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YouTube's Anti-Adblock and uBlock Origin

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381–390 of 781 posts

Re: YouTube's Anti-Adblock and uBlock Origin

#381

This ad block debate makes me think about patio11’s post “The optimal amount of fraud is non zero”. Essentially in trying to make a system as fraud-free as possible you make it too difficult to work with / the cost of fighting fraud is higher than the cost of the fraud. Ads vs Ad Blockers seem to be in that space, but on the cost of customer good will. Can YouTube squeeze more money from ads by doing this? Sure. Is i…

> patio11’s post “The optimal amount of fraud is non zero”. Thanks, I just skimmed this post. It seems to me that "optimal" is substituting for "cost effective". The optimal amount of fraud is always zero, it's just not cost effective given the existence of people willing to go to lengths to commit fraud. > Can YouTube squeeze more money from ads by doing this? The third option is that this would incentivize a portio…

Cost effective in a way. A more precise thing to say might be that the Nash equilibrium of the system contains a non zero amount of fraud.

Or that fraud is an evolutionarily stable strategy within the environment.

Re: YouTube's Anti-Adblock and uBlock Origin

#382
post #78

A lot of absurd moralizing here about "you're stealing by not watching ads". I keep adblock on for most sites because ads are so intrusive and often malware vectors. If advertisers want my eyes they need to not be obnoxious. I started blocking YouTube ads in particular because it kept serving me ads that were brazenly homophobic ("how gross and smelly is gay sex? Find out!") I feel no moral problem with this, if you…

Agree. Many are ignoring the fact that these ads aren't all traditional advertising. Particularly appauling in my view is the propaganda: https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/clive-palmer-spends-... We saw similar things with The Voice referendum recently. When someone has paid to manipulate society en masse, and there are no more targeted controls to stop the content being forced on you available, why is anyone s…

... and Australia has (had maybe?) pretty good rules around television advertising. I mean, at least it's a good way up the logarithmic scale from internet advertising standards anyway.

P.S. I use Clive Palmer's advertising as a useful data point for what not to support, so it's not a total waste.

Re: YouTube's Anti-Adblock and uBlock Origin

#383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. People need to go in the line of fire a lot more. Once you are hardened, you just waltz through these bullshits like a 70 ton tank.

The people we're talking about are providing a service for free, with no direct benefit to them. Why would they go into the line of fire for something like that? It is our collective duty to make sure individuals providing a service to society are treated with respect. If we can't do that then we simply don't deserve their time and effort.

Why would someone who fears crossing photocell doors try it again and again... For years? To overcome the phobia, that's why.

Nah, people need to be brought out of the protecting bubble.

You give money to them, so they have a tangible evidence that their work means something. Not just stars and patting in the back. Time to stop the open source beggar movement.

Re: YouTube's Anti-Adblock and uBlock Origin

#384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're neither paying YouTube any money nor watching their ads, meaning you're a pure money sink, why should they care about your goodwill?

If I'm referring thousands of people to YouTube, and I stop doing that while simultaneously joining the chorus of anti-YT sentiment on the internet, their bottom line should care.

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Re: YouTube's Anti-Adblock and uBlock Origin

#385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're neither paying YouTube any money nor watching their ads, meaning you're a pure money sink, why should they care about your goodwill?

If I'm referring thousands of people to YouTube, and I stop doing that while simultaneously joining the chorus of anti-YT sentiment on the internet, their bottom line should care.

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Re: YouTube's Anti-Adblock and uBlock Origin

#386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way to fix it with infinite money is to have individual human curators (concierge services) for every customer. This eliminates fraud and makes a very, very easy-to-use "user interface" when the human concierges are well trained. Regardless, even if I'm wrong with "cost effective", the word still isn't "optimal".

However well trained they may be, humans are notoriously easy to manipulate and engineer around. Humans in a customer service role especially, since they are by definition expected to be helpful by default.

We've reached maximum reply depth.

> This is not a hypothetical. In many healthcare systems, that is the approximate timeframe for medical practice, doctors are amongst the most expensive and selectively educated service professionals on the planet, and can still be readily hoodwinked by a bad faith approach.

Yes, because they are trained, licensed, and incentivized to place other things above fraud detection or customer service itself. I was literally discussing with the other person about Youtube, for which 5 - 10 years of training is sufficient to train a concierge and still leave 4.5 - 9.5 years dedicated to fraud detection and prevention.

People complain about health care all of the time, yet most of them still come back to it. The threshold for flouncing due to bad user interface is a lot higher than for Youtube.

Re: YouTube's Anti-Adblock and uBlock Origin

#387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Attention and personal information are not a valid payment methods. Either charge money up front or accept the risk we're going to delete your ads and block your tracking.

Why aren't they valid payment methods?

Because our minds are sacred. They're not empty spaces they get to insert brands and products into at will. I consider that a form of violence. Their surveillance capitalism should be literally illegal. They should be scrambling to forget all about us the second we're done transacting with them, not amassing vast amounts of information into data lakes.

Re: YouTube's Anti-Adblock and uBlock Origin

#388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The people we're talking about are providing a service for free, with no direct benefit to them. Why would they go into the line of fire for something like that? It is our collective duty to make sure individuals providing a service to society are treated with respect. If we can't do that then we simply don't deserve their time and effort.

Why would someone who fears crossing photocell doors try it again and again... For years? To overcome the phobia, that's why. Nah, people need to be brought out of the protecting bubble. You give money to them, so they have a tangible evidence that their work means something. Not just stars and patting in the back. Time to stop the open source beggar movement.

Regularly having to deal with abusive comments takes a mental toll on you no matter how much of a tough guy you are. Why do you think we're entitled to them not only sacrificing their time, but also their mental heath? Donations on most open-source projects don't even come close to covering the costs of either.

Again, we are not entitled to their services and assholes can and will ruin nice things for all of us.

Re: YouTube's Anti-Adblock and uBlock Origin

#389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think YouTube will "win" this war, unfortunately. Even people that "join" individual channels cannot watch content from those channels if they use AdBlock. At some point these people are either going to buy premium or turn off the ad-blocker. It boggles my mind that engineers and managers that have kids and are working on the YouTube team think this is okay and this is what the future of the platform should look li…

YT is too big for people who hate ads to not invest a massive effort. The ad blocker endgame will be YT videos being "pre-watched" by a headless browser running in the background and the video data grabbed from there (either recorded or directly). You then watch the ad-less video in a custom frontend. If implemented correctly there's pretty much nothing YT could hope to do about this.

Wasn't one of Kimdotcom's ventures scraping YT videos for the creation of his own streaming platform at some stage?

Seems like slightly less of greasy activity now than it was then.

"Count eight" about halfway down the page: https://cip2.gmu.edu/2015/09/22/lets-get-real-about-kim-dotc...

Re: YouTube's Anti-Adblock and uBlock Origin

#390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think empathy is a much more relevant superpower, and the lack of it can be disgusting.

Unfortunately, after all my observations of humans over the course of decades, I feel like real empathy is actually pretty rare in humans. It might be common in fictitious characters, but not in real people.

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