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Someone at YouTube Needs Glasses: The Prophecy Has Been Fulfilled

jayd.ml

101–110 of 728 posts

Re: Someone at YouTube Needs Glasses: The Prophecy Has Been Fulfilled

#101
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blocking ads is hardly "pirating" content

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.

Re: Someone at YouTube Needs Glasses: The Prophecy Has Been Fulfilled

#102
post #23

Not really related but... have anyone else noticed that suggestions on the home page became much worse recently? I'm getting a lot of unrelated videos which are often very old, like published up to 18 years ago. OTOH, videos from subscriptions are not getting suggested, I often have to check individual channels to see if they posted anything new. What's happening?

Use the subscriptions page for the channels you follow. I use Unhooked to make it my home page.

Re: Someone at YouTube Needs Glasses: The Prophecy Has Been Fulfilled

#103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which adblocker are you currently using? The arms race is getting pretty tiring...

Even on Safari with Apple’s braindead “content blocker” API, AdGuard manages to successfully block YouTube ads.

Not so braindead after all

Re: Someone at YouTube Needs Glasses: The Prophecy Has Been Fulfilled

#104
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: Someone at YouTube Needs Glasses: The Prophecy Has Been Fulfilled

#105
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Was it piracy to leave the room and make a snack during TV ads?

Re: Someone at YouTube Needs Glasses: The Prophecy Has Been Fulfilled

#106

What's the point being made in this article? That TVs have lower information density than desktop browsers? Like, yeah, obviously. That if you don't sign in to YouTube and don't pay to remove the ads, that you'll get prompted to sign in and you'll see ads? That doesn't seem particularly problematic. Sure it's mildly funny that a funny projection is true in a very contrived way, but it doesn't really stand up to any c…

Compare the 1.25 video thumbnails shown on the apple tv app to the thumbnails on Steam's big picture mode (designed for people sitting on a couch far away from a tv):

1. https://emilio-gomez.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/steamos-...

2. https://preview.redd.it/new-big-picture-mode-is-finally-publ...

Re: Someone at YouTube Needs Glasses: The Prophecy Has Been Fulfilled

#107
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.…

[flagged]

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.

Re: Someone at YouTube Needs Glasses: The Prophecy Has Been Fulfilled

#108

I used to pay for YouTube premium. I stopped doing that, uninstalled the apps, and now use it through the browser with adblockers. (Yes, on my phone and iPad.) It works so well I’ve gotten at least half a dozen neighbours to do the same. If you haven’t tried it, it’s a definitive step up in UX.

What is a set and forget adblocker for the Apple ecosystem?

Wipr, Adblock Pro, Ghostery or uBlock Origin Lite. I've used all four and they perform about as well as you need them to for an adblocker. I'm currently using uBlock.

Re: Someone at YouTube Needs Glasses: The Prophecy Has Been Fulfilled

#109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 com…

I've tried to explain this to people repeatedly and they don't get it. They're always like "oh no the AI scraper is slamming my website it's ruining everything". Um, maybe configure your web browser to not send me data if you don't want me 'scraping' your website. It's literally your server's choice to send me data. I'm just asking from a few IPs. If you want to send data to all of them that's your server's choice.

But I think people don't get the fact that they can just request payment or only send to authenticated users from authorized IPs and so on. Instead they want to send to all IPs without payment but then get upset when I use a bunch of IPs without paying. Weird.

I'm trying to read a bunch of stuff. The entire point of a computer is to make that easy. I'm not going to repetitively click through a bunch of links when a bot can do that way faster.

Re: Someone at YouTube Needs Glasses: The Prophecy Has Been Fulfilled

#110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. 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.

The advertiser is buying the right to put an advert in front of you, not the right to a sale. Whether they convert you is up to them, their product, their offering, etc. I think you can never buy a single product from an ad and this is still piracy.

That said, a lot of advertising is not performance/pay-per-click focused as you've described and is instead brand advertising. The point of the Coca-Cola christmas ads is not to get you to buy a coke today, it's to have a positive impression that builds over years. This sort of advertising is very hard to attribute sales to, but a good example of how you don't need to buy a product for seeing the ad to be worth something to the company.

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