YouTube's new anti-adblock measures

There are 3 primary undesirability aspects of ads:

1) ads as irrelevant intrusions (in spite of all data Google collects, ads are mostly irrelevant for any person)

2) ads as ugly or blockers of beauty

3) ads as thieves of attention or downright theft (scam ads, illegal products)

Then, should we pay to get rid of ads or not? Two opposite opinions:

1) paying YouTube support creators

2) paying YouTube rewards the "shitification" of the platform

But even for those who pay there are issues: the content creator's own sponsorships, shorts, the risk of account banning by Google.

Then how about compensating creators directly? (Patreon or PayPal for example)

What I don't get is the questioning on the morality of ad blocking. No one should be obligated to watch an ad in one's own device, regardless of whatever "Terms of Service" (which is not a contract). It may be unfair to the content creator who relies on that revenue though.

> the content creator's own sponsorships, shorts...

Many of the people I watch add "jump ahead" buttons for these sections now, which is neat.

Install the Sponsorblock extension. It does this automatically, provided someone watched the video before you and told it where the sponsor is. It can also, optionally, skip over "like and subscribe!", "buy my merch", intro and outro jingles, and other potentially low-value segments.

I have only one: Ads.

Ads shouldn't exist. The fact that most human endeavours now are forced to use ads is insane.

I like adverts. They inform me about good things I could buy that I otherwise wouldn't have known about.

You seem to use the word "good" very liberally.

No one is obligated to watch ads though. No one is obligated to use the service.

As someone who uses an ad blocker I do think it's immoral, and I do pay for YouTube premium and other stuff where reasonable.

When you ignore or don't click on the ads, is that also immoral?

It's actually YouTube that adds those as a feature for Premium subscribers. It infers the locations automatically using viewing data.

Ads are a brute force approach to the challenge of having useful information (company X offers Y) reach their target (people who needs Y presently or in the future).

If you say no ads should exist, then what alternatives would you have for that challenge?

> Then, should we pay to get rid of ads or not? Two opposite opinions:

> 1) paying YouTube support creators

> 2) paying YouTube rewards the "shitification" of the platform

I have a third opinion. I expect that if enough people pay Google, they will remove the free service altogether, add ads to the paid service, and perhaps introduce a new, more expensive ad free tier. Paying them not only rewards the enshitification, it encourages the next step.

That's not the point of ads.

Humanity lived without ads for thousands of years, I think we can do without.

That time coincided with humanity living near the lowest standards of life.