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I feel content on the internet was free for so long, people just feel entitled to it. Now everyone is anti-ad, with most not being able to support an argument a

I feel content on the internet was free for so long, people just feel entitled to it. Now everyone is anti-ad, with most not being able to support an argument as to why targeted ads are bad (like any human at Google cares how user 1839028934 watches vtubers for 8 hours a day), but they still feel entitled to consume content for free.

lelandbatey 5y ago
> "They're still entitled to consume content for free." YouTube et al. are free. That's the whole point! The only reason anyone uses them is because they are free, as in free beer. If I crack open an incognito tab and go to YouTube, they serve me a page of videos, I click on one, and it starts playing. I didn't agree to anything, I never said "oh, but I agree I'll watch the ads/let the ads play/download the ads" in order to be allowed to watch the YouTube video. (armchair lawyers will make murmurs about "Terms of Service" and "End User License Agreements", which may in some cases technically be true in a legalese sense, but are clear cases of trying to weasel out of what's right in front of our faces, which is that these platforms are free). YouTubes business model is to give things away for free and HOPE that they can advertise to you enough that it will be worth it. This is, in general, the business model of "the internet". The thing is, we've been at it for so long, that the businesses folks are starting to become entitled. It's been 25+ years and so many people have gotten in on this game (low level content creators are quite numerous) that now the opinion of the tastemakers is shifting to one of "yeah I am entitled to get paid for my work, and since I get paid when people look at the ads I facilitate, I am thusly entitled to have my audience look at my ads so I can get paid." It's a train of thought that seems to make sense, but all the creators are forgetting that that's not how their business model actually works, and that's not the deal any of us in any conscious way have agreed to. I have a story I wrote a while ago that I feel captures what we're seeing with business people becoming entitled to owning our eyeballs, devices, and attention: ---------- By 2027 we live in a world were in every town there's a pizza place with a huge sign atop reading "FREE PIZZA". You park your car and queue in line for the order window; when your time comes you ask for a pepperoni pizza and you're handed a pepperoni pizza, no cash required. However, you're also handed a 3 inch thick stack of flyers advertising for random business and schemes. Well, you didn't ask for a phone books worth of paper, so you move to throw them into the garbage. Before you can you're stopped by an employee who gasps "what are you doing?!" As though in answer to a question like 'why are you breathing', you reply "I'm throwing away these extra papers; they're very heavy." "But don't you know that if people throw away the advertisements, we can't afford to give away the pizza?" moans the employee. Feeling irritated, you respond "Well, it's my pizza now so I'm going to throw these away." You do, and with that you walk to your car and drive home. The frustrated employee would, by 2030, move to management, where the business would seek to have customers sign papers saying that they can be hand-fed pizza by restaurant staff as long as that customer agrees, under penalty of death and enforced by on-site police, to sit with their eyes held open and stare into monitors showing advertisements on loop. Later in 2035, this nameless employee would receive a promotion to VP after coordinating a team of lawyers who successfully lobbied the US congress to legislate allowing the term "FREE PIZZA" to describe the process of "contractually and punitively enforced assisted hand-feeding in panoptic advertising environments". Meanwhile in 2028, Europe would rule in favor of selling Pizza for $2 a slice.
- bmicraft 5y ago
  You have put very well how I've felt about all this for a long time now
- Pooge 5y ago
  Worth pointing out that there would be no place selling pizza anymore. Why buy one when you can eat (and read) for free?! It wouldn't be a bright world, but the web nowadays isn't bright. Man it makes me sad.
- rrrrrrrrrrrryan 5y ago
  Sounds like a typical timeshare pitch.
- FabHK 5y ago
  > If I crack open an incognito tab and go to YouTube, they serve me a page of videos, I click on one, and it starts playing. I didn't agree to anything I am served this when going to YouTube, which I have to agree to: "Before you continue to YouTube Google uses cookies and data to: Deliver and maintain services, like tracking outages and protecting against spam, fraud and abuse Measure audience engagement and site statistics to understand how our services are used If you agree, we’ll also use cookies and data: Improve the quality of our services and develop new ones Deliver and measure the effectiveness of ads Show personalised content, depending on your settings Show personalised or generic ads, depending on your settings, on Google and across the web For non-personalised content and ads, what you see may be influenced by things like the content that you’re currently viewing and your location (ad serving is based on general location). Personalised content and ads can be based on those things and your activity, like Google searches and videos that you watch on YouTube. Personalised content and ads include things like more relevant results and recommendations, a customised YouTube homepage, and ads that are tailored to your interests. Click 'Customise' to review options, including controls to reject the use of cookies for personalisation and information about browser-level controls to reject some or all cookies for other uses. You can also visit g.co/privacytools at any time. Privacy Policy • Terms of Service"
  - lelandbatey 5y ago
mkdirp 5y ago
On average only 3 pieces of information are needed to identify a person. Sure you're person 1234567890, but all the information linked to that user can find out exactly who that person is.
- ApolloFortyNine 5y ago
  So? If your issue is government surveillance, take it up with them, get a law created so they can't look at it. If it's the company, they truly don't care who you are, you truly are 1234567890 to them. If that, it's unlikely a human being will ever actually look at your data.
  - mkdirp 5y ago
    If you think you truly are user 1234567890 then you're sorely mistaken. Corporations have one thing in mind, and that is profit. They'll use your data however they see fit to maximise those profits. If that means identifying you, then so be it. There is a reason phrase like microtargetting exists. When a political group is able to target individuals using their platform, that's not okay. It gets worse though, government surveillance is one thing, it's another when Corporations give them full access to their data. Or did we forget Snowden already?
Krasnol 5y ago
Why would a "human" need to care? The algorithms which do things with your data you don't know are far worse.
- ApolloFortyNine 5y ago
  >The algorithms which do things with your data you don't know are far worse. I'd love an example.
  - Krasnol 5y ago
    Credit scores, racial profiling and other data based discriminations
    - ApolloFortyNine 5y ago
      >Credit scores At least you started off with by far your worst example. The alternative to credit scores is only the wealthy getting loans, full stop. Any alternative would require a human being combing your finances for hours, which would obviously substantially raise the cost of loaning money.
      - Krasnol 5y ago
        Oh so let's build scores based upon social media interactions and google results because this is fair? What? No. Not ANY alternative would require a human. There are a few numbers you actually need. You should have to ASK for those!! Besides that: I don't care about someone losing money because they actually have to sit down a human to verify data which is relevant. This is what humans are good for and if it cost you, you can put it on a bill.
Pooge 5y ago
> Now everyone is anti-ad I became anti-ad. I absolutely cannot browse the web normally without having uBlock Origin installed. Websites that place intrusive ads are responsible for this. > they still feel entitled to consume content for free Yes, and I agree with you. But even if YouTube became a paid service, Google would still find a way to track you and continue its shady privacy practices. There's some entitlement, but there's definitely some principles at work, too. YouTube is the last Google service that I use (beside Android...), and the earlier it implodes the better. My mother told me about ads on Snapchat and I asked her: "Would you be willing to pay $2/months to not get any ads?". The answer is obviously "No". We can all agree the web would be a more sustainable place if services were paid, but as you said: now we feel entitled to it.
- bmicraft 5y ago
  The real problem with ads is that you have to pay vastly more to remove them through a subscription (where it is even possible) than the revenue they would have brought.
  - Pooge 5y ago
    If every Snapchat user paid $2/month, wouldn't Snapchat have decent revenue? For some service the infrastructure might cost a lot, but I don't think it applies to Snapchat (it's a very "ephemeral" photo-sharing platform, after all). Another way would be to charge for every photo you upload. Those that share more pay more, which would make sense.
  - bduerst 5y ago
    That's because the demand for subscription content is magnitudes less than ad-subsidized free content. Even if you made a hybrid model, the content isn't that interchangeable. The type of customer who pays for a subscription is going to consume vastly different content than the freemium customer.
    - Nextgrid 5y ago
      > the demand for subscription content is magnitudes less than ad-subsidized free content. A lot of ad-subsidized content only "works" because by the time the user realizes that the content is subpar it's already too late and they've "paid" and can't take their money back. This wouldn't work in a scenario where an explicit action needs to be taken (to agree to pay a fee) before consuming the content, and/or where due to laws/regulation the customer has the possibility to demand their money back if they've been misled. The truth is that a lot of content on the internet isn't worth paying for.
generalizations 5y ago
This feels like a really condescending take on the people you disagree with. Why do you assume it's entitlement? Netflix thrives because they're worth paying for. People have the right to not be watched, no matter how "anonymous" it is. Why do you have a problem with that?
- ApolloFortyNine 5y ago
  You can, today, pay for youtube premium and receive an ad free viewing experience. >Why do you have a problem with that? Why do you have the problem with simply paying? Or simply not using any websites that have ads? Speak with you 'wallet' (in this case, view impression) if you will.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - generalizations 5y ago
    > Why do you have the problem with simply paying? Never said I do. You, however, seem to have a problem with the idea that not wanting to be tracked and watched is a legitimate desire. Why is that?
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
kelnos 5y ago
I believe all advertising is emotional and mental manipulation, and I feel it is unethical to subject people to that. Targeted ads are a) that same manipulation but on steroids, and b) the result of privacy-damaging, pervasive, surveillance capitalism. I am against these things as a matter of principle. For the record, I do pay for YouTube Premium, as well as the ad-free Hulu plan (rather than the ad-supported plan), etc. If I am given the option to pay to remove ads, for a price I consider reasonable based on the value I get, I will pay it. Most websites, however, either do not present this option at all, or require something ridiculous like a $20/mo subscription when the perceived value I get from it is an order of magnitude lower. I recently clicked a link to an article at The Guardian, and, in their bid for donations, told me that this was the 18th article I've read in the past year. I wish more sites would do this, but I believe that my consumption of any particular news source is similar to that. I am certainly not going to pay for a double-digit monthly subscription for any site where I read just 2 (or even 5 or 10) articles per month; that does not feel like a fair exchange to me. I would be fine paying for articles a la carte (say, 5 or 10 cents each), but of course micropayments seems to be a dead concept these days (for reasons I understand and sympathize with).
k12sosse 5y ago
It's weird that people just think because it's available over the Internet it should be free because "this isn't how it worked in 1993". Would love to see what would happen if YouTube went behind a paywall - even a low figure like $1.99 a month to view anything at all. How would this change consumption habits, how would this change producing habits.
- SlavikCA 5y ago
  That would be great: that would open the door to possibility (viability) of YouTube competitor
- autoexec 5y ago
  > It's weird that people just think because it's available over the Internet it should be free because "this isn't how it worked in 1993". The idea is older than the 1993. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_wants_to_be_free https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_wants_to_be_free when it comes to the vast majority of the content on youtube, it was created by someone other than google with the expectation that it would be free. There is now an expectation that people should be able to find and listen to any song they want on youtube (to a lesser extent movies and TV shows too), but that has less to do with how people feel about the internet and more about our broken copyright system and that most of that content used to be broadcast to the public. If youtube were behind a paywall most people wouldn't spend as much time (if any) watching youtube videos and far fewer people would bother creating content for it. That'd be a losing situation for Google since they need the public's eyes on ads and a steady stream of data to mine from both content creators and viewers.
jlpom 5y ago
Few are against targeted ads but rather data collection.
jraph 5y ago
> most not being able to support an argument as to why targeted ads are bad (like any human at Google cares how user 1839028934 watches vtubers for 8 hours a day) That's just small pieces of data about you, adding up, that can be requested by potential future governments which turned into totalitarianism. The less data about us stored somewhere, the safer. This is what is fundamentally wrong with the "targeted" part in "targeted ads".
cute_boi 5y ago
There are plenty of reasons to hate ads. https://cosmicskeptic.github.io/blog/advertising-industry/ https://cosmicskeptic.github.io/blog/advertising-industry/

lelandbatey 5y ago

> "They're still entitled to consume content for free." YouTube et al. are free. That's the whole point! The only reason anyone uses them is because they are free, as in free beer. If I crack open an incognito tab and go to YouTube, they serve me a page of videos, I click on one, and it starts playing. I didn't agree to anything, I never said "oh, but I agree I'll watch the ads/let the ads play/download the ads" in order to be allowed to watch the YouTube video. (armchair lawyers will make murmurs about "Terms of Service" and "End User License Agreements", which may in some cases technically be true in a legalese sense, but are clear cases of trying to weasel out of what's right in front of our faces, which is that these platforms are free). YouTubes business model is to give things away for free and HOPE that they can advertise to you enough that it will be worth it. This is, in general, the business model of "the internet". The thing is, we've been at it for so long, that the businesses folks are starting to become entitled. It's been 25+ years and so many people have gotten in on this game (low level content creators are quite numerous) that now the opinion of the tastemakers is shifting to one of "yeah I am entitled to get paid for my work, and since I get paid when people look at the ads I facilitate, I am thusly entitled to have my audience look at my ads so I can get paid." It's a train of thought that seems to make sense, but all the creators are forgetting that that's not how their business model actually works, and that's not the deal any of us in any conscious way have agreed to. I have a story I wrote a while ago that I feel captures what we're seeing with business people becoming entitled to owning our eyeballs, devices, and attention: ---------- By 2027 we live in a world were in every town there's a pizza place with a huge sign atop reading "FREE PIZZA". You park your car and queue in line for the order window; when your time comes you ask for a pepperoni pizza and you're handed a pepperoni pizza, no cash required. However, you're also handed a 3 inch thick stack of flyers advertising for random business and schemes. Well, you didn't ask for a phone books worth of paper, so you move to throw them into the garbage. Before you can you're stopped by an employee who gasps "what are you doing?!" As though in answer to a question like 'why are you breathing', you reply "I'm throwing away these extra papers; they're very heavy." "But don't you know that if people throw away the advertisements, we can't afford to give away the pizza?" moans the employee. Feeling irritated, you respond "Well, it's my pizza now so I'm going to throw these away." You do, and with that you walk to your car and drive home. The frustrated employee would, by 2030, move to management, where the business would seek to have customers sign papers saying that they can be hand-fed pizza by restaurant staff as long as that customer agrees, under penalty of death and enforced by on-site police, to sit with their eyes held open and stare into monitors showing advertisements on loop. Later in 2035, this nameless employee would receive a promotion to VP after coordinating a team of lawyers who successfully lobbied the US congress to legislate allowing the term "FREE PIZZA" to describe the process of "contractually and punitively enforced assisted hand-feeding in panoptic advertising environments". Meanwhile in 2028, Europe would rule in favor of selling Pizza for $2 a slice.

bmicraft 5y ago
You have put very well how I've felt about all this for a long time now
Pooge 5y ago
Worth pointing out that there would be no place selling pizza anymore. Why buy one when you can eat (and read) for free?! It wouldn't be a bright world, but the web nowadays isn't bright. Man it makes me sad.
rrrrrrrrrrrryan 5y ago
Sounds like a typical timeshare pitch.
FabHK 5y ago
> If I crack open an incognito tab and go to YouTube, they serve me a page of videos, I click on one, and it starts playing. I didn't agree to anything I am served this when going to YouTube, which I have to agree to: "Before you continue to YouTube Google uses cookies and data to: Deliver and maintain services, like tracking outages and protecting against spam, fraud and abuse Measure audience engagement and site statistics to understand how our services are used If you agree, we’ll also use cookies and data: Improve the quality of our services and develop new ones Deliver and measure the effectiveness of ads Show personalised content, depending on your settings Show personalised or generic ads, depending on your settings, on Google and across the web For non-personalised content and ads, what you see may be influenced by things like the content that you’re currently viewing and your location (ad serving is based on general location). Personalised content and ads can be based on those things and your activity, like Google searches and videos that you watch on YouTube. Personalised content and ads include things like more relevant results and recommendations, a customised YouTube homepage, and ads that are tailored to your interests. Click 'Customise' to review options, including controls to reject the use of cookies for personalisation and information about browser-level controls to reject some or all cookies for other uses. You can also visit g.co/privacytools at any time. Privacy Policy • Terms of Service"
- lelandbatey 5y ago

mkdirp 5y ago

On average only 3 pieces of information are needed to identify a person. Sure you're person 1234567890, but all the information linked to that user can find out exactly who that person is.

ApolloFortyNine 5y ago
So? If your issue is government surveillance, take it up with them, get a law created so they can't look at it. If it's the company, they truly don't care who you are, you truly are 1234567890 to them. If that, it's unlikely a human being will ever actually look at your data.
- mkdirp 5y ago
  If you think you truly are user 1234567890 then you're sorely mistaken. Corporations have one thing in mind, and that is profit. They'll use your data however they see fit to maximise those profits. If that means identifying you, then so be it. There is a reason phrase like microtargetting exists. When a political group is able to target individuals using their platform, that's not okay. It gets worse though, government surveillance is one thing, it's another when Corporations give them full access to their data. Or did we forget Snowden already?

Krasnol 5y ago

Why would a "human" need to care? The algorithms which do things with your data you don't know are far worse.

ApolloFortyNine 5y ago
>The algorithms which do things with your data you don't know are far worse. I'd love an example.
- Krasnol 5y ago
  Credit scores, racial profiling and other data based discriminations
  - ApolloFortyNine 5y ago
    >Credit scores At least you started off with by far your worst example. The alternative to credit scores is only the wealthy getting loans, full stop. Any alternative would require a human being combing your finances for hours, which would obviously substantially raise the cost of loaning money.
    - Krasnol 5y ago
      Oh so let's build scores based upon social media interactions and google results because this is fair? What? No. Not ANY alternative would require a human. There are a few numbers you actually need. You should have to ASK for those!! Besides that: I don't care about someone losing money because they actually have to sit down a human to verify data which is relevant. This is what humans are good for and if it cost you, you can put it on a bill.

Pooge 5y ago

> Now everyone is anti-ad I became anti-ad. I absolutely cannot browse the web normally without having uBlock Origin installed. Websites that place intrusive ads are responsible for this. > they still feel entitled to consume content for free Yes, and I agree with you. But even if YouTube became a paid service, Google would still find a way to track you and continue its shady privacy practices. There's some entitlement, but there's definitely some principles at work, too. YouTube is the last Google service that I use (beside Android...), and the earlier it implodes the better. My mother told me about ads on Snapchat and I asked her: "Would you be willing to pay $2/months to not get any ads?". The answer is obviously "No". We can all agree the web would be a more sustainable place if services were paid, but as you said: now we feel entitled to it.

bmicraft 5y ago
The real problem with ads is that you have to pay vastly more to remove them through a subscription (where it is even possible) than the revenue they would have brought.
- Pooge 5y ago
  If every Snapchat user paid $2/month, wouldn't Snapchat have decent revenue? For some service the infrastructure might cost a lot, but I don't think it applies to Snapchat (it's a very "ephemeral" photo-sharing platform, after all). Another way would be to charge for every photo you upload. Those that share more pay more, which would make sense.
- bduerst 5y ago
  That's because the demand for subscription content is magnitudes less than ad-subsidized free content. Even if you made a hybrid model, the content isn't that interchangeable. The type of customer who pays for a subscription is going to consume vastly different content than the freemium customer.
  - Nextgrid 5y ago
    > the demand for subscription content is magnitudes less than ad-subsidized free content. A lot of ad-subsidized content only "works" because by the time the user realizes that the content is subpar it's already too late and they've "paid" and can't take their money back. This wouldn't work in a scenario where an explicit action needs to be taken (to agree to pay a fee) before consuming the content, and/or where due to laws/regulation the customer has the possibility to demand their money back if they've been misled. The truth is that a lot of content on the internet isn't worth paying for.

generalizations 5y ago

This feels like a really condescending take on the people you disagree with. Why do you assume it's entitlement? Netflix thrives because they're worth paying for. People have the right to not be watched, no matter how "anonymous" it is. Why do you have a problem with that?

ApolloFortyNine 5y ago
You can, today, pay for youtube premium and receive an ad free viewing experience. >Why do you have a problem with that? Why do you have the problem with simply paying? Or simply not using any websites that have ads? Speak with you 'wallet' (in this case, view impression) if you will.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- generalizations 5y ago
  > Why do you have the problem with simply paying? Never said I do. You, however, seem to have a problem with the idea that not wanting to be tracked and watched is a legitimate desire. Why is that?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]

kelnos 5y ago

I believe all advertising is emotional and mental manipulation, and I feel it is unethical to subject people to that. Targeted ads are a) that same manipulation but on steroids, and b) the result of privacy-damaging, pervasive, surveillance capitalism. I am against these things as a matter of principle. For the record, I do pay for YouTube Premium, as well as the ad-free Hulu plan (rather than the ad-supported plan), etc. If I am given the option to pay to remove ads, for a price I consider reasonable based on the value I get, I will pay it. Most websites, however, either do not present this option at all, or require something ridiculous like a $20/mo subscription when the perceived value I get from it is an order of magnitude lower. I recently clicked a link to an article at The Guardian, and, in their bid for donations, told me that this was the 18th article I've read in the past year. I wish more sites would do this, but I believe that my consumption of any particular news source is similar to that. I am certainly not going to pay for a double-digit monthly subscription for any site where I read just 2 (or even 5 or 10) articles per month; that does not feel like a fair exchange to me. I would be fine paying for articles a la carte (say, 5 or 10 cents each), but of course micropayments seems to be a dead concept these days (for reasons I understand and sympathize with).

k12sosse 5y ago

It's weird that people just think because it's available over the Internet it should be free because "this isn't how it worked in 1993". Would love to see what would happen if YouTube went behind a paywall - even a low figure like $1.99 a month to view anything at all. How would this change consumption habits, how would this change producing habits.

SlavikCA 5y ago
That would be great: that would open the door to possibility (viability) of YouTube competitor
autoexec 5y ago
> It's weird that people just think because it's available over the Internet it should be free because "this isn't how it worked in 1993". The idea is older than the 1993. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_wants_to_be_free https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_wants_to_be_free when it comes to the vast majority of the content on youtube, it was created by someone other than google with the expectation that it would be free. There is now an expectation that people should be able to find and listen to any song they want on youtube (to a lesser extent movies and TV shows too), but that has less to do with how people feel about the internet and more about our broken copyright system and that most of that content used to be broadcast to the public. If youtube were behind a paywall most people wouldn't spend as much time (if any) watching youtube videos and far fewer people would bother creating content for it. That'd be a losing situation for Google since they need the public's eyes on ads and a steady stream of data to mine from both content creators and viewers.

jlpom 5y ago

Few are against targeted ads but rather data collection.

jraph 5y ago

> most not being able to support an argument as to why targeted ads are bad (like any human at Google cares how user 1839028934 watches vtubers for 8 hours a day) That's just small pieces of data about you, adding up, that can be requested by potential future governments which turned into totalitarianism. The less data about us stored somewhere, the safer. This is what is fundamentally wrong with the "targeted" part in "targeted ads".

cute_boi 5y ago

There are plenty of reasons to hate ads. https://cosmicskeptic.github.io/blog/advertising-industry/ https://cosmicskeptic.github.io/blog/advertising-industry/