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Comment by komali2

4 days ago

> 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.

43 comments

komali2

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JAlexoid  4 days ago

If we're going with bad analogies I have an opposite one - you're walking past the Nike store and the store has a promotion on "Watch 5 minutes of ads and get a free pair of shoes", but you instead kick the TV with the ads over, grab the shoes and run away.

Or are you going to pretend that there's no agreement between you and YouTube that you're going to watch ads in exchange for the free content?

  • baumy  4 days ago

    I will not be pretending that. I am _asserting_ it. I made no such agreement with YouTube. I am very confused why you think I did

    • JAlexoid  4 days ago

      Are you going to lie that you didn't know that the videos are shown to you in exchange for ads?

      Entering into a contract doesn't necessarily require you to sign a document. Quite a few contracts that we make every day require no formal acceptance, like entering a shop.

      11 replies →

    • tailrecursion  4 days ago

      I agree with this. There was no meeting of the minds, no contract. But, the terms in the Google account probably include something about the terms for viewing youtube videos.

      5 replies →

HDThoreaun  4 days ago

[flagged]

  • Nextgrid  4 days ago

    I don’t make a deal when I visit a website, and especially not when I have to visit it because it became the de-facto standard when sharing video content. I just get my computer to ask for some bytes and the server happily sends them to me. If the server happened to send me some garbage in addition, I am free to make my computer ignore it.

  • rmunn  4 days ago

    What deal? What contract?

    I'm serious. Show me in the Youtube Terms of Service where it says that blocking ads is against the contract. I've looked. Carefully. There is no such language there.

    • its_ethan  4 days ago

      I don't think you actually looked very closely, so it's weird you've doubled down on that lol

      Item 2 of "Permissions and Restrictions" says you aren't allowed to "circumvent, disable, fraudulently engage with, or otherwise interfere with any part of the Service (or attempt to do any of these things), including security-related features or features that (a) prevent or restrict the copying or other use of Content or (b) limit the use of the Service or Content;"

      where "content" is earlier defined as basically anything Google/YT sends you (which would include the ad).

      A quick google search also takes you to a pretty straightforward statement from Google/YT: "When you block YouTube ads, you violate YouTube’s Terms of Service."

      [TOS]: https://www.youtube.com/t/terms#c3e2907ca8

      [Help Center]: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/14129599?hl=en#:~:...

      1 reply →

  • venturecruelty  4 days ago

    YouTube sends my browser a lot of data, a LOT of data. It's not my fault if some of that data doesn't make it to the screen, or if hardware on my network blocks certain DNS requests. No, I asked YouTube for a web page, and it sent one back to me. I'm not sure why everyone is so eager to let someone else dictate what code they run on their own machine. It's really strange.

  • komali2  4 days ago

    > The deal you make with YouTube is that you watch the ad in exchange for the video.

    Did I? Can you tell me where I made this deal? I navigated to YouTube.com, I don't see a contract, I don't see a place to sign or a hand to shake. Where is this bilateral agreement?

    I think what you meant to say was, YouTube really very much wants me to watch their ads, and I don't care to, so I won't.

    If your counter is that then YouTube will shut down, I say, oh well, I've already archived all the videos I care about, and someone else will replace them, or not, and either way life will go on.