Someone at YouTube Needs Glasses: The Prophecy Has Been Fulfilled

> Common sense and morality

Hah! Someone after my own heart. Well, since we're not talking law, let's get into it!

First of all, all profit is theft. Your boss and shareholders are only able to make money because they steal margin from your labor.

In this case, Youtube may be providing a platform, but what it gets in return is far more than it gives back to creators. Creators have no rights when it comes to Youtube - I can list many who were nixxed from Youtube because they violated a specific subset of neoliberal, puritanical "ethics." For example, Youtube will delist or demonetize videos that have too many swear words in them, or videos that discuss things that aren't illegal but Youtube doesn't like, such as adblockers or emulation software.

This is unethical. Youtube has no value outside of its creators. Yet it has total say over what kinds of content creators are allowed to make, and it sets the prices for creators, keeping the lion's share for itself. That is theft.

Youtube abuses its users as well, cramming features we don't want down our throats, like "Shorts" (puke) and increasingly longer ads. I know for a fact not enough revenue is going to the creators because they still need to seek external sponsorship, resulting in double-ads: youtube ones, and then sponsored portions of videos. Youtube also constantly enshittifies the UI. And, despite its puritanical neoliberal ethics, it does basically nothing about the extensive racist content on its platform (any video featuring black people doing just about anything will have years-old comments on it with racist content). And don't even get me started on the freakshow that is Youtube Kids. Just search "Elsagate."

Youtube feeds into the demonstrably mentally unhealthy attention economy and engages in dark pattern UX.

Youtube is undergoing platform enshittification, making things worse for its creators and users in order to extract as much profit as possible. It's not illegal, but it's certainly unethical. Given their shittiness, it's completely reasonable to leverage tooling to block their shitty ads. And don't pretend like this harms creators in any meaningful way. If I buy one t-shirt from a creator I like (which I do, frequently), I've given them more revenue per head than if I watched every single one of their videos, start to finish, one hundred times, with no ad blocking.

Reminds me of a comment I wrote just recently:

» I think that anyone who is technically sufficiently well-versed, is going to avoid that hellscape like the plague. So then, who is the actual audience for this stuff? My guess would be: the old folks' home around the corner, which, sooner or later, will be forced to upgrade those TVs to smart-TVs. And once those old folks put in their credit card numbers or log in with their Amazon accounts, there goes a lot of people's inheritance.

My own elderly father is wise to the scam, but not confident in his ability to navigate the dark patterns. So now, he is afraid to input his credit card information into anything digital, essentially excluding him from cultural participation in the digital age. « [1]

With that frame (the target audience for smart TVs is old people), "needing glasses" is not all that far-fetched.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45462816

There is no need to use uBOL on Firefox, just use the normal version.

EDIT: But yeah, the Mozilla reviewers are very hostile, also had to fight with them for one of my add-ons. It's ridiculous that spam and malware add-ons get a pass but privacy-conscious add-ons get rejected.

I see the same screen and wonder why they don't suggest videos based on subscriptions. I assume they figure no suggestions will nag people into enabling history.

I was going to disagree by saying that the menus are extremely confusing to the elderly. However if the goal is to extract money from them by generating confusion about what is an on-demand vs a streaming piece of media; you could not design a better software system. Reminds me of the theory that micro-transaction revenue in video games has driven menu UI in the direction of confusing and disorientating the player.