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YouTube's new anti-adblock measures

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Re: YouTube's new anti-adblock measures

#651

Post by AlienRobot »

akersten wrote: post #209

Thank you for your important work fighting this battle, it must be exhausting. The more Google insists on forcing advertising on us, the more we should look closely at the wildly inappropriate and downright scammy ads they are hosting. If they can't leave well enough alone and look the other way on ad blocking, (which is the only way to avoid exposing myself and family to these dangerous ads), they need to be under a…

>forcing

Why people say this? You can either not use Youtube or pay for premium. Nobody is forcing you to download hundreds and hundreds of gigabytes of video?

Re: YouTube's new anti-adblock measures

#652

Post by belorn »

yugioh3 wrote: post #235
akersten wrote: post #209

Thank you for your important work fighting this battle, it must be exhausting. The more Google insists on forcing advertising on us, the more we should look closely at the wildly inappropriate and downright scammy ads they are hosting. If they can't leave well enough alone and look the other way on ad blocking, (which is the only way to avoid exposing myself and family to these dangerous ads), they need to be under a…

people deserve to get paid for the work they put into creating content and building platforms, no? books, movies, tv shows, news, etc, are all distributed in some way or another that costs the consumer either money or their time viewing advertising. if you don't want to watch ads, pay YouTube for a subscription.

Those are two different problems. Paying creators and requiring online platforms to follow laws and not participate in crime like fraud are not the same issue.

If they want to sell a service in exchange for payment, then they are free to do so. For legal reasons they are not doing that. The explicit legal definition used by lawyers and politicians is that advertisement supported services are not a payment, but an optional content that the viewer might or might not look at. This optional aspect of advertisement is how laws distinguish between it and a sale. From a legal perspective there is a difference between selling a sample product for 1 cent, compared to giving it away for free. One is a sale, and the other is a free giveaway, and thus they are under different legal definitions.

There are similar legal theory for when a platform should be held legal responsible their products, for their advertisement, and when local laws applies and how. News papers, radio, and TV has each been forced to handle local advertisement laws and regulation, and there is a reason why most had departments to curate which advertisement they could publish. They also get held responsible if they break local law.

Re: YouTube's new anti-adblock measures

#653

Post by jonasdegendt »

thejazzman wrote: post #586
Defletter wrote: post #560

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Steel-manning the argument, near where I live, it's not that uncommon to see small to moderately sized advertisements along the road, such as a sign outside/near the entrance of a farm that's selling eggs, meat, etc. I am wholly unopposed to this. In fact, I'm very supportive of this, and used them to find a farm to buy local honey from. Whereas the stereotypical massive slabs whose advertisements get wallpapered on,…

And where I live it's an ever growing hell of political signs, dominos pizza, and anyone else who realizes there is no enforcement against this wide scale littering. The signs are never removed and continue piling up. Abandoned / unmonitored lots are also a frequent target. And it's rapidly getting worse Glad you're cool with it though, I guess? Cuz I've considered running for office on the sole platform of having th…

Driving through the south is always fun.

> Go to church or the devil will get you!

Re: YouTube's new anti-adblock measures

#654

Post by AlienRobot »

mycatisblack wrote: post #597

Here’s something many people probably don’t know. I live in a west-Eu country with several well-defined language borders. Each time we cross a border (on holiday), the youtube ads change language. When I’m logged in. I don’t have a driver’s license, yet the most common ad I get is for second hand cars. I’m in a relationship, yet I regularly get ads for dating sites. I have a job, get ads for jobhunting advice. And th…

First it was "I hate how much ad companies track me and build profiles on me."

Now it is "I hate how ads are irrelevant."

People need to understand that ads will never be 100% perfect, otherwise you would buy something every time you saw an ad. 99.99% of the ads will miss the target, and that is normal. It would be insane if it worked any other way.

For what it is worth Google has a page where you can customize what sort of ads are relevant to you. https://support.google.com/My-Ad-Center-Help/answer/12155451...

Re: YouTube's new anti-adblock measures

#655

Post by constrictpastel »

I get ads for secret solar panel information that the 'Electric Companies don't want me to know about'. Concern-troll ads, that feel like psychological warfare, about every health ailment that I might potentially have. Boomer-bait 'Patriot-Power Pack! Survival food, ammo and eagle coins. Kolon-Klense type product depicting a woman sitting on the porcelain throne complaining that she can't crank a shit. Las but not least. An over-eager Sylvester Stallone excited to show me his one amazing....salt trick?

Re: YouTube's new anti-adblock measures

#656

Post by AlienRobot »

throw123xz wrote: post #265
tlogan wrote: post #239

Why do we justify blocking ads, even when we know the content we’re consuming isn’t free to create and even if the content is free, it still costs money to store and distribute? We often rationalize using ad blockers because ads can be intrusive or annoying. But let’s asking ourselves: Why do we feel entitled to get this for free? This isn’t a moral judgment. I genuinely want to understand the reasoning.

Back when I started using Google Adsense, they had a 3 ad per page rule. You could be banned if you went above that limit. Today you can easily find web pages with 10, 15 or even more ad spots... one after each paragraph, sidebar, full page "popup", etc. On YouTube, we went from a banner on the video to a few seconds of a video before to multiple ads before the video to multiple ad pauses even on relatively short vid…

AdSense had that rule when you manually placed the ads on your website. Ever since they started doing automatic placements with AI or whatever, they simply spam the page with ads.

Pretty much all article-based sites, recipes, news, blog posts, anything built with wordpress to blogspot. Their algorithm seems to ensure that there is always 1 ad visible on screen at all times. With font sizes as big as they are these days this means 1 ad every two paragraphs.

And the auto placement is enabled by default on new accounts, and all these new "features," get automatically enabled from time to time. I'm sure there is a mountain of webmasters that didn't even notice that their websites have gotten filled with ads.

The worst one is that interstital that appears whenever you click a link. I'm pretty sure Google had a rule against that type of popup, and then they literally made the popup themselves.

On the other hand, all of this can be disabled.

The question is how much money does a website need to make to stay online. If it could survive with fewer ads, I'm sure there would be fewer.

Re: YouTube's new anti-adblock measures

#657

Post by Workaccount2 »

PurestGuava wrote: post #513
matwood wrote: post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. This isn’t a situation where you can’t pay. YT has a clear, reasonably priced solution for no ads. It also comes with YT music. If people don’t think there’s enough value in YT, then don’t pay and don’t use it. Reminds me of the early justification of Napster where people would complain the latest B. Spears song was garbage and not worth paying for, yet it was the most downloaded song.

> If people don’t think there’s enough value in YT, then don’t pay and don’t use it. The most common throughline of all pro-piracy discourse is that there's a lot of people who feel completely entitled to free entertainment, and they will come up with all sorts of bizarre mental gymnastics to justify that as something other than "I want free entertainment and don't want to see ads." I don't think anyone could articul…

Even worse, it's come to the point where it is actively destroying the internet. Everything from every news site being paywalled to click bait mania to brain rot content focused on the bottom suckers who can't ad block.

Re: YouTube's new anti-adblock measures

#658

Post by kerkeslager »

ITT: advertisers, pretending there's something that could be changed about ads that would make them not ads.

Fundamentally, ads are bad. There just isn't a change you can make to ads that makes them okay.

At a personal level, ads distract us, they tell us we don't have enough, aren't attractive enough, just generally aren't enough. They don't inform us: a one-sided view of a product absent criticisms or comparison to competing products is effectively just a lie.

At an economic level, ads break any benefit to capitalism. Instead of companies competing to provide the best product at the lowest cost, ads make it so a worse product at a higher cost can become the market leader. Ads are one of the primary drivers of the enshittification of everything. Ads allow companies to launch with garbage products that nobody would ever pay money for, slap ads on them to monetize, and thereby prevent competing products actually worth paying for from ever even coming to market.

The only answer is to refuse, on principle, to view ads. If a company receives money from advertisers, you're the product, not the user. If a product has a "free" tier paid for by ads, paying to hide ads doesn't help because you're still competing with advertisers for that company's loyalty, and advertisers will always win in the end (i.e. ads in cable TV--mark my words, there will be ads in all the premium-tier streaming services eventually).

Re: YouTube's new anti-adblock measures

#659

Post by tsoukase »

mycatisblack wrote: post #597

Here’s something many people probably don’t know. I live in a west-Eu country with several well-defined language borders. Each time we cross a border (on holiday), the youtube ads change language. When I’m logged in. I don’t have a driver’s license, yet the most common ad I get is for second hand cars. I’m in a relationship, yet I regularly get ads for dating sites. I have a job, get ads for jobhunting advice. And th…

My kids are watching some kid stuff and ads about sanitary napkins show up. At least google degrades the experience and helps me fight the screen time war.

Re: YouTube's new anti-adblock measures

#660

Post by kerkeslager »

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote: post #414

The primary thing that makes advertisements disagreeable is their irrelevance. That’s not to say whether or not the advertisement is for a product or service for which the viewer is interested in purchasing but how it relates to the context in which it is viewed. People complain about billboards next to a countryside highway because it is entirely irrelevant to driving through the countryside. Actual complaints may b…

> The primary thing that makes advertisements disagreeable is their irrelevance.

The primary thing that makes advertisements disagreeable is the whole thing. There is nothing good about ads, ever. If I want information about a product, I'll go looking for it, and I won't go to an advertiser. If I'm looking to watch a YouTube video, there is absolutely no condition under which I want to hear about a product unless that's explicitly what I went to that video to hear about.

All ads are lies. There is never an ad that tells you about the flaws in a product or compares it honestly to competing product. I'm simply not interested in being lied to.

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