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Someone at YouTube Needs Glasses: The Prophecy Has Been Fulfilled

jayd.ml

141–150 of 728 posts

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

#141
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.

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.

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

#142
post #132

It's difficult to capture into words how much contempt I hold for Google and Amazon, two companies which lost their way long ago and are now actively user-hostile. YouTube has gotten worse with every release. Endless, pointless UI changes. Sneaky resolution downgrades. When your video says "Auto 1080p" it's like 480p quality, manually choose 1080p and watch it change. Amazon has been working overtime to make your exp…

[flagged]

I don't think you know what that word means.

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

#143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

And I have the right to pay someone to watch the ads + videos for me, and then summarize me the video minus ads. Just like I have the right to hand my ad-full newspaper to someone, have them cut out the ads and hand me back the now ad-free one. If both of those are legal and ethical (I’d be curious what argument someone would make against this), then offloading this work to a machine should be just as ethical.

But in those cases someone is still seeing the ads. It's when no one is seeing the ads that it becomes piracy, in my opinion.

A summary is not the same as the content either, that's a fairly well tested concept (fair use, etc).

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

#144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And I have the right to pay someone to watch the ads + videos for me, and then summarize me the video minus ads. Just like I have the right to hand my ad-full newspaper to someone, have them cut out the ads and hand me back the now ad-free one. If both of those are legal and ethical (I’d be curious what argument someone would make against this), then offloading this work to a machine should be just as ethical.

You can rationalize this any way you want, but at the end of the day you're screwing over not a faceless corporation - but the very people who put out videos on YouTube. It's fine if you're OK with it, but don't pretend that you're not doing that.

You're not replying directly to the last comment because it posed a hard question, and you've resorted to an emotional appeal.

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

#145

Why. Why are they doing this. It’s the same with Netflix. I don’t understand. What is the metric that goes up when they show a couple giant videos.

I would presume the conversion rate for those specific three videos are much higher then if they're just three of twenty

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

#146
post #79

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.

> 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 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?

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

#147
post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, Youtube pays out more to creators than anyone else on the web, they dwarf Patreon 10x. People who make youtube videos rely on ads to get paid.

They’re welcome not to make videos. But if they make them and lay them out there for free alongside some garbage I have the right to ignore, don’t blame me if I do look at them and ignore the garbage, and since there’s so much of it I eventually get my machine to ignore them, not unlike wearing gloves when dealing with a messy task as to save you the time of scrubbing your hands from dirt/oil/etc.

Ignoring the "garbage" is absolutely valid, but hiding it so that you never see it is what makes it piracy.

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

#148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[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.

[flagged]

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

#149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. B…

And what is the surefire way to stop AI scrapers from accessing your website? If there is no way, how can this be an acceptable ask?

It already sounds like you're using several IPs to access sites, which seems like a work around to someone somewhere trying to limit the use of one IP (or just lack of desire to host and distribute the data yourself to your various hosts).

Just because you can do something doesn't mean everyone must accept and like that you are doing that thing.

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

#150
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.

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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