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SponsorBlock – Skip over sponsorship segments on YouTube

(sponsor.ajay.app)
192 points bgstry | 1 comments | 21 Apr 21 07:04 UTC | HN request time: 0.214s | source
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vages ◴[21 Apr 21 08:58 UTC] No.26887003[source]▶
I get the technical justification for doing this: You own your player, so you should be able to control it in whatever way you want. But as consumers, how do we expect the uploader to get paid for their work if we use both Adblock and Sponsor-skip (for the lack of a better word)?

Pay to watch is, of course, an option, but that leads to discrimination based on income – unequally distributed between parts of the world and individuals in the same part of the world. (Yes, I am aware that the sponsorship system leads the creators to cater to the more well-off within each bubble, so it's still a bit discriminatory.)

Any ideas or objections?

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cyborgx7 ◴[21 Apr 21 09:15 UTC] No.26887113[source]▶
Advertising is bad and I will oppose it in all its forms. What other system for financing the content does or doesn't exist is irrelevant to the my decision to block as much advertising out of my perception as I can.

That said, Patreon seems to be working very well for a lot of people making high quality content.

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antiterra ◴[21 Apr 21 20:09 UTC] No.26894785[source]▶
That reads an awful lot like: “If a content creator’s patronage is not in the form I prefer, I deserve to circumvent that patronage and consume their content anyway. It’s irrelevant to me how & if they are compensated.”
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1. bscphil ◴[22 Apr 21 23:56 UTC] No.26909553[source]▶
Let me try to say in a more nuanced way what other replies have said more bluntly.

It's not a matter of deserving, it's a matter of supply and demand and technological capabilities. To ignore the latter, let's pretend YouTube is capable of 100% effective DRM, such that you only watch the content if you see all the ads and sponsorships, eyeballs on screen, in the style of "15 Million Merits".

Even in this case, it's unmistakable that the supply of entertainment overwhelmingly exceeds the demand. This is why all the traditional Hollywood companies are all entirely focused on making blockbusters: it's the one thing they can do that no one else can (because of the initial investment required). But they're the exception. The vast majority of content creators, including people trying to do it full time, are making basically nothing or just enough to get by. There are thousands and thousands of Twitch streamers scraping by on 12 hour days where they average a hundred or so viewers.

In other words, even in this DRM hellscape, the push of the market is going to be towards less and less remuneration for each creator, because the total market capacity of entertainment as such is not enough for each entertainer to live off of. There is quite simply not enough money in it. If I'm forced to watch ads, I'll switch to content providers that don't use ads. The result is worse for the creator, because the vast majority of them are suffering from lack of visibility. So they make their content more palatable by reducing ads, and the downward spiral continues. This is already happening, because most creators are not making enough to live off of.

The only way to solve this problem is for us to decide socially that artistic creation is good as such even if there's not a marketable demand for it, and that therefore creators deserve to be compensated. The fact that it's society that would have to come to this conclusion means that it's society upon which the burden of providing this compensation would fall, not individual consumers. In other words, the solution isn't sponsorships or watching ads, it's something like universal basic income.