YouTube's new anti-adblock measures

You're asking the question in a way that's unreflective of how people think. They can do it and want to do it and would need a reason to not do it. So the question is, what would make someone feel like they were ethically compelled to watch an advertisement? It sounds impossible to me, maybe someone with a very unique perspective could chime in about themselves.

Here's an attempt at a double-negative answer: you can't be ethically compelled into an unethical contract, and since advertisements are manipulative, voyeuristic and seek to take advantage of the limitations of human attentional control, it's a priori impossible for watching an ad or downloading a tracker to ever be ethically compulsory.

Taking this in a more tangential, but similar thought. The copyright holder does not own the copyrights of the ad. Different copyrights.

There's a very simple answer.

You want to watch some content. The content provider offers you two options: pay and get no ads, or watch for free and also sit through some ads.

You are not obligated to watch ads. You are opting to watch them in exchange for the free content, then skipping out on a commitment you volunteered for while still taking the free content.

The "unethical contact" argument is bullshit, because you made a choice but didn't live up to it. Instead of either paying or not watching, you watched anyway.

All the best to you, I hope you enjoy watching your ads. :-)

this is ridiculous.

The provider is welcome to serve ads, and i am welcome to not watch them. When there are Ads on TV and I get up to go to the kitchen, am i skipping out on a commitment? Am I now a freeloader? Should the TV have a camera to make sure I watch all the ads like a good little boy?

People have been fastforwarding/skipping ads for decades. this is nothing new.

I actually pay, rather than watch the ads, but a large part of that was also dumping Spotify and using the YouTube music app instead for listening in the car.

Do the less fortunate not deserve to have access to culture and information without being subjected to the psychological abuse that is advertising?

Technically, the provider only really cares that the ads played, not that you were paying attention to them.

Unlike DVR for TVs, you are not welcome to skip playing them entirely. They've been pretty clear that skipping them via the use of ad blockers is a violation of the terms of service.

If they can't afford a YouTube subscription, they're not going to be buying anything that would be advertised anyway.

Let's be honest here, ads are trying to get you to buy things, but "psychological abuse" is a pretty extreme hyperbole, especially for people already in such tight poverty. They've got enough going on that someone trying to get them to buy shitty knives or switch their car insurance isn't going to be impactful.

> Technically, the provider only really cares that the ads played, not that you were paying attention to them.

Advertisers do care about them. It's just that they don't have a way to track/measure it.

So if ad blocking extensions could make YouTube think you watched the ad, then they’d be fine?

> The content provider offers you two options: pay and get no ads, or watch for free and also sit through some ads.

You're wrong in both parts.

1. There is no way to pay to only remove all ads. YT premium bundles some music nonsense and also doesn't remove ads added by creators.

2. "Watching" isn't part of the contract, only "injected ads" are. Do you read every billboard in exchange for the benefit of better roads financed with ad revenue?

> Let's be honest here, ads are trying to get you to buy things

The issue is that those are not the only ads Youtube is showing to people. You can basically upload any video and make it an ad. Sometimes Youtube's moderation fails and some nasty stuff slips through the cracks:

> In the latest incident, a Redditor describes how their young nephew was exposed to an explicit ad while watching a Fortnite stream by the well-known YouTuber Loserfruit.

> “My 7yr nephew was watching Loserfruit (Fortnite streamer) and then came up to me asking what Loserfruit is doing because this ad started playing,” the concerned uncle shared.

Source: https://www.androidauthority.com/youtube-explicit-ads-proble...

Hell, they'll show weight loss ads to people with eating disorders - and this one might just be intentional rather than a failure of Youtube's moderation:

https://www.reddit.com/r/fuckeatingdisorders/comments/18gx1v... (Just one example but it's not hard to find more)

"Psychological abuse" is very much not hyperbole in the worst case scenarios. And as an extra bonus, Youtube promotes scam ads as well:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39117360

This seems to be a very big problem for YouTube:

  “In 2023, we blocked or removed over 5.5 billion ads, slightly up from the prior year, and suspended 12.7 million advertiser accounts, nearly double from the previous year,” the platform told us at the time.

I wonder what proportion of those 5.5 billion inappropriate ads were removed only after people watched and reported them.

The music nonsense is bundled because YouTube is full of music videos and music in the backgrounds of videos and they have to pay the record labels to play the music in. They have "YouTube Premium Lite" that doesn't include music, but then you get ads on videos that have music in them.

Why isn’t simply avoiding YouTube considered a viable solution?

And if they could find a way to make you pay attention you’d better believe they’d do it in a heartbeat

This makes no sense, it's not hard to filter out music videos, and music in regular videos wouldn't cost the same as the whole music premium, also Lite isn't just about music:

> Ads however may appear on ... Shorts, and when you search or browse.

So again, you can't pay just to replace ads. (By the way, there is another huge difference - premium is a subscription, so not tied to ad time replaced)

>You want to watch some content. The content provider offers you two options: pay and get no ads, or watch for free and also sit through some ads.

Thee provider made the content public on the Web. That means I can view it under any terms I chose until they find a way to exclude me without excluding all the attention that being on the public Web gives them.

There are not 2 options as you claim. There are infinite options to the user here. Google may prefer you engage in only one of two ways, but they have no legal ground to require that with content on the public Web.

Stop playing dumb

This is a pedantic response to a reasonable suggestion. It is not reasonable to complain about a product or service you are not paying for.

> have no legal ground

That's moving the goalposts of the conversation.

> ads are trying to get you to buy things

Are they? The last time I made the mistake of watching youtube without an ad blocker I got served US right-wing propaganda. I live in Spain, always have, and Google knows enough about me to know I'd despise that content.

>I can view it under any terms I chose until they find a way to exclude me without excluding all the attention that being on the public Web gives them.

This is the unsung argument everyone forgets! It goes to the very start of why someone might register a domain name and set up a website on the... World Wide Web... for people to visit with their User Agent software, ask for some HTML and get some HTML back. "HOW DARE YOU NOT DO A RANDOM SOCIALLY DEFINED THING AFTER ASKING FOR OUR HTML (AND OTHERS' MP4S)?"

The pedantry comes not from someone using their User Agent however they want to use it. It comes from a company trying to (with receipts and lawsuits to prove it) LITERALLY redefine the World Wide Web into their own money making machine, and punish anyone who rocks their boat. They can cry "legal argument" all they want. At the end of the day, they're trying to force pedantry on their users. The only problem is most of the public has bought it Hook, Line and Sinker.

No it's not. It's shining a light on where the real WWW goalposts are and always have been.

There's a difference between letting an ad play and you simply ignoring it, and using technical means from preventing that ad playing at all.

Principally - the latter actually affects the compensation given to the creator of whatever video you're watching. The former does not.

Ironically, they'd try to get you ... or someone... anyone! on fraud. Can you imagine the same argument made in the example of getting up and going to the kitchen?

> Your honor, they agreed to our terms and conditions which stipulate you MUST stay in the recliner facing forward the whole time. By getting up to <do something important and not waste their life watching ads>, they've defrauded our advertisers! We demand to be repaid in the form of 43 lazyboy hours per year.

When Apple first launched face ID, there was talk (I can't remember where) of developers being excited about the possibility of tracking where their users were looking.

“Why isn’t simply avoiding de facto standard video delivery platform isn’t simply an option?”

> The content provider offers you two options: pay and get no ads, or watch for free and also sit through some ads.

Wrong. The content provider explicitly states “ad-free”, yet I still see ads from content creators themselves.

YouTube music is nice, though.

Have you tried watching YouTube in the west without Adblock or YouTube premium?

Psychological abuse doesn’t even begin to describe experience.

Except TV and YouTube can offer similar, but not necessarily same, purpose.

TV, speaking of cable, is exclusively for entertainment. YouTube is used for pretty much everything these days. Imagine being in a panic, looking for a video how perform CPR, and getting 30 seconds unskippable ad.

The terms of the contract are the terms encoded in the HTTP protocol. They are:

- I, as the user, (or my user agent on behalf of me) ask for a resource.

- YT, as the provider, (or the server on YT's behalf) decide whether to send that resource to me.

- If you do, I'll use or not use it in accordance with my user agent configuration.

I asked for the video, and YT chose to send it to me. I'm not going to lose sleep over the morality of using the web as it was intended to be used.

Then it seems that blocking ads is the more honest thing to do! Otherwise the company placing the ad would be unfairly paying money for a service not actually delivered. This also makes the market more efficient, as blocking ads is a clear signal their products aren't desired.

Whenever I’m in a situation where I can’t skip an ad (e.g. TV, radio, on foreign computer, etc), I usually turn down the volume and look away. Am I, in some sense, stealing whenever when I am not thoroughly considering each of the generous offers that Brand and Company have paid money to have delivered personally to devices of people like me? Is this inconvenient time spent while avoiding their message my penance, and is trying to skip it altogether somehow what turns my actions into sin?

Of course it’s all about everyone getting paid! I always just find it silly when my fellow plebeians try to echo some false obligation to abide by this system when people like us have been avoiding it for as long as it has existed.

I feel like you can make the same argument in favor of being allowed to DDOS. Yes it's public, but I don't think that gives you a moral out for viewing the content in a way the publisher doesn't want.

Google isn't obligated to pay the bandwidth costs just so the population can have ad-free access, no.

You brought up something I’ve been thinking about too: the real issue is that YouTube has effectively become a monopoly. It’s the de facto standard for online video.

It makes me wonder: is there room for meaningful competition or an alternative platform? And if so, how could it be made sustainable? Are there any viable revenue models beyond ads and surveillance capitalism?

AdNauseum simulate ad clicks, which I've always found to be an interesting concept. Sadly it will never reach a critical mass of users for it to be effective.

https://adnauseam.io/

It being "nice" does not negate the fact that there's no way to pay for _only_ ad removal.

I have. It was mostly the usual nonsense- overpriced kitchen knives, stupid phone games, car insurance, clothes, that sort of thing.

Nothing about anything I saw rose even close to the level of psychological abuse.

Showing multiple ads across a couple of minutes video and at least one add at the start is not a psychological abuse to you? I'm not binge watching YouTube anymore, and I have premium, but this is borderline insane. Imagine EVERY action that you do is being monetized and you're literally prevented from doing anything while the ad is showing.

If you can’t make a reasonable attempt to answer your own question, you’re not here to argue in good faith.

You’re just factually incorrect on 1. Creator sponsors are not YT ads, by your logic i wouldn’t be allowed to watch a movie trailer on youtube because it’s technically an ad for something.

What we choose to watch on youtube is also up to us.

“Literally prevented from doing anything” - well this is a complete lie, so we can ignore the rest of what you said.

And apple, being not terrible in this one specific regard (their privacy record tends to be decent for a tech giant), didn’t allow it fortunately. Not sure if the same is true on other phones.

> Creator sponsors are not YT ads

They are. YT shows content, and has several mechanisms of including paid ads in that content. From content consumption perspective there is no difference which specific mechanism is used.

> by your logic i wouldn’t be allowed to watch a movie trailer

No, that's your own twisted logic. By my logic you'd be free to consume directly whatever you want, just be able to "pay and get no ads"

Excuse me? You can somehow watch video through the ad?

Google has enough cash to squash any competitors. For now, the only remotely hopeful viable alternative is the creator-owned Nebula.

And what if I want to watch mightycarmods entire videos including their personal sponsorship segments? Are you just going to take that away from me?

Stop fallaciously pretending they’re the same thing.

You said “doing anything”. Read your own comment…

> No, that's your own twisted logic [stop fallaciously doing that!]. By my logic you'd be free to consume directly whatever you want, just be able to "pay and get no ads"