this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2023
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How dare YouTube enforce their own policies on their own website?
I would love if everything was free, too.
And I'm not a Google lover. Ditched Chrome on all my devices a couple weeks ago.
I just think seeing everyone scream and cry about the movie theater hiring security guards cuz kids sneaking in the back are flooding the seats is pretty funny. Everyone wants their cake and to eat it, too. Both Google and their users.
I think a lot of people feel that youtube is getting to eat all of the cake and is only offering crackers in return.
I think people accept that services need to advertise to survive, but become upset when that level of advertisemeant becomes excessive.
Services are funded by advertisers. Advertisers are funded by their customers, the general public, after charging more for their products to fund advertisement. This is a symptom of the commodification of the collective consciousness. Absolutely disgusting.
No one would have adblock if the ad situation on websites never grew completely out of control.
This is absurdly inaccurate. I've been on the internet since AOL and adblockers have been around since the VERY beginning.
A company called Juno used to offer free dial up internet if you allowed a permanent banner of ads at the bottom of your screen. This was the early 2000s. Guess what existed even then, to block the ads? Just cuz a company was trying to get SOMETHING for providing something for free? Yup, adblockers. The narrative "oh, the companies started it!!" Is very easy to parrot, but companies advertising themselves is not wrong or unethical and blaming them for doing it is absurd.
They were niche back then. The amount of adblock users was effectively nothing compared to today.
Not how I remember it
And it would never have gotten completely out of control, if people didn't use ad-block.
We should never have tried to fund the web with ads in the first place. We're perfectly willing to pay for data plans, phone service, electricity. Web services should have been the same from the start.
yea, it would have. corporations are an insanely greedy bunch.
Obviusly. But this was an arms race that was always going to pan out this way the moment we started expecting ads to fund the web.
"I wouldn't get so carried away beating you if you didn't make me so much angrier by trying to run when I smack you."
I agree. But here we are. And until it's illegal to do so (and, honestly, afterwards too), when a website I'm viewing politely asks me to download toxic ad content filled with psychological manipulation and malware, my computer will politely whisper "no." I might revisit this policy in the future if the entire advertising industry takes a huge step back to tone down their abusive shit, but in the meanwhile, I have no problem blocking malignant content from my presence. No means no.
A business plan that requires psychological abuse and exploitation of your customers is not an ethical, sustainable, or valid plan and the people who push it are not worthy of my consideration.
I have YouTube premium included in my pixel pass subscription, so this doesn't necessarily effect me. However, you have a grossly uninformed opinion on data and how it works. You think data caps and fast lanes would've saved us from advertising? I'm sorry but the sad truth is it wouldn't have, the money from the ISPs isn't going to trickle down to the website owners, that's not how it works, that's not how any of this works. That's kind of one of the big arguments against data caps and fast lanes, it limits those websites from receiving traffic and in turn ad revenue. If anything those data caps would make things worse.
I think he means that instead of everything on the early internet being ad supported, they should have just made people pay. Think about it; how much of our problems are because everything is a race to the bottom to capture the most eyeballs? Clickbait, recommended algorithms designed to make you angry, news as entertainment, etc.
This was always the outcome of ads. If you want it to stop, start directly paying for things. If you want to continue this arms race to the bottom, keep doing what we've been doing. (not you you)
You have a grossly misinterpreted understanding of my comment. We pay for things like data because it just being free would never work.
Just like youtube or spotify being free has never really worked. I'm saying we should start paying for services like those the same way we pay for our data plans.
Which part of my comment made you think I was suggesting our data plans should somehow pay for our web services? That would be fucking stupid.
Unfortunately people like things for free, so "Free" means faster user acquisition.
But what really sucks is now everything feels like it's a microtransaction haven.. It's not just "subscriptions" but "Ad ons" and more.
Paying for a program feels almost dead, paying for a service is on the way out, because you're now paying to be on a ad supported service, and they'll keep trying to push that as "how it should be".
There are 18 year olds who have never bought a piece of software before. And there's probably plenty that have only purchased games. Push Xbox Game Pass more and we may even have people who never bought anything, because the modern world isn't about you "Owning" anything, it's about leasing, licensing, and reoccurring payments.
I don’t think Google will miss my skipping their ads, look at their bottom line. It’s ridiculous how many ads there are now and I’m not paying 12 bucks a month to watch a guy show me how to fix shit in my house.
The actual guy generating the content by the way, not to be confused with the middleman platform that just serves it up to you.
They take away dislike button, something I consider essential to navigate content, the algorithm is like a hyperactive drug dealer always ready to sell you the next big hit thing "you might ~~like~~ watch" and according to google itself the last YT revenue was 29.24 billion USD - so, it's not like they are going to sink without it isn't it.
So, yeah no thank you. They are doing extremely well, this is just squeezing every penny they can out of normal people so that the line goes up.
If they also stopped selling all my online data as a part of that subscription then I might consider it but it's hard to trust companies these days.
That's a huge number, but it is meaningless. It's more important to focus on profit (or net income) and unfortunately those numbers aren't as easy to get. You can see all the financials but while Youtube gets revenue numbers, how much they pay to partners, and they spend on google services isn't itemized.
They are probably operating at a profit, but definitely not 29 billiuon dollars of profit
You don’t have a moral responsibility to pay someone who is selling your time and attention on top of someone else’s work. “The servers aren’t free!” Ok. Landlords are entitled to zero profit. The sooner we get there, the better. That’s the main thing Adam Smith and Marx agree on: rentiers are useless.
No. Capitalists want to own everything. DRM that works is always abused until the product is intolerable to legit end users.
Yo ho! Thieves and beggars!
Never shall we die!