Bypassing Google's big anti-adblock update

Can you elaborate a bit? Why would that make my attention more valuable than other's?

If you are a paying subscriber, you are self-identifying as (likely) a higher net-worth. The problem for ad platforms allowing paid opt-out is that the most valuable users leave the network.

Then they have to go to advertisers and say, “advertise on our network where all the wealthier people are not.” A brand like Tiffany’s or Rolex (both huge advertisers) aren’t going to opt into that.

Because by paying you are demonstrating you have more than enough disposable income to waste on their extortion. You're paying for the privilege of segmenting yourself into the richer echelons of the market. You're basically doing their marketing job for them and paying for the privilege.

At some point some shareholder value maximizing CEO is going to sit down and notice just how much money he's leaving on the table by not advertising to paying customers like you. It's simply a matter of time.

Take a third option. Don't pay them and block their ads. Block their data collection too. It's your computer, you are in control.

You gotta love the mental gymnastics people will go through to convince themselves that not paying and blocking ads is the morally correct thing to do.

If you truly have those beliefs the right moral action is to not use YouTube at all but god forbid you'd have to make any sort of sacrifice.

I don't use Youtube at all, but I keep thinking I'm missing out and should make the effort to find a way to circumvent tracking. I can't see that the morality points to an obligation to absorb adverts. There can be no contract on the basis of what your mind must do.

Edit: let's step through this. If I use a towel placed over the computer to block ads, that's morally the same as using blocking software, I think? If I block the ads by putting my fingers in my ears and staring at the ceiling, also the same thing, morally. If I block them by watching them in a negative frame of mind, saying that I dislike ads and won't do what they suggest, I'm still doing the bad thing, the same as using an ad blocker - if it is a bad thing. My obligation, if it is an obligation, is to be receptive. Otherwise what, it's a sort of mind-fraud?

A YouTube subscription doesn’t exactly break the bank. Being able to afford it doesn’t make you wealthy.

Apart from that, you can bet that YouTube is pricing it in a way that they aren’t losing out compared to ad revenue.

It's a decent chunk of change for the sole purpose of avoiding ads on a single platform that barely pays the people actually producing the content. If you're looking to access premium content and YouTube Music, it's a slightly better value proposition (but only slightly, because YTM sucks, especially compared to what GPM used to be). For that ~$120 a year, you could buy a bunch of Steam games to occupy the same amount of time as your YT habit. Or you could buy a sub to services like Nebula which actually pay content creators decently. Or you could buy an external hard drive, install yt-dlp, and embrace Talk Like A Pirate Day, Groundhog Day-style.

Adding: advertisements use as many hacks as possible to grab your attention. You could broadly categorize things that behave in this way as akin to a) a baby's cries (attention-seeking by something that absolutely requires your assistance), b) an alarm (attention-seeking by something that seeks to warn you), or c) being accosted (attention-seeking by something that seeks to harm you for its own benefit). Which are advertisements most closely aligned with? Is it the same across all advertisements, or do intentions vary? People likely assign varying levels of morality to the above examples; does advertising inherit the morality of the most closely aligned example?

I mean, yeah, if you don’t actually get much use out of YouTube, then it might not be worth it to you. But that’s the same for all streaming services. And I wasn’t commenting on whether it’s worth it or not, which of course is subjective, but on how big an expense it is in absolute terms. The former doesn’t relate to the “higher net worth ads” argument, the latter does.

Personally I do like YouTube Music, due to all the user-uploaded content that isn’t available on other platforms.

$12 is a week of chicken thighs, man. It's enough gas to make $60-$80 running UberEats orders. In America. In "absolute terms", it's $100+ dollars a year to turn off ads on a single platform for content the creators are compensated pennies for.

People who choose that without much thought - because it's barely an expense for them - are definitely tending towards "higher net worth" nationally, let alone globally. A lot of those people just don't realize it, because the entire point of seeking that kind of status is so that they can enter a socioeconomic bubble and not have to care about annoyances (like advertising).

It is still my right to murder to uphold your lack of morals

There is nothing immoral about this at all. They're the ones who chose to send people videos for free, gambling on the notion that people would look at the ads. Nobody is obligated to make their unwarranted assumptions a reality. They are as entitled to our attention as a gambler is entitled to a jackpot.

If someone gives you an ad filled magazine, you can rip out the ad pages and throw them in the trash, leaving only the articles you actually want to read. Same principle applies here. If some random person on the street gives you a propaganda pamphlet, are you obligated to read it just because some businessman paid for it? Of course not.