Comment by danpalmer
4 days ago
I do pay for YouTube Premium, I see no ads, and everything works pretty conveniently. What's your point, that with a bit of extra effort you can pirate content?
4 days ago
I do pay for YouTube Premium, I see no ads, and everything works pretty conveniently. What's your point, that with a bit of extra effort you can pirate content?
For me, and many people, advertising is a mental health issue. I don't enjoy those ads, they are very disturbing and jarring. It causes me anxiety and I don't like the things that those ads normalize. I don't think most people, especially americans, realize how far off the rails our society is in terms of our normalization of insane shit.
So, for health reasons, I block nearly all advertisements. It is a HUGE mental health win. There is a ton of research behind this, as well.
I'm not going to pay extra money to disable a health concern. I'll block ads instead. I should not have to PAY MORE for a product that doesn't damage my health.
I will always happily directly support content creators. I will not watch ads.
You're responding to a comment that says they pay and don't see ads
> I should not have to PAY MORE for a product that doesn't damage my health.
Is this the same way of saying your mental health is important to you but you're not prepared to pay a service money to protect said mental health and support creators you like?
> I'm not going to pay extra money to disable a health concern.
Honest question: Why? You do pay for toothpaste, right? If you have a gym membership, you pay extra for the convenience not to do cardio in the woods (which is great in late May, much less so in late November). You tend to pay more for nutritious food as compared to things you get at a fast food joint.
What makes a health concern related to $genericOnlineService different?
This is less like paying for a gym membership and more like paying some kind of fat-fairy not to come inject you with fat while you’re sleeping every night.
Paying for things that help you is good. Paying someone not to try to scam you is… fucked up.
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Blocking ads is hardly "pirating" content
To be clear, this is not a value judgement. I pirate content sometimes, and I use adblockers, but ad blocking is definitely piracy – you're circumventing the method of paying for content.
I realise that online ads have other implications such as tracking that, say, a blu-ray rip downloaded from a torrent doesn't have, but the reason for piracy doesn't change the fact that it is.
> you're circumventing the method of paying for content.
So it is a payment?!? Through out the last decades advertisement has not been liable under customer protection laws that regulate sales of products, and generally avoided local laws. The stated reason has been that advertisement is not a sale since the viewer is not recompensating the publisher. A product given for free is in a completely different category of law than that of a sale.
Im old enough to remember when phone companies tried the tactic of giving away mobile phones for free, but which carried a binding contract with the carrier. Courts found that to be illegal and forced companies to sell them for 1 cent since a free product can not have a binding contract, which turned the transaction into a sale. The outcome of that meant that information of the full cost must be given to the customer in no unclear terms, since we are now dealing with a sale.
Products given for free with advertisement is also exempted in EU from value added tax. The given reason (can't find the original legal source) was that viewers may watch nothing, some or all the advertisement, and that makes putting a monetary value and taxing it difficult. If you buy a subscription it can be taxed, but watching it free with adds do not. This is true for both physical and non-physical goods.
I don't think it is piracy. Most advertising supported content is made freely available to you with the expectation that you will view the advertising. That expectation is not a contract and was a decision made without your involvement. You have no obligation to perform to someone else's expectations. If the content is made freely available you are free to watch it whichever way you choose. Choosing not to view the advertising might mean they don't get paid for producing their content, but you are under no obligation in the absence of an agreement.
Piracy involves you deciding to acquire content that has not been made freely available.
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1. It's not piracy.
2. I don't care.
I choose what code runs on my machine, not Google. Google can run their own code on their own machines, that's fine. Once data is in my processor, I'm going to do what I want with it. Google doesn't have to concern themselves with what I'm doing on my own computer.
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> you're circumventing the method of paying for content.
I disagree. If you were buying every advertised product and falling for every advertised scam then fair enough. But assuming you were ignoring them, there is no issue with offloading the thing you would do anyway to a computer and save everyone the time/bandwidth.
37 replies →
Ad blockers are recommended by the FBI as safety measures. I follow the FBI's advice. Internet ads are a vector for executing untrusted code that can invoke exploits and engage in invasive fingerprinting. Revert back to the 90s web with dumb ads and I'll look at them. It's amazing how blinkered people will be about potentially malicious programs downloaded from the internet just because it's hidden behind a browser interface.
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I can absolutely decide to reject with impunity any and all packets that my computer receives, no matter if I initialized the request. I have not made a sale by reading some other website content and have absolute authority to discriminate over which data is allowed or blocked. Ads have absolutely no higher authority or preference over other packets that would obligate my bandwidth, attention, or time.
> but ad blocking is definitely piracy
This is a huge escalation of an already over-stuffed term.
Equating piracy to theft was bad enough, now choosing to not view ads is also piracy, which is theft?
I try to be chill here but no, foot down, absolutely not. Blocking ads is nothing more than determing what content comes in on the wire to the computer you own, or what content is rendered in your web browser. That's it. If that means someone isn't making money when they could be, well, too bad so sad.
It's like, "if you walk past a Nike store without pausing to hear the sales pitch, you are stealing from Nike." Capitalist hellscape.
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> you're circumventing the method of paying for content.
Without an ad blocker I can stand up and walk to the next room - optionally muting audio output - then come back.
Is that fraud? Or should I drink a verification can?
Just because you say it's piracy doesn't mean it is.
When they provide all the equipment necessary to watch the content, and pay for the internet connection and power to my house, only then will they have a claim to what commands are run on my computer.
But my computer, that I paid for, using the power and bandwidth that I pay for, does not play ads.
If they don't like those terms, they can feel absolutely free to not send me any content they don't want me to watch.
Some of us are old enough to remember televisions. It's not piracy to leave the room or turn the TV off while the ads are playing.
See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_Broadcasting_Co._v._Dish_N...
Was it piracy to leave the room and make a snack during TV ads?
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While this is not an unreasonable way one could define "piracy", surely you must be aware that your definition is significantly more expansive than the one in common use?
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I'm pretty anti-piracy, and I don't think ad-blocking is piracy.
Metaphors are dangerous, but, for the purposes of this specific comparison, I see piracy as breaking into a video store and taking a disc, and ad blocking as allowing some people into my house but not others.
YouTube is free to block me as a user or put its content behind a paywall if it doesn't like me doing this, but I am also free to decide what comes into my browser.
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Just use AdNausem (uBlock Origin mod) that clicks ALL THE ADDS. Problem solved! Wish more people used it, so the creators could again make money from ads.
No. Ad blocking is NOT piracy. It’s really that simple.
> "you're circumventing the method of paying for content"
Because the payment method is a scam. Imagine if all car owners were charged the same price for fuel regardless of how much they used.
Likewise, imagine watching 10 videos and being charged the same as someone who watches 200 videos.
We should pay for what we watch. The end. Ad blocking is not piracy when the payment option is at best a blunt extraction of funds from my wallet, at worst a sleazy shakedown.
> ad blocking is definitely piracy – you're circumventing the method of paying for content
This ship sailed when adblockers first went mainstream. (One of the early developers dropped their product because they thought it was unethical.)
I think we’ve now moved to the consensus that adblocking when viewing content isn’t pirating. It’s similar. But not the same, in intent, mechanism or effect.
> but ad blocking is definitely piracy – you're circumventing the method of paying for content
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45177601
What you are describing is not piracy/Copyright infringement.
You can say that we should not be blocking those ads, that is fine. But blocking ads is not making unauthorised copies of the content.
lol, no it’s not pirating.
I don't really see what the difference is.
They're not getting the payment for the video either way.
Morally I don't see how they aren't equivalent. I'm not going to stand on a high horse saying you shouldn't do either, but I don't really see how you can pretend one is less harmful to creators than the other, in terms of the basic principles involved.
Piracy involves obtaining media content for free for which you should normally pay for, as a result of someone sharing the media meant for their own personal use to the general public.
YouTube does not ask for payment, it sends the video data you want alongside some bullshit you’ll ignore and waste precious human time doing so.
Ad blocking just involves offloading the ignoring to the computer, as it should, since computers are meant to automate menial tasks.
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> the payment for the video either way.
"the payment for the video" as if it's a given that my ad impression is required for me to watch some video that they made available to me on their website for free.
Morally, YouTube shows the most heinous and scummy ads 24/7 on their platform and fails to take them down when reported. Gambling, AI sex games, "cure what doctors miss" ads for human use of Ivermectin - it's your moral duty to block them.
You wouldn't not download a virus.
its pirating content in a way that you dont generate revenue for youtuber that expect from ads
I'm not generating revenue for a lot of companies who are in the advertising business. That's not the definition of piracy. Find another word.
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Most content creators have links to support them with donation or patreon.
Once a year choose 3 small youtubers (larger ones are already multi-millioners, they don't need your help) and drop them $5 each.
Now you just did 1000% of what they could get from you watching ads.
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I'm sure that trillion-dollar analytics empire is worth something even without my eyeballs consuming some shitty pre-roll.
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You still get the autogenerated dubs by default, the comments moved to end of the earth, and many other stuff (shorts etc.) people get pissed about.
At this point ads are just one of the annoyances amoung so many others.
The massive overlays of what-to-watch-next hiding most of the video much too early, ie. before the very end, of the video you were trying to watch until the end but now just ragequit and downloaded instead... are very ugly
Those are there because the content creator you’re watching decided to put them there. It’s entirely up to them whether they show up and when they show up.
And they can be hidden, so it's not exactly entirely up to them, nor should it be. If they wanted them in the video content they could put them there.
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I pay for YouTube Premium too (probably not much longer) but can only 'comfortably' use the site through a series of increasingly hacky extensions for Firefox. On non-web apps, there is no recourse from the UI enshittification.
The general theme is the same as the article: less real estate dedicated to actual videos you might want to watch. There were two rows of completely useless garbage that I had to add to my uBlock Origin filter just now: one for Shorts (which I have blocked in the past) and a new one for some sort of Youtube Games thing (?) that looked like the worst AI generated slop you'd never want to play.
If this is the premium experience then I don't want it.
> The general theme is the same as the article: less real estate dedicated to actual videos you might want to watch. There were two rows of completely useless garbage that I had to add to my uBlock Origin filter just now: one for Shorts (which I have blocked in the past) and a new one for some sort of Youtube Games thing (?) that looked like the worst AI generated slop you'd never want to play.
This is the same stuff you get without buying Premium. So I guess they figure you're only paying to dodge the ads.
Which seems, to me, like a lot of money compared to (ad cost * number of ads you would see).
Just here to say thank you to everyone arguing/explaining why ad blockers are not piracy using interesting arguments better than my own.
You will never walk alone.
The point is that the pirated experience is both easier to access and more convenient.
If I'm paying, I expect the best possible experience, and you just don't get that. It's not just YouTube, many streaming services are objectively inferior to pirating.
I do pay for YouTube Premium - and I still get ads when someone has YT Videos embedded on their website. YouTube knows who I am, the cookies are set, there is no reason to give me ads.
It is not yet painful enough for me to invest time and energy to research less convenient ways of UX improvement. Not ... yet.
As a premium user I'd like to block shorts.
I also like that there’s no ads in premium. Speaking of premium things, I also really like Brilliant for learning things quickly and Surfshark VPN because it protects my privacy when I’m on the go.
I also pay for premium, and have for at least 15 years since it was called Red, and the experience is complete garbage.
If you turn off history, you get zero videos on your home screen. This is not because the history is needed to generate the suggestions, because the blank home only started a few years ago.
I used to never subscribe to any channels, I just got reasonable feed of suggestions based off of whatever I happened to search for explicitly or if I got there by clicking a link, or by what I chose to click on even if the list starts out totally random, except of course it never was totally random because they still have ip address and other fingerprnting signals.
After they blaked out the home screen and started showing the "you're not logged in, go here to fix this error", I subscribed to a bunch of channels to provide data for generating a feed. They still don't provide any. You can take extra clicks (which is agonizing on the Roku since it just doesn't react well and misses button presses all the time) to get to the subscriptions page, which will show recent uploads exactly from those channels and no others.
I also still get several other forms of ads in the form of the embedded/native ads and the irrelevant suggestions that come from youtube's interests instead of my own, like shorts. I also still get ads simply because I don't get to use my own account all the time. When you watch youtube anywhere but your own laptop by yourself, you are at the whims of someone else's account and some other platforms app limitations.
And even on your own machine, I absolutely resent having to tie my viewing history to my identity and have someone else log all of that. So there is reason to intentionally use no account even if you otherwise have no problem paying to support not only the content producers but even the delivery system.
Why can't I disable shorts? There is no amount I can pay to hide all shorts, but I can have it for free i=on a pc with a tampermonkey or ublock script. But that only helps on a pc. I watch mostly on a TV and I have no ability to hack the roku app. Maybe if I switch to a google tv I could use newpipe or something.
Paying for premium does not make youtube good. It does not resolve much of anything. It is not remotely the touche this smarmy comment attempts to suggest.
Paying for premium takes youtube from being like pulling out 10 of your fingernails to only pulling out 8 of your fingernails.
That 2of10 fingernals relief and for the sake of the creators, that's the only reason I still pay for premium.
They keep doing it because you keep paying them.
Use the money you save to buy a media pc that can block shorts to use to watch youtube on the tv.
It's not piracy.
If I go to the bathroom during an ad break, am I "pirating" the content?
If it weren't for piracy, there would be nothing on Youtube except highschool dropouts lobbing accusations at each other, and AI-generated slop.