this post was submitted on 08 Dec 2023
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I have an honest question and I feel like Lemmy is a good place to have a real discussion on this. To preface this, I use adblock too so I'm kinda calling myself a hypocrite with this question :P
Why do we expect any free service not to have ads? If a paid service like Netflix introduced ads I'd be pissed, and same goes for cable TV these days. But why would something free like Youtube not have ads? How can we be bothered by ads on a service we're getting for free?
Someone help me reconcile this for my own well-being haha.
Ads arent inherently the problem. The problem is that the user experience often gets ruined because, for example, on certain news sites every paragraph of text you read, you get a full page ad. Imo when its like this its fully acceptable to not let them have limited revenue from you.
Youtube has the right to serve ads along with the content, but it does not have the right to dictate what I can or can't do with the data once it hits my machine. It has no more right to hijack my property to force them upon me than it does to strap me to a chair and force my eyes open, A Clockwork Orange style.
If Youtube doesn't like that arrangement, its recourse is to serve a
403: forbiddeninstead of the video data.There's also a deeper discussion to be had whether corporations have any sort of right to exist in their current form in the first place, but I'll leave that for another time.
Is is like muting during a commercial break, or going out of the room to do something else. What happens in my home, is under my control. You want to stop me from doing that? Refuse to serve me content. I'm fine with that
It's like flipping over the ad pages in a magazine. It's like taking the advertisement brochures out of a newspaper and throwing them into the trash. It's like leaving the room during halftime break. It's like taping a show without the commercial breaks. It's like walking past a poster without reading it. It's like getting your letters from the mailbox and throwing away the advertising mailers. It's like going to the cinema and talking during the ads that are playing before the movie. It's like walking down the sidewalk and ignoring the people trying to sell you merchandise. It's like switching channels when commercials come on.
But for some reason, people are trying to tell me that I'm ethically and morally in the wrong for blocking fucking YouTube ads.
Well said. I’ll remember this point next time blocking YouTube ads comes up in discussion.
You're asking someone who'd spent a good chunk of my life creating Skyrim mods for free and volunteering for services in my community with no recompense or desire for money how I expect people to contribute things they presumably enjoy without getting paid? To be clear, you're asking me this from a server on a federated platform that is held together with community love and free-will donations?
I know we've been conditioned by capitalism to reduce everything to its monetary worth, but I feel like we should know better here.
Fair point, but the instance I use doesn't allow image uploads because of the disk space issue. Videos take way more space than that. And, of course, you can't just slap in a single drive, you need RAID or something so when a drive fails, you don't lose stuff.
Add in bandwidth concerns, and it's a legitimate question. Hosting a general video site can't be cheap, and people generally won't pay for it.
If we did want a community run video hosting site ala Lemmy, how would that work? What would it cost the hosters?
That's PeerTube. Idk what it's costing the hosts exactly, but my server is apparently bringing in enough in donations to be viable.
Idk I don't really care that much about video content, so I'll leave that up to someone else to parse. If someone provides an entirely free, ad-free way to share videos, then great. If not, then oh well.
To add on to what the others have said, there should always be competition between free and paid services. Free services should provide only what they are capable of with the limitations they operate under due to a donation model, while paid services can use all the advantages they can get with advertising, big budgets for hosting, etc. Free and open-source often still won under these conditions. Think Encarta against Wikipedia. If paid wins, that's fine, people can still have a reasonably good alternative with the free option.
The problem arises when a corporation builds on the back of a free resource, and then starts charging users once the network effects kick in. With YouTube, Google was able to leaverage 20 years worth of videos that people lovingly uploaded (although 10 of those years were in the post-ad plagued world) and then start forcing people to bend to their monetization rules. Most of those people didn't upload to YouTube because they wanted to make money off their videos, they just wanted to share a funny video. If given the choice, they would have chosen free instead of ad-driven. We have no choice since all that content is now locked behind YouTube's ad walls.
The ads themselves are not a problem. The problems are