It's not 'piracy', but it is theft of a different nature in that you're indirectly reducing the revenue that would have been received by the content creator.
Blocking crypto miners reduces revenue too. It's all malware (in fact crypto miners are obviously less malicious) and blocking it shouldn't be given a second thought.
Right, and adware/spyware (which are in practice the same thing) is malware, and is objectively more harmful than surreptitious crypto miners. One just wastes energy. The other wastes energy, spies on you, and attempts to use the information it gathers on you to exploit your psychology and turn you into more of a consumer, or in some cases just outright run scams on you. Background crypto miners are a far more honest and direct payment mechanism.
It’s a theft because I don’t want to watch 40 seconds of unskippable ads every time I open same video in succession on YouTube or whenever I rewind? Seriously?
Watch 30 seconds of ads, then a few minutes of video? Oh wow, more ads!
Accidentally leave the YouTube app then reload it? You guessed it, more ads!
Turn off your TV while a video is playing then you turn it back on the next day? New ads are instantly loaded up and are playing before the screen turns on all the way.
Block channels, creators, or content you dislike in an effort to tailor a video feed to your preferences? Too bad. You’ll still receive content the system knows you dislike because those creators manage to push ads onto their viewers more often.
Pay for a YouTube subscription to block ads? That service gets cancelled, and your only option is to sign up for a new service that costs more and includes features you don’t want and won’t use.
On top of all that, your viewing habits, likes, dislikes, and a mountain of other private information are collected and sold to random entities.
Use Adblock? You're a no-good, dirty, rotten pirate! How dare you steal the food from poor little Google’s mouth?
Obviously...You use a service, which costs money to run/build/produce, and the way that service is paid for is by advertisement. Your decision that the advertisement is annoying or intrusive isn't what makes your circumvention of it piracy or not, it is your violation of the terms according to which you're being given access to the content.
I find it interesting that I have yet to meet a single person advocating for ad blockers on YouTube who, upon being given the option to have an ad-free experience by paying for YouTube premium, choose to do so. Yet they often then immediately fall back on the tired arguments that "well if the ads weren't so intrusive I wouldn't use an ad blocker."
> YouTube who, upon being given the option to have an ad-free experience by paying for YouTube premium, choose to do so.
That’s not interesting because it’s a false dichotomy.
If someone watches youtube and premium costs 5% of their monthly income, it will not be a shocker when they choose to block instead.
Similarly, people who view it as a shakedown for payment with the alternative being visual and audio harassment are not going to bend the knee easily.
I lost all respect for youtube when I saw that my dad is subject to a minimum of 60 seconds of political attack ads every 5-10 minutes that can’t be skipped. Literal political propaganda 10 times an hour. Fuck them.
My argument against paying for YouTube is that it feels like rewarding their shitty ad behavior, while also requiring me to use an account that allows them to track me and continue selling my data. If I had any faith in Google not being evil, I'd be happily paying for rather a lot of Google services...
There used to be a YouTube subscription called Premium Lite which was just ad-free YouTube. I happily paid for that until they shut it down and tried to force the much bigger
subscription on me (nothing else in premium is relevant to me).
Now I use smarttube which is not only ad-free but also has tons of nice features which YouTube will never deliver. However, should premium lite comeback I would pay for it but keep using smarttube.
Let me tell you the story of how youtube terminated my youtube premium account for community violations, despite the account only being used to view videos, no uploads, no comment, no community interactions of any kind. How a banned account removes access to subscription page so I literally could not unsubscribe to premium, and went through months of fruitless appeal process that was met with automated denial until I was forced to cancel my credit card after being charged 100+ because you're only allowed appeal every 90 days and I didn't want to lose a 10+ year old account. Or how I had paid Google One sub, which was suppose to offer me in person service, only for them to say they have no interaction with the Youtube team. Then I had to do a Take Out to back up all my data on the off chance that Google would ax all my other services for cancelling card. No one should be paying for a service where they can't talk to a real person to get problems resolved. Google still owns me 10 months of red sub.
If I think some material is worth money I can seek out the 'creators' and pay them directly.
Alphabet could stop being a bunch of criminal enterprises, begin respecting data protection rights for example, and then they'd have a case in claiming that paying them for something might be reasonable.
> I find it interesting that I have yet to meet a single person advocating for ad blockers on YouTube who, upon being given the option to have an ad-free experience by paying for YouTube premium, choose to do so.
That’s because service is a complete crap, pal. These days I’m staying solely for content released in 2015 and earlier.
Why would I in the right mind support this ADHD driven, rage bait filled dump that exists solely to squeeze money out of every occasion? Modern shite is disproportionally skewed towards digital garbage because it generates more engagement and i’m the one supposed to subsidize that?
if you think that nothing interesting or useful was posted on youtube in the last 9 years then i really wonder in what corners of the platform you're roaming around :D
I didn’t say that there’s no new quality content. It’s just platform optimized now for crapware. Just look at the top videos and YouTube shorts, cesspool.
Wouldn't that be a bunch of the people paying for YouTube premium?
Half the reason I pay for it is just because it is easier than trying to mess with ad blocking. (The other half is that it's nice to have download on every device in the native app).
>> and the way that service is paid for is by advertisement.
If by advertisement you mean the whole sale consumption and tracking of all your personal behaviors to aggregators that have arbitraged advertising for their profit and pushed everything in a race to the bottom...
Then yes.
Most people don't object to ads, and less to smart ones... we hate pop ups, the tracking, the scams, the bullshit. Advertising on line has done everything in its power to devalue its product as much as possible and operate an ineffective volume business. Its been doing this since the Netflix pop under and the sign up for 10 services to get a free iPod days.
> ad-free experience by paying for YouTube premium
How many paid for services now have ad's to? Sorry but no one is buying into this bullshit any more.
Sorry but this pointless semantic argument has been thoroughly debunked. A tangible object is not required for it to be considered theft in anything other than very specific legal contexts. That's why we talk about musicians 'stealing' riffs or chord progressions. That's why artists accuse AI of 'stealing' their digital artwork. That's why comedians complain about other comedians 'stealing' their jokes.
It hasn’t been debunked. It’s still not theft despite artists using the “you stole my idea” colloquialism.
It’s non-rivalrous and a massive portion of the world does not see it as bad at all to copy ideas (see China), let alone anything on par with property theft.
"We" do not talk about musicians stealing chord progressions, at least I do not. There is (in western diatonic music) a quite limited number of chord progressions (that sound "good"/"acceptable" to ears used to this kind of music) Should new music be prohibited from being created once they've been used? Should painters not be allowed to use a certain combination of colors anymore because another artist already used them? As a (studied but now hobby) musician, I think that is utter nonsense, excuse my french...
