You are mixing two things. Nobody can just blast ads on your phone without your consent. But you did give consent by accessing YouTube.

No, I’m not here to defend Alphabet. I’m just saying it’s equal to stealing groceries at Wallmart. They request payment, you deny. Just because it’s so much easier to do on YouTube doesn’t mean it’s any more justifiable.

Oh baby, you don’t understand what you just said, do you?

Nobody forces you to watch ads. Close YouTube, don’t look back, email content creators to have em send ad free video links directly to you.

Watching ads is your obligation as consumer, if you decide not to pay for their removal.

Homie missed the point. using ublock and sponsorblock is equal to petty theft. Disliking a company doesn’t make it morally right to steal from them.

ITT: “it costs more than 5 bucks a month!” yeah, if you don’t share with friends with family, it does. Also, music service included, deduct your spotify payment.

“You can just block ads” You can just miss the whole point.

“I rather support creators directly” I’m happy you do that. YouTube hosting is not free for Google/Alphabet, pay them too, or you’ll have to teach each and every creator how to webhost + help em search a “real job” because selfhosted won’t pay enough. Also, good fun browsing videos then.

IDK man, paying for YT Premium really isn’t that bad. Assuming you already consume YouTube content, that is. And I’m pretty sure that’s like 98% of first world population between 4 and 70.

Blocking ads on YouTube is no sustainable solution. Hosting Billions of Gigabytes of on-demand content is SUPER expensive. Like, it actually costs money. Other, wayyy smaller indie creator on-demand video platforms charge 5 bucks a month, but i’ts okay if they do it, because they aren’t big bad Alphabet.

If that’s your view, you don’t have a problem with pricing, you have a problem with morals. And if you still do voluntarily consume YouTube content in private, with or without ads in any which way, you inarguably have a huge problem with your own morals.

YouTube premium is a good deal. It’s priced very well compared with competition, it actually does pay indie creators and it let’s you access to features that many users really do use.

BUTBUT THEY ARTIFICIALLY LIMIT FEATURES FOR NO REASON WITHOUT PREMIUM. I mean, it’s subscription software and streaming, what else would they do? Every for profit subscription software provider and their mother does this. I develop hospital software and we literally do exactly this. If hospital A has feature x and hospital B also wants that, we don’t just hand that out for free even when we just have to add it to their system in like 10 minutes… what did you expect? They already use our software (like you use YouTube), we don’t have a huge incentive to just randomly add features if nobody paid for it. If we do, be happy about it, send me a gift card, if we or they don’t, that’s just business.

The median house proce in Oklahoma is super low. Try finding a home in the west.

20k will not get you a 3 bedroom home. Do you by chance live in West Virginia? Their median home values is under 200k, and even then, 20k won’t get you there. Trust me homeboy, 20k will not get you far, not even in the cheapest of regions.

The median US house value is 430k. The lowest legal downpayment is 3%, but that’s plain stupid. Financially, anything under 20% makes no sense. Your mortgage will be super high and you’ll have to pay for morgage insurance which you don’t have to do if you do a downpayment above 20%.

Also, if it’s so cheap and easy to buy a house, why isn’t everyone buying a house right now? The majority of millenials and forward are renting and you’re telling me half a year of rent is enough for them to get a house? Clearly they would have figured that one out by now.

Just so you understand my living standards. I do not own a car at all. I could financially afford one, but that wouldn’t be a sensible investment.

I can’t say I had such a civilized discussion on reddit. At least I can’t remember. Typical reddit discussions always felt a bit more filled with emotion, maybe hatred. Lots of shitposting too. Might have to do something with the more targeted demographic of Lemmy.

Something being a business model actually doesn’t mean it’s right. Dropshipping exists after all. Paying everyone for their services can’t be a viable solution either. The main business model here usually consists of “pay to upgrade”. If you don’t pay, it kinda works. If you do want to pay, it works really well. BitWarden is my personal hero in that regard. Their product works really well as freeware. It works even better when you pay for it. But I believe many paying users don’t even need the additional functionality, they just pay to give something back. Moral retribution so to speak.

I see how blocking ads on freeware isn’t morally wrong, I mean there’s not much that’s universally immoral. It’s quite the topic in ethics, deontology says some acts are universally bad or universally good, no matter the consequences. A common example is honesty: being honest is always good, but I’m sure you thought of a dozen examples where honesty might not be the “good” way.

I still do agree with you. Blocking ads in specific instances can be completely fine. I mean we could construct setups where not blocking ads might lead to nuclear war. But I truly believe that it’s fine in everyday use. You don’t wanna see ads, they annoy you, you don’t feel like paying with your time and brain cells. An individual avoiding ads is so inconsequential for everyone else involved, utilitaristically, that’s a net gain of happines. On the other hand, ethics is not a study about individual actions, that’s morals. I don’t believe that any ethics could realistically support such a choice in the grand scheme. Assuming everyone acts by those rules, buying advert slots is wasted money.

Luckily we are indiviudals and like you said a day ago, there’s enough people paying their taxes for you to evade them without consequences for either party.

I, in this instance, decided it’s not about the company per se, it’s more about the individual action. I’m no sucker for Nestlé, but you can’t argue that they don’t do good things as well. They are quite the big player in vegan meat alternatives and they actually do seem to put in quite the work to make sensible products in said category. They superficially seem to be sustainable and healthier than many other comparable products. Even if that’s not true, even if their products are shipped around the globe eleven times a day, it’s pushing for something that’s ecologically sensible. If they themselves don’t produce an ecological product, they still help to establish shelf space for other, more ecological products. So yeah, I’d buy a Nestlé product in that case. Even just to show Nestlé and the stores that such a product is in demand.

There’s other scenarios where I don’t act by the same logic simply because I’m a human and humans aren’t known for being all that logical after all.

I’m a capitalist consumer and I greatly profit from my financial situation each and every day. I do live in a way too big apartment after all, and plans for individual housing are on the way. Not very ethical in the grand scheme xD

I can tell your house is nothing like what I’d wanna live in. If you can get a house for maybe 70k, yeah a downpayment of 20k works.

In most places a house will likely be 500k or above. Let’s just say 500k for the sake of argument… it’s a simple number for your simple brain. You’ll have to pay at least 20% up front. That’s 100k in my example. However, that’s quite an unreasonable thing to do in recent years, so I better suggest your downpayment be more than 30%, or 150k in this example. Generally, 40% is s very good downpayment in terms of long term financial security… that’s already 200k. So yes. 200k is what the average person should expect. 20k wouldn’t even get you the land.

Broski where do you live? Try saving 200k or whatever it takes to make a sensible downpayment wherever you live. Remember, while saving that money, you still pay for rent and logically, rent didn’t go down either.

Oh buddy I get you so well. I’m not german by the way, but I guess DACH is close enough.

I actually do work software development now, even though I said systems engineering in an earlier comment. Systems engineering is ‘just’ my past, back when I actually learned stuff. Funny enough, I work for the medical sector. Not IN the medical… oh what ze hell… We make software stuff for hospitals and whatnot. At least that’s what I’m up to right now and I don’t have to tell you, it doesn’t feel as good as it should. I am essentially hired for life. As decent people in IT do, I earn more money than one should reasonably spend and demand is so high, I could just sit back and relax 4 days a week with no major consequences other than my team hiring yet another person to compensate for my lazyness.

I don’t wanna work there anymore. I probably won’t be working there today one year later. Not because we scam people or anything, I just don’t think we do justice to what should be expected from us. Our oh so cool product saves lifes and that’s good. But shouldn’t we care a bit more about better quality control, more efficient workflows, more reliable products?

We’re good enough to “win” the capitalism game. People want the thing we make and the thing we make is a good thing. But is it as good as it could be? Definite no. Do others do better? Probably, they just invest more… higher costs. Could that mean that we are inactively killing people because we force them into buying our product due to cost efficiency? Yeah sure but it’s not that easy, is it? There’s no right or wrong here, really.

So… anyway.

I see your point about you not blocking ads actually being harmful for the advertiser, because you differ from the average Joe in terms of advertisement influence. But I don’t believe that’s for us to decide. By opting for advertising a product, companies risk approaching people like you (and ME if we are being honest… I guess it’s the high rate of autism in IT (I’m not gonna include a sarcasm tag here because they stink)), that don’t recieve advertisements well and might actively steer away from their product. They contractually do NOT risk their advert not being displayed at all… you see where this is going.

Genug Moralapostel. The existence of ads in modern media is okay with me. I don’t exactly wanna see them, but I understand their business model and it’s not really all that reprehensible to me. I do prefer straight up pay walls over ad walls… sometimes. At least for video streaming platforms. To be honest it’s probably the other way around for most situations. I gladly accept ads on websites if it means I don’t have to pay for each and every single website access all the time. Moral dillemmas everywhere.

I don’t think our opinions differ all that much. We basically had a “well if you feel like this, why don’t you do this?” “oh it was just a hypothetical, I actually already do this. But this and such…” “Ah yes, but no but, this and that”

I’m with you, homeboy.

No use justifying your wrongdoings by pointing at what anybody else did.

If you think Google or YouTube are evil, bad or immoral, just avoid em.

I don’t feel like adressing every point seperately because I’m just slothing with my cat in my bed right now. I’ll just be rambling a bit.

Anyways. Yeah sure, Google is a bad company in many regards, I’m with you. Morals and ethics are about as subjective as it gets, so here’s my take on that. Just because some entity is morally in the wrong doesn’t justify my own actions, whatever they may be. What makes it fair to obtain goods and services from Google without paying the price? It’s quasi-stealing but I already brought that up before. If the Alphabet Corp. (Google and stuff) is so bad, then maybe you should avoid their products by principle.

I know in the grand scheme it doesn’t matter what I do. The odds of my actions actually doing anything at all are quite low. Where I’m from people used to say “somewhere a bag of rice tipped over”. It’s inconsequential. And I believe that’s true in everyday life but I also know it’s not true in the grand scheme. While I am an individual, I have to look at my actions as if they are not. It doesn’t matter if I burn through 100 gallons of petrol a day… but it does matter if we all do it.

So yes, I agree with you in each and every way. Except I somehow also don’t. It’s really hard to live by the same morals and ethics each and every day. Utilitarism sounds good… but not for everything, same goes for deontology. Many concepts in ethics are not compatible with eachother and I don’t think it’s “normal” to even strive to find your own morals.

Google may be bad, but their business model with YouTube specifically isn’t really all that evil. They maintain a well established, feature rich platform and people get to share their content on that site for free. A small percentage earns money or even gets to make a living through that. They also maintain said platform for advertisers with promises on how often their ads will be shown and how they will be placed, received and forced upon a user. In this instance it’s not entirely clear who the bad guy is. All of em, kind of.

I studied for a bit a few years back and we had a series of courses called “ethics for engineers”. It was mainly about figuring out what you get to do and what you have to do as an engineer of any kind in terms of ethics. Right now I’m wondering, would I really feel all that bad as a software engineer or whatnot at such a company? It really depends I guess. Sure, increasing the ad counter from 2 to 3 sucks for users. Yet they accept it in some way u know? If they didn’t accept, they wouldn’t stay on YouTube. Using YouTube is not something you are forced to, you could, at any time, just stop. So, if supplying more ads is really totally nessecary to have the platform be profitable (which, be honest, in some form or another, it must be), it’s morally sound. Would it really be better to let the platform die? I don’t belive so. I believe the platform kind of self regulates in a sense that it would just die off it they took any negative aspect too far.

I don’t know what they promise their content creators… this view might look completely different by the way.

So. Yeah. Dunno. I don’t think “cheating” YouTube by blocking ads or whatnot is all that fair. It’s still legal, though. Probably still better to stay away if you believe that they are such a bad company.

I mean yeah, suck a fat dick, I’m with you. But IMO paying for YouTube isn’t wrong. If not for ads, they gain nothing from me. I used to lock them in. 3rd party instance, no google accounts, separate browser clients, ad block, sponsor block… everything a decently smart systems engineer could think of.

That’s wrong. I pay for services like nebula, why not pay for YouTube?

I currently pay about 2 bucks a month for YouTube Premium and YouTube Music. I legally share it with people I’m close with. 30 bucks a year for unlimited ad free (other than sponsorships) is very affordable, even if I didn’t share it with family and friends.

I still don’t share personal information with them. They probably think I live in Argentina or something because my account is not defined to a region and my IPA reads as residential Argentina most of the time.

YouTube started as a free to use service (in terms of monetary cost). There’s no way they could ever go from that to pay to use. Content creators depend on YouTube being accessible without monetary compensation through the viewer’s wallet. At the same time, upkeep for on demand 4k video up- and downstreaming is not easy, not simple, not cheap. Not cheap at all. Go ask Nebula and the likes.

Ads are ineviteable. You want goods and services, you pay for them. If you don’t feel like spending money, you will pay by watching ads and/or by giviny away personal information that in turn can be used to create monetary value in some form or another (better advert targeting, better market analysis, etc.).

Strategically avoiding any form of payment for goods and services is frankly immoral. It’s exactly the same as stealing. It morally is stealing. If you go to the store and steal a product, you’re doing the same. You cost said store money without reimbursing them by paying for it. Blocking ads and especially sponsorships is immoral and you have every right to do it as it stands. Just don’t complain about companies disliking your behaviour.

These are actively worse for me.

I actually speak a bit of italian. It’s pronounced “bolonya” in american phonetics. I was actually supposed to go study in Bologna but unfortunately my uni canceled the deal.

The post is more about how americans pronounce the city of Bologna.