy. I know, If it is not fb/google someone else will develop the tools. I wish world governments will establish some doctrine on targeted ads and ads in general.
I am ok with seeing scam ads on shady small website, but for a company of google/FB scale . No. they should be more responsible. they have tools/money to be more responsible and yet they are not. the only reason I think is they are forcing people to turn off ad-personalisation this way.
by responsible I mean, we should have ability to report scam-ads even if we didn't sign-in/opt out of ad-personalisation.
every time , i try to report a scam-ad on youtube, it asks me to turn off ad-personalisation to proceed.
> The reason you are seeing those ads when personalisation is turned off is that they are the only kind of scheme which can scattershot their advertising while still remaining profitable.
> I hate to see youtube die, It is a wonderful archive for society
The actions of the past few weeks have proven it's a terrible archive for society. If there is anything you enjoy on there I'd suggest you archive it from there while you can because they'll be putting the same effort into blocking yt-dlp before the end of the year once people start taking advantage of that to bypass the ablock-block.
I agree that some of the content on YT is of great cultural and useful value.
The usual answer when the profit motive enshitifies something that is considered culturally valuable is to serve the public through a non profit organization instead of a publicly traded company.
I realize I am saying this on a forum created for technical folks who hope to win the startup lottery so I don’t expect much…
I don’t like advertising because it doesn’t even pretend to be informative firstly and secondly it’s not entertaining. Just inform me of what the product or service does and then if that is impossible just do a joke. I haven’t seen a YouTube in ads in years that doesn’t show some aspect of our society I don’t care about such as medications, crypto, how stupid a consumer who doesn’t buy their product is, etc.
That’s what I am avoiding with ad blocking. My life is better without all these things. I’m actually living a better life without ads.
I agree. There's a certain amount of personalization I'm willing to accept - like if I'm in the market for a 3d printer and I start getting targeted ads. Where it goes off the rails for me is if I search for information on a certain cancer, and then I start getting targeted ads for medicine and services. At that point the veneer of innocent advertising is blown away and I don't have to accept it.
Ok cool but this is the real world and companies need money to stay in business. This open source free internet principle works great, until nobody wants to do the work for free, which is accelerating due to global recession.
Mark my words, by the end of this economic downturn you’ll just be happy that you’re not getting charged for a web browser… if you’re lucky.
In a more reasonable world, web browsers would've been more-or-less done once we had xhtml/xslt and flexbox, and they wouldn't cost $500M/year to maintain. The insanity we have today is largely thanks to the influence of... the ad companies.
oftopic but. yes, I agree. Software development costs a lot.
but I think you missed something important. The thing is, we are collectively paying for internet-infra through broadband charges/taxes.(we collectively own it). we don't have to subsidize greedy companies making bad decisions with our time/money/privacy.
the business models/decision of the companies is at fault, they made it monetarily free, and when they find they can't make money, rather than fixing the problem with their model, they try to own/charge internet which is not theirs. (drm etc)
I argue otherwise regd economic downturn, if it is not for selfless opensource developers the internet/business we see , will not exist. even many of these so called businesses use their work and make unimaginable pool of profits of their work, with zero concern for society.
I would be perfectly happy paying for a browser (60% or more of my computing) if it was aligned to my incentive (better extension than safari’s and no third party like pocket)
To be precise, this is not "blocking" ads, this is simply not making HTTP requests for ads. It is the web user's choice whether or not to send an HTTP request.
The biggest issue with generic or burnt in ads is that they're not targeted ads. The value of an ad which isn't targeted is more than an order of magnitude less than one which is targeted.
Traditional free-to-air broadcasting (mostly) works financially because they pay once for the transmission, it's a largely fixed fee to cover an area, and then they get paid for the audience they potentially reach. Even still the broadcasters have to pay to have market research agencies run surveys to figure out what's being watched and by whom. When pay TV providers became able to get telemetry from set-top boxes the value of the addressable market rocketed because the audience was no longer hypothetical, it could be measured, analysed and segmented.
The reason you get crap ads when personalisation is turned off is because the advertisers who have money want their advertising dollars spent on addressable market, not on random NPCs. A non-addressable ad is cheaper, so that's the market for who's buying the ads. I hate ads, so I have YouTube Premium Family, that works great because I can see content without interruption and I support the independent content creators. I also run PiHole because some sites and services are just so loaded with advertising that it's annoying, so I might well be hypocritical here.
But the biggest issue that people don't understand, or think they understand but totally under estimate, is the technical challenge of delivering every video on YouTube everywhere in the world with fair quality. I build streaming infrastructure at scale (not for Google) and I'll tell you that it's really expensive to do what they do and yet people take it for granted. They feel entitled to watch YouTube because Google represents the evil establishment, without recognising the challenges they face.
I don't agree with the idea that it's good to write apps that mooch off YouTube just because they're a big corporation. Yup, it's not piracy, it's probably on the lighter side of the grey area of unauthorised API abuse. If you want to build a competing service to Google that comes without personalised ads and has great content, I wish you all the best but when you get the CDN bill, you'll understand. There's a cost per viewed minute that's probably unsustainable. Heck, even traditional broadcasters who have launched their own streaming services have struggled to make money, and that's with targeted advertising enabled.
> I am ok with seeing ads, until they don't track my behavior
Once again, people blaming sites for things browsers should handle. It's not YouTube that does the tracking; it's your browser allowing it to happen. YouTube is not fetching data from you. YouTube is using the data you send it. This comes from the browser, allowing it to happen. The misplaced blame is why we are in this state.
Maligned usage is what they’re doing. Cookies is good for storing state as HTTP is stateless. Bu if you storing some marker so you can track me around the web, it’s in bad faith. Just like a program can use 4 GB of RAM if that’s needed but something that is just greedily taking memory is what we call a malware.
> I am ok with seeing ads, until they don't track my behavior, they don't try to manipulate my decisions based on age,region,sex,location, earning status.
How do they try to manipulate you? Appeal to you, sure. Not wanting them to have your data, absolutely. But manipulate?
I recall at the time of the EU referendum in the UK, I was being bombarded with video "adverts" about how Turkey was about to enter the EU, and if they did, it would be a corridor for terrorists, we'd had some incidents around that time, and so it was targeted to play on people's fears.
If only for a second, it gave me pause for thought.
I'm not here to comment on any of that, but that was the time when I realised, we _are_ being manipulated by targeted "advertising"; in what I consider the most underhanded and disgusting ways.
I'm much wiser to it now, I was always cautious before, but now I've seen the manipulation of others, and their fears; I'm constantly shooting down bullshit that family, friends and acquaintances are being targeted with on social media etc.
Fuck advertising, and targeted advertising even more so. I'll block it, and if I can't I won't use the platform, it's that simple.
2 instances I would like to share from my personal experience.
when I am in freshman year, I wanted to host a website and started looking online for best service, I was bombarded with google cloud ads across all websites.
I thought google cloud is the best service.(I was never shown results of AWS/IBM watson, when they are far better than Google Cloud at that time). you always use web for exploring options and these ads can manipulate to pivot to one service, when it is not always the best.
after that I tried an experiment with my friends from my collage dorm. we have a proxy for our university. so only tracking I assume is done through respective google accounts.one of them has an Iphone (buys a lot on amazon), others use android. we searched for "best watches to buy", the recommendations/ads(top results) for iphone user is ~1k$(premium brands) and we were shown results of watches around 100$ etc.
I would say above results are manipulative because they will pivot our further searches, the search is not showing best watches/blogs about it. but showing results that the AI think will have higher rate of ads - buy conversion.
The above results definitely will have an impact on further searches, The iphone user will pivot his search to the top results he see which might not always be best.
They are designed to get you to buy things you don't need, and they do that through manipulating human traits. They make you feel you will be lesser/incomplete/not as good as unless you have such and such product. This is not "appealing" to people - it's stone cold corporate manipulation with only one goal in mind.
People have way less control over how they react to what they take in then they think they do.
>*Emotional brands have a significant impact when the consumer experiences a strong and lasting attachment to the brand comparable to a feeling of bonding, companionship or love*. Examples of emotional branding include the nostalgic attachment to the Kodak brand of film, bonding with the Jim Beam bourbon brand, and love for the McDonald’s brand.
>Edward Louis Bernays (/bɜːrˈneɪz/ bur-NAYZ, German: [bɛʁˈnaɪs]; November 22, 1891 − March 9, 1995) was an American theorist, considered a pioneer in the field of public relations and propaganda, and referred to in his obituary as "the father of public relations".[3] His best-known campaigns include a 1929 effort to promote female smoking by branding cigarettes as feminist "Torches of Freedom", and *his work for the United Fruit Company in the 1950s, connected with the CIA-orchestrated overthrow of the democratically elected Guatemalan government in 1954*.
If you don't consider deliberate induction of emotions that imitate love, fear or hatred in order to sell product manipulative I don't know what to tell you.
Edward Bernays manipulated the populace into smoking by branding cigarettes as 'Torches of Freedom' for Feminists who were eager to push back against the social taboo.
He did a whole lot of other manipulative tricks, his wiki page is intense.
Ads are known to exploit and enflame insecurities and doubt to garner sales.
The entire point of all advertising is to get you to think or feel a certain way about something or someone. If that can't be described as 'manipulation', then I don't know what can?
As other's have said, they hire highly skilled psychologists to increase patterns associated with consumption. It's an unfair fight, like throwing a civilian in the ring with Tyson. I guess you've got a chance, but why is that fight even allowed in the first place?
Right of computer owner to access public network resources and display it in the way he wants is above profit incentives of resource provider and above any other proprietary rights for that matter.
For instance, if I receive a HTML/CSS data that displays a trademarked design (which should be kept as a whole), I am able to mangle the presentation part any way I want for personal usage. If I publish a site that's a mangled copy of a trademarked site, that's gray area. For my PC usage, no gray area. Same with disassembling, reverse engineering, etc.
Then, I have a right to publish any tools that perform any customizations over owner's items, be them hardware or software. Customizing proprietary software and reselling it is illicit. Customizing for one's own purposes isn't (the proprietor may choose to drop support for owner on his prerogative).
Most important point is that YT and alikes want to freeload in the middle area. They want to be free and public, but they want to force the way you consume them. That is a no go. YT can choose to make a closed system, but then they would lose all random people without accounts finding YT links and watching them. Really, tie the google account, and set up watching quotas, direct payment or any other system where YT directly gets "paid back". The user can use his tokens to access streams from wherever he wants, youtube-dl or whatnot.
> Right of computer owner to access public network resources
This misunderstanding is the basis of your entire argument: YouTube is not a public resource. It’s a private company providing access to mostly private content in exchange for payment under certain terms.
Currently they have the right to deny access as desired and even to pursue legal charges against people who don’t follow their terms. The only way to change the situation is to change the law, such as what some countries have done to limit the amount of tracking they’re allowed to perform. Client portability would be an interesting but challenging argument to make since they would have raise not only the past estimates of revenue lost due to unauthorized redistribution but now would almost certainly make the argument that creators need to be protected against unauthorized AI usage, too. I’d like to be proven pessimistic but it seems unlikely that we’re going to see much political will for IP reform with relatively little public demand.
I can go to youtube.com right now without an account, without accepting any agreement or contract, click on a video and it will send data to my computer.
How I process that data on my computer is entirely up to me and not anyone else.
> providing access to mostly private content in exchange for payment under certain terms.
Confused frown. That doesn't match any description I've previously come across about what YouTube is.
I thought YouTube content was pretty much entirely 'public'.
If they removed their website and access to the content was limited only to those who paid a monthly subscription via an app then that'd be slightly different.
Ad-impressions as payment is one of the most accessible means of service monetization in the world. You only need eyes or ears to be granted access. Cutting that off, or somehow ruling it illegitimate to require, will raise the bar and cut off less affluent and less educated communities.
This is true. Maybe the deal just needs to be negotiated in a more formalized way. I kind of like how Brave handles the problem, where the browser itself shows you ads (in a much less obtrusive and more privacy-preserving way than how sites do it) and then distributes the resulting funds to the sites you visit. If advertising were structured that way, instead of how it is now where sites will serve up ads and get aggressive if your client chooses not to display them, then you could retain advertising as an option for those who want it while also allowing alternative payment methods for those who would prefer that, and preserving end user control over the software running on their machine.
And who is obligated to provide these resources? There is a big difference between the government not being able to restrict you in some way, and some party providing you with something (general purpose computing in this case). Presumably someone should have provided printing presses as well.
I wonder if you'll keep your free rights opinion the first time some bot abuses your service, causes a few 100.000$ in AWS costs and then goes away without paying for it.
What part about Google accounts and tokens did you not understand? Bots can’t freeload if your services are protected by service credentials and fees.
A significant part of the fees Ticketmaster charges goes to mitigating bots reserving seats and then reselling them on the secondary market. This problem can be easily addressed by requiring reserves and purchases to be made only from registered accounts. They choose not to do this because they’ve determined the cost of combating fraud is offset by allowing non-account holders to make purchases for events.
I haven't seen anyone else with my perspective on ads, so I thought I'd share it.
I believe ads actively make life worse. Modern ads are based on creating wants, rather than addressing needs. The more wants you have, the less satisfied you will be with your life.
If I needed to do some home improvement and went to the hardware store, and there were ads for certain brands in the store, that's not a problem. The ads are giving me information about a product that I might need.
But that's not how most advertisement works. Car companies don't advertise to people who need a car to commute, they show you an ad with a hot guy driving a car in a beautiful landscape and make you want to be that guy. You can't be the guy without the car, so you want the car. The goal of the ad is not to inform, it's to create a desire.
I don't want to want. I want to be content, and I can't be content if I'm always wanting. The only way around it is to not want in the first place.
If you're a Buddhist monk then you can do that already, but I'm not. Human nature is to want things, so the way I have to prevent myself from wanting things is by not exposing myself to superfluous ads.
Ooof, accepting Bitcoin/currency donations for a product that explicitly strips out monetization of another 3rd party service is going to be a problem for longevity of this project on GitHub.
Because a service like Github is an emergent property of a bunch of developers making similar decisions:
1) spend time & effort setting up a git on home server or Raspberry Pi -- or -- spend that time playing with my kids or riding a bike outside
2) spend $10/month for a shared hosting plan to run my git/Gitlab instance -- or spend $0 for a free account on Github
3) expose my self-hosted home ip address -- or find a networking workaround because my house is behind ISP NAT and/or I don't want to publicize my home ip address and keep it private so I use someone else's public network ... such as Github
Take variations of those 3 reasons and multiply it out by a million developers making similar decisions and you will inevitably end up with a "free automatically managed git instance in the cloud" ... aka Github.
Search engines. Search engines have a massive hand when it comes to centralising. Both Google and Bing prioritise centralised services no matter how irrelevant their pages are.
Just try an independent engine like https://mojeek.com and see for yourself how vastly different the surfing experience is. It's like you're back to the time when the internet was accessible and not centralised to a few Big Tech apps and websites.
Morally, you are depriving the content creators and Youtube of revenue (if they rely on Youtube ads). You could argue that they aren't somehow fundamentally entitled to make money, but you are also not fundamentally entitled to consume their content. The content creator had to do work to produce the content and YT has to do work to provide a platform where it can be disseminated. Naturally, they want to be paid for doing this work. We can argue about how much they should be paid, but again nobody is forced to watch YT. It's a voluntary transaction. If you don't like ads, buy a YT subscription. If you don't want to support YT, encourage your content creators to provide their content elsewhere.
Practically, some companies have been historically willing to shut one or both eyes over open source/free projects as a gesture of goodwill (or marketing exercise). The moment money is involved, the lawyers tend to be unleashed and the whole "this is just a free hobby project with no monetary incentives for the developers" goes out the window.
Selling tools to commit crimes can be bad depending on the crime. Removing Youtube's ability to monetise probably doesn't do that much harm on a micro scale, but is problematic on a macro scale. This isn't like most piracy where the sales baseline remains the same and those who wouldn't buy will pirate, this is mostly just directly revenue negative to Youtube.
Regarding ad-blocking: it's pretty simple – no single person in the entire world goes on the internet to view ads. People come to get information/content and just don't really care about other fluff that interferes with that.
As long as it's possible to block ads, people will just do it, because it provides a SUPERIOR browsing experience than otherwise. I sometimes turn uBlock off by accident and instantly get reminded how screwed the browsing experience is without it.
Some people also claim that ad-blocking hurts content creators. This is mostly false. Most content creators have realized by now that relying on ad revenue as a considerable source of income is unsustainable in the long term, due to aformentioned reasons. That's why most have Patreon, Ko-fi, merch shops, donations etc., which is a far more solid business model.
I block all ads everywhere I can, I don't care if they track me or not, if they are "privacy-respecting" or other crap, I simply don't care. And I encourage everyone to do the same.
That's why most have Patreon, Ko-fi, merch shops, donations etc., which is a far more solid business model.
Is it? Most of the times I've seen these things come up it's mainly in the context of those being additional, but much smaller, revenue streams for the vast majority of creators.
Are there many creators surviving entirely (or at least primarily) on subscription/donation/etc revenue?
There are, I also forgot to mention general product placement/integrations, sponsorships and stuff like that, although SponsorBlock has put a dent in that (primarily pre-roll type ads)
The problem with this is that the thumbnails usually also contain helpful information.
As an example, a recommendation from ARTEde with the title "Poor despite job | ARTE Re:" where the thumbnail shows "Brits at the limit" and someone standing in an supermarket aisle.
Or the title "TSMC's First Breakthrough: The Copper/Low K Interconnect..." with the thumbnail "COPPER SEMIS" on top of a magnified semiconductor.
There are extensions that can swap the thumbnails with a frame from the video. It's not as good as a handpicked frame, but it's a lot better overall compared to the garbage youtubers are making now. The one I use on chrome is called "clickbait remover for youtube"
If people don’t want to pay for YouTube, then why not use peertube[0]?
I don’t understand the arguments here. If you don’t want ads, then pay for Premium. It’s fantastic that an option exists to solve the problem! If you don’t like the price, then don’t pay for it.
Somehow people have got it in their minds that YouTube owes them content for free. That’s a great mindset to make the shift to peertube and away from YouTube, but I don’t think it holds up as justification for getting mad at YouTube for forcing their preexisting paid plan to remove ads.
Either pay for YouTube Premium or shift to a different model of video sharing. Both options currently exist!
> You won't get a direct answer for this. Only endless justifications
So... you will get answers?
That you disagree with the reasons give does not mean that they're not giving you reasons. It just means you disagree with the reasons that they gave :)
You can use fastmail instead of gmail. Kagi instead of Google search, Apple Maps or OSM instead of Google maps. Firefox instead of chrome. PiHole to block Google trackers. Disallow the Google indexer in your website’s robots.txt.
If you don’t like Google, don’t use their products. Yes, they are hard to avoid. However, in the case of YouTube, it can be avoided by not using it. You can’t have your cake and eat it too.
Well, first of all, they don't actually sell your data.
If we accept "sell your data" as a shorthand for "allow targeting ads to you without actually giving the seller of the ad any information about you", it's still something you can control. In fact, the very first time you use YouTube you'd be shown a non-modal dialog about whether they're allowed to use your data for ad targeting or not, and have to make a yes/no choice
So it sure sounds like your objection is just an excuse.
I got that big warning about having 2 videos left before being locked out of youtube viewing due to running an "ad-blocker", that was last week, I've not watched a video on the site since.
I just download it with yt-dlp or throw it in to mpv. If those stop working I'll probably just stop watching youtube altogether since I only watch maybe 6-10 vids a week anyway. This "app" does look quite good, but for how long it will work if g**e keeps making it difficult I don't know.
This might be useful to you. Alternative YT frontend with many instances. Usually the only third party connection is to googlevideo.com, which is unavoidable, if you want videos from YT.
Sometimes a video might not play or might not be downloadable. Simply switch instance, maybe to an instance in another country, and try there.
Readit News
let me make a simple analogy, how do you feel if a circus publicizes as free, has a billboard to show ads, and in background they hires a detective to follow your every move 24/7 , note down your interests/dislikes so they can show you personalised ads based on the interests. creepy right, That how i feel these companies do.
just because someone/company spent money and posted a billboard on public space, doesn't mean you have to read through it. It is the risk they assumed, just like youtube/creators made the decision to host videos for free on a public space. it is a bad decision from their part and they have to live with it and not gaslight people.
I hate to see youtube die, It is a wonderful archive for society. if you want you can buy premium/see ads so that society wont lose some thing valuable. but not because of creators/YT losing revenue.(that's the risk they assumed when they started the business).
and then there are people who say, you can turn off ad personalization, I did since last 5 years and you know what I see. Some Scam apps/NSFW ads content. and there is no way to report the ads unless I turn on ad personalization.
I would like to repeat statement from louis rossmann , don't accept the premise of the corporates when the premise itself is shaky.
If I see a giant ad billboard, I can not look at it, look away, close my eyes, block it with my hands, etc. In a distant future I'd buy glasses that blur ads from my sight (if that could be done without a company seeing everything I see).
For me ad-blockers are the same with some automation. It's a way for me to not give up my time and attention for something I never asked for in the first place.
Moves like this one from YouTube are one step closer to that dystopian nightmare depicted in Black Mirror where you have to watch the ad no matter what. You close your eyes, and the ad pauses and only goes away after you finish watching it. It's absolutely insane.
We somehow got gaslighted into believing there's something good with advertising and there are just a few "bad actors" (where did I hear that before?). I firmly disagree. The entire world would be a better place without ads.
I arrive late to the movie theater, I'll arrive anywhere from 15-30 minutes late.
why?
Because I paid to watch a movie, I did not pay to watch advertisements of movies. There's typically 15-30 minutes of ads in front of movies nowadays.
When I was younger I didn't have this policy because there were far fewer ads, but they keep cramming more and more.
1. Equivocating adblock with stealing
2. Using adblock deprives content creators of funds
3. Users of adblock are entitled whiners who just want free stuff
4. Without ads, YouTube cannot exist
It is getting tiring.
Everyone in here wants to have their cake and eat it to. The proper channels are political, but half the folks here want to have laissez faire government and also the free to violate contracts they don’t like.
I get it, but it’s not actually a sensible way to run a society.
It’s not something I’m going to fall on my sword over, because I’m actually very sympathetic to privacy concerns, it just rings a bit hollow when we’re talk about the convenience of YouTube verses more open alternatives with less content.
I think you have not tried to view pages without an adblocker. Nearly impossible to navigate, they blur news and ads, nasty pop-ups etc. I have no idea how someone without an adblocker is able to use the internet. And in Europe you also need the "I don't care about cockies" plug in.
However like you said, the problem is not the ads themselves it is the tracking that comes along for the ride.
There isn't any inherent reason that ads have to be so privacy invasive (I guess it is hard to not have ads at least log your requests when they go to a different server but that alone is normal I guess).
It is unfortunate that is seems the ship has sailed on actually privacy focused ads and instead of being tailored to the user they are just tailored to the content on the page/video/whatever. I would allow those ads if they existed.
It sucks since I do think ads are important, website operators need some way to make money and it is clear that most people are not going to pay for the things they have grown accustom to getting for free. But the current solution is so privacy invasive that you have to block it.
Not only tracking, ads can carry malware and viruses from malicious sites. They also can bog down the browser like Fandom wiki for example. Ads company are part of the problem since they don't screen them for malicious stuff.
I don't mind ads in general. I don't like it when they are in my face, lagging my mobile browser (Fandom wiki), demanding for notifications (redirector sites), autoplaying twitch stream (Fandom wiki), plastered the front page of search result (Google), and misleading games ads (mobile games).
I do have a few site that are whitelisted in uBlock because those site uses ads that are reasonable. Unfortunately, the rest of them are blocked because they can't keep it in moderation. I understand they need to make money to provides free contents, but that didn't mean they can use the ads like it is a wild wild West.
> It sucks since I do think ads are important, website operators need some way to make money
They can sell physical goods and services, no one is preventing them from making money.
I don't want my personal data to be in the wrong hands and that's why I disable ad-personalisation. But I don't agree that seeing ads for scam apps, NFTs, gambling or get rich quick schemes is better than personalised ads. The reason you are seeing those ads when personalisation is turned off is that they are the only kind of scheme which can scattershot their advertising while still remaining profitable. I'd much rather live in a world where the ad system knows exactly what I need or want and shows me appropriate ads. That way advertisers waste less money and there is more money available for the service provider or the content creators to provide value back to me. The only reason we don't live in that world is that Google and other companies have been shown to be untrustworthy when it comes to handling their customers' personal data.
Er...just fucking no thanks.
I am ok with seeing scam ads on shady small website, but for a company of google/FB scale . No. they should be more responsible. they have tools/money to be more responsible and yet they are not. the only reason I think is they are forcing people to turn off ad-personalisation this way.
by responsible I mean, we should have ability to report scam-ads even if we didn't sign-in/opt out of ad-personalisation.
every time , i try to report a scam-ad on youtube, it asks me to turn off ad-personalisation to proceed.
Do you know this for a fact, and if so, how?
The actions of the past few weeks have proven it's a terrible archive for society. If there is anything you enjoy on there I'd suggest you archive it from there while you can because they'll be putting the same effort into blocking yt-dlp before the end of the year once people start taking advantage of that to bypass the ablock-block.
The usual answer when the profit motive enshitifies something that is considered culturally valuable is to serve the public through a non profit organization instead of a publicly traded company.
I realize I am saying this on a forum created for technical folks who hope to win the startup lottery so I don’t expect much…
That’s what I am avoiding with ad blocking. My life is better without all these things. I’m actually living a better life without ads.
Mark my words, by the end of this economic downturn you’ll just be happy that you’re not getting charged for a web browser… if you’re lucky.
but I think you missed something important. The thing is, we are collectively paying for internet-infra through broadband charges/taxes.(we collectively own it). we don't have to subsidize greedy companies making bad decisions with our time/money/privacy.
the business models/decision of the companies is at fault, they made it monetarily free, and when they find they can't make money, rather than fixing the problem with their model, they try to own/charge internet which is not theirs. (drm etc)
I argue otherwise regd economic downturn, if it is not for selfless opensource developers the internet/business we see , will not exist. even many of these so called businesses use their work and make unimaginable pool of profits of their work, with zero concern for society.
Servers "block" HTTP requests, not clients.
Traditional free-to-air broadcasting (mostly) works financially because they pay once for the transmission, it's a largely fixed fee to cover an area, and then they get paid for the audience they potentially reach. Even still the broadcasters have to pay to have market research agencies run surveys to figure out what's being watched and by whom. When pay TV providers became able to get telemetry from set-top boxes the value of the addressable market rocketed because the audience was no longer hypothetical, it could be measured, analysed and segmented.
The reason you get crap ads when personalisation is turned off is because the advertisers who have money want their advertising dollars spent on addressable market, not on random NPCs. A non-addressable ad is cheaper, so that's the market for who's buying the ads. I hate ads, so I have YouTube Premium Family, that works great because I can see content without interruption and I support the independent content creators. I also run PiHole because some sites and services are just so loaded with advertising that it's annoying, so I might well be hypocritical here.
But the biggest issue that people don't understand, or think they understand but totally under estimate, is the technical challenge of delivering every video on YouTube everywhere in the world with fair quality. I build streaming infrastructure at scale (not for Google) and I'll tell you that it's really expensive to do what they do and yet people take it for granted. They feel entitled to watch YouTube because Google represents the evil establishment, without recognising the challenges they face.
I don't agree with the idea that it's good to write apps that mooch off YouTube just because they're a big corporation. Yup, it's not piracy, it's probably on the lighter side of the grey area of unauthorised API abuse. If you want to build a competing service to Google that comes without personalised ads and has great content, I wish you all the best but when you get the CDN bill, you'll understand. There's a cost per viewed minute that's probably unsustainable. Heck, even traditional broadcasters who have launched their own streaming services have struggled to make money, and that's with targeted advertising enabled.
Once again, people blaming sites for things browsers should handle. It's not YouTube that does the tracking; it's your browser allowing it to happen. YouTube is not fetching data from you. YouTube is using the data you send it. This comes from the browser, allowing it to happen. The misplaced blame is why we are in this state.
How do they try to manipulate you? Appeal to you, sure. Not wanting them to have your data, absolutely. But manipulate?
I recall at the time of the EU referendum in the UK, I was being bombarded with video "adverts" about how Turkey was about to enter the EU, and if they did, it would be a corridor for terrorists, we'd had some incidents around that time, and so it was targeted to play on people's fears.
If only for a second, it gave me pause for thought.
I'm not here to comment on any of that, but that was the time when I realised, we _are_ being manipulated by targeted "advertising"; in what I consider the most underhanded and disgusting ways.
I'm much wiser to it now, I was always cautious before, but now I've seen the manipulation of others, and their fears; I'm constantly shooting down bullshit that family, friends and acquaintances are being targeted with on social media etc.
Fuck advertising, and targeted advertising even more so. I'll block it, and if I can't I won't use the platform, it's that simple.
when I am in freshman year, I wanted to host a website and started looking online for best service, I was bombarded with google cloud ads across all websites. I thought google cloud is the best service.(I was never shown results of AWS/IBM watson, when they are far better than Google Cloud at that time). you always use web for exploring options and these ads can manipulate to pivot to one service, when it is not always the best.
after that I tried an experiment with my friends from my collage dorm. we have a proxy for our university. so only tracking I assume is done through respective google accounts.one of them has an Iphone (buys a lot on amazon), others use android. we searched for "best watches to buy", the recommendations/ads(top results) for iphone user is ~1k$(premium brands) and we were shown results of watches around 100$ etc.
I would say above results are manipulative because they will pivot our further searches, the search is not showing best watches/blogs about it. but showing results that the AI think will have higher rate of ads - buy conversion.
The above results definitely will have an impact on further searches, The iphone user will pivot his search to the top results he see which might not always be best.
They are designed to get you to buy things you don't need, and they do that through manipulating human traits. They make you feel you will be lesser/incomplete/not as good as unless you have such and such product. This is not "appealing" to people - it's stone cold corporate manipulation with only one goal in mind.
People have way less control over how they react to what they take in then they think they do.
The creation of a vacuum that didn't previously exist but now needs to be filled.
Or the pointing out of a vacuum that previously went unnoticed, but is now noticed and therefore must be filled.
>*Emotional brands have a significant impact when the consumer experiences a strong and lasting attachment to the brand comparable to a feeling of bonding, companionship or love*. Examples of emotional branding include the nostalgic attachment to the Kodak brand of film, bonding with the Jim Beam bourbon brand, and love for the McDonald’s brand.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays
>Edward Louis Bernays (/bɜːrˈneɪz/ bur-NAYZ, German: [bɛʁˈnaɪs]; November 22, 1891 − March 9, 1995) was an American theorist, considered a pioneer in the field of public relations and propaganda, and referred to in his obituary as "the father of public relations".[3] His best-known campaigns include a 1929 effort to promote female smoking by branding cigarettes as feminist "Torches of Freedom", and *his work for the United Fruit Company in the 1950s, connected with the CIA-orchestrated overthrow of the democratically elected Guatemalan government in 1954*.
If you don't consider deliberate induction of emotions that imitate love, fear or hatred in order to sell product manipulative I don't know what to tell you.
He did a whole lot of other manipulative tricks, his wiki page is intense.
Ads are known to exploit and enflame insecurities and doubt to garner sales.
Deleted Comment
For instance, if I receive a HTML/CSS data that displays a trademarked design (which should be kept as a whole), I am able to mangle the presentation part any way I want for personal usage. If I publish a site that's a mangled copy of a trademarked site, that's gray area. For my PC usage, no gray area. Same with disassembling, reverse engineering, etc.
Then, I have a right to publish any tools that perform any customizations over owner's items, be them hardware or software. Customizing proprietary software and reselling it is illicit. Customizing for one's own purposes isn't (the proprietor may choose to drop support for owner on his prerogative).
Most important point is that YT and alikes want to freeload in the middle area. They want to be free and public, but they want to force the way you consume them. That is a no go. YT can choose to make a closed system, but then they would lose all random people without accounts finding YT links and watching them. Really, tie the google account, and set up watching quotas, direct payment or any other system where YT directly gets "paid back". The user can use his tokens to access streams from wherever he wants, youtube-dl or whatnot.
This misunderstanding is the basis of your entire argument: YouTube is not a public resource. It’s a private company providing access to mostly private content in exchange for payment under certain terms.
Currently they have the right to deny access as desired and even to pursue legal charges against people who don’t follow their terms. The only way to change the situation is to change the law, such as what some countries have done to limit the amount of tracking they’re allowed to perform. Client portability would be an interesting but challenging argument to make since they would have raise not only the past estimates of revenue lost due to unauthorized redistribution but now would almost certainly make the argument that creators need to be protected against unauthorized AI usage, too. I’d like to be proven pessimistic but it seems unlikely that we’re going to see much political will for IP reform with relatively little public demand.
What terms?
I can go to youtube.com right now without an account, without accepting any agreement or contract, click on a video and it will send data to my computer. How I process that data on my computer is entirely up to me and not anyone else.
> providing access to mostly private content in exchange for payment under certain terms.
Confused frown. That doesn't match any description I've previously come across about what YouTube is.
I thought YouTube content was pretty much entirely 'public'.
If they removed their website and access to the content was limited only to those who paid a monthly subscription via an app then that'd be slightly different.
But then they'd lose all the foot traffic.
A significant part of the fees Ticketmaster charges goes to mitigating bots reserving seats and then reselling them on the secondary market. This problem can be easily addressed by requiring reserves and purchases to be made only from registered accounts. They choose not to do this because they’ve determined the cost of combating fraud is offset by allowing non-account holders to make purchases for events.
I believe ads actively make life worse. Modern ads are based on creating wants, rather than addressing needs. The more wants you have, the less satisfied you will be with your life.
If I needed to do some home improvement and went to the hardware store, and there were ads for certain brands in the store, that's not a problem. The ads are giving me information about a product that I might need.
But that's not how most advertisement works. Car companies don't advertise to people who need a car to commute, they show you an ad with a hot guy driving a car in a beautiful landscape and make you want to be that guy. You can't be the guy without the car, so you want the car. The goal of the ad is not to inform, it's to create a desire.
I don't want to want. I want to be content, and I can't be content if I'm always wanting. The only way around it is to not want in the first place.
If you're a Buddhist monk then you can do that already, but I'm not. Human nature is to want things, so the way I have to prevent myself from wanting things is by not exposing myself to superfluous ads.
Because a service like Github is an emergent property of a bunch of developers making similar decisions:
1) spend time & effort setting up a git on home server or Raspberry Pi -- or -- spend that time playing with my kids or riding a bike outside
2) spend $10/month for a shared hosting plan to run my git/Gitlab instance -- or spend $0 for a free account on Github
3) expose my self-hosted home ip address -- or find a networking workaround because my house is behind ISP NAT and/or I don't want to publicize my home ip address and keep it private so I use someone else's public network ... such as Github
Take variations of those 3 reasons and multiply it out by a million developers making similar decisions and you will inevitably end up with a "free automatically managed git instance in the cloud" ... aka Github.
Just try an independent engine like https://mojeek.com and see for yourself how vastly different the surfing experience is. It's like you're back to the time when the internet was accessible and not centralised to a few Big Tech apps and websites.
Technically nothing.
Morally, you are depriving the content creators and Youtube of revenue (if they rely on Youtube ads). You could argue that they aren't somehow fundamentally entitled to make money, but you are also not fundamentally entitled to consume their content. The content creator had to do work to produce the content and YT has to do work to provide a platform where it can be disseminated. Naturally, they want to be paid for doing this work. We can argue about how much they should be paid, but again nobody is forced to watch YT. It's a voluntary transaction. If you don't like ads, buy a YT subscription. If you don't want to support YT, encourage your content creators to provide their content elsewhere.
Practically, some companies have been historically willing to shut one or both eyes over open source/free projects as a gesture of goodwill (or marketing exercise). The moment money is involved, the lawyers tend to be unleashed and the whole "this is just a free hobby project with no monetary incentives for the developers" goes out the window.
Deleted Comment
Instead Patreon or Librapay is a better way to support them.
https://www.stephendiehl.com/blog/crypto-is-a-scam.html
In general, software engineers even on HN tend to agree with that - that using their paid service without paying is bad, yeah.
As long as it's possible to block ads, people will just do it, because it provides a SUPERIOR browsing experience than otherwise. I sometimes turn uBlock off by accident and instantly get reminded how screwed the browsing experience is without it.
Some people also claim that ad-blocking hurts content creators. This is mostly false. Most content creators have realized by now that relying on ad revenue as a considerable source of income is unsustainable in the long term, due to aformentioned reasons. That's why most have Patreon, Ko-fi, merch shops, donations etc., which is a far more solid business model.
I block all ads everywhere I can, I don't care if they track me or not, if they are "privacy-respecting" or other crap, I simply don't care. And I encourage everyone to do the same.
"I didn't request the ad"
Is it? Most of the times I've seen these things come up it's mainly in the context of those being additional, but much smaller, revenue streams for the vast majority of creators.
Are there many creators surviving entirely (or at least primarily) on subscription/donation/etc revenue?
As an example, a recommendation from ARTEde with the title "Poor despite job | ARTE Re:" where the thumbnail shows "Brits at the limit" and someone standing in an supermarket aisle.
Or the title "TSMC's First Breakthrough: The Copper/Low K Interconnect..." with the thumbnail "COPPER SEMIS" on top of a magnified semiconductor.
I don’t understand the arguments here. If you don’t want ads, then pay for Premium. It’s fantastic that an option exists to solve the problem! If you don’t like the price, then don’t pay for it.
Somehow people have got it in their minds that YouTube owes them content for free. That’s a great mindset to make the shift to peertube and away from YouTube, but I don’t think it holds up as justification for getting mad at YouTube for forcing their preexisting paid plan to remove ads.
Either pay for YouTube Premium or shift to a different model of video sharing. Both options currently exist!
[0] https://joinpeertube.org/
You won't get a direct answer for this. Only endless justifications as for why it's seemingly impossible to just not use Youtube.
So... you will get answers?
That you disagree with the reasons give does not mean that they're not giving you reasons. It just means you disagree with the reasons that they gave :)
Using a adblocker is just returning the favor.
If you don’t like Google, don’t use their products. Yes, they are hard to avoid. However, in the case of YouTube, it can be avoided by not using it. You can’t have your cake and eat it too.
If we accept "sell your data" as a shorthand for "allow targeting ads to you without actually giving the seller of the ad any information about you", it's still something you can control. In fact, the very first time you use YouTube you'd be shown a non-modal dialog about whether they're allowed to use your data for ad targeting or not, and have to make a yes/no choice
So it sure sounds like your objection is just an excuse.
I just download it with yt-dlp or throw it in to mpv. If those stop working I'll probably just stop watching youtube altogether since I only watch maybe 6-10 vids a week anyway. This "app" does look quite good, but for how long it will work if g**e keeps making it difficult I don't know.
This might be useful to you. Alternative YT frontend with many instances. Usually the only third party connection is to googlevideo.com, which is unavoidable, if you want videos from YT.
Sometimes a video might not play or might not be downloadable. Simply switch instance, maybe to an instance in another country, and try there.