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>So the net result of taking media away from legacy industries and handing it over to tech is (1) unskippable ads, (2) surveillance, (3) censorship and revocati

>So the net result of taking media away from legacy industries and handing it over to tech is (1) unskippable ads, (2) surveillance, (3) censorship and revocation of media you don't physically own, and now (4) unpausable media. No. First, legacy industries didn't have media "taken away" from them. They simply refused to adapt to new technology quickly enough, so new media (WWW) became popular, which replaced the old media the legacy industries were working with (newsprint, OTA TV). 1. a. You can skip ads using an ad-blocker. They work extremely well. Lots of people refuse to educate themselves about them, and even when their tech-savvy friend shows it to them or even installs one for them, they don't use it. 1. b. The legacy industries didn't let you skip ads either: if you were reading a newspaper, the ad was right there next to the text. If you were watching TV, you had to sit through commercials (which were generally timed to appear at the same time on all stations, so you couldn't change channels to avoid them). DVRs didn't come about until much later. 3. "censorship": Legacy industries only printed or aired stuff they wanted you to see, and since there were only a small handful of choices, that wasn't much. revocation: the tech companies haven't taken anything away. You can still buy CDs and Blu-Rays, but people choose to subscribe to streaming services instead. Also, you can download anything you want from YouTube with yt-dlp. 4. This isn't unpausable, they just show ads during pauses (if you refuse to use an ad-blocker).

namaria 2y ago
I'm glad prevalent behavior is to not use ad blockers. It turns watching ads a tax on ignorance, and lets that usage fly under the radar.
- shiroiushi 2y ago
  This is an understandable position, and probably explains why ad-blockers have been tolerated for so long, however it seems it isn't working so well any more because the media giants have been pouring a lot of resources in recent years into defeating ad-blockers. Many websites will refuse to load the page until you turn off the ad-blocker (of course it's an arms race, as the ad-blockers will figure out how to block this ad-block detection), YouTube is apparently working very hard at defeating ad-blocking (with varied results so far), etc. So it seems that ad-blockers have gotten popular enough that these companies believe they're "losing" too much money (i.e., not getting money they think they should) to ad-blocking and are stepping up efforts to fight back. Of course, the worse they make the ads, the more people turn to ad-blockers. Back when ads were new, no one really cared much about a banner ad here or there. But then the advertisers came up with pop-up ads, and users (rightfully) revolted, and tools to block these ads were devised, even building them directly into web browsers because these pop-ups were so awful. The same is happening now, I believe: YouTube ads weren't so annoying in the past, only showing at the video start, but now they inject 30-minute ads at random times, so more and more users are turning to blockers.
  - rightbyte 2y ago
    > YouTube is apparently working very hard at defeating ad-blocking (with varied results so far), etc. They could embed the ad in the video stream. It would be a pita to circumvent. Essentially you'd need to record the video and fast skip the ads.
    - shiroiushi 2y ago
      There must be technical reasons that YouTube hasn't already used this approach, otherwise it seems that they would have done it by now. I'm guessing it would require transcoding for every video played, and the energy cost of that (even with optimized GPU units for this job) just isn't worth what they get paid in ads.

namaria 2y ago

I'm glad prevalent behavior is to not use ad blockers. It turns watching ads a tax on ignorance, and lets that usage fly under the radar.

shiroiushi 2y ago
This is an understandable position, and probably explains why ad-blockers have been tolerated for so long, however it seems it isn't working so well any more because the media giants have been pouring a lot of resources in recent years into defeating ad-blockers. Many websites will refuse to load the page until you turn off the ad-blocker (of course it's an arms race, as the ad-blockers will figure out how to block this ad-block detection), YouTube is apparently working very hard at defeating ad-blocking (with varied results so far), etc. So it seems that ad-blockers have gotten popular enough that these companies believe they're "losing" too much money (i.e., not getting money they think they should) to ad-blocking and are stepping up efforts to fight back. Of course, the worse they make the ads, the more people turn to ad-blockers. Back when ads were new, no one really cared much about a banner ad here or there. But then the advertisers came up with pop-up ads, and users (rightfully) revolted, and tools to block these ads were devised, even building them directly into web browsers because these pop-ups were so awful. The same is happening now, I believe: YouTube ads weren't so annoying in the past, only showing at the video start, but now they inject 30-minute ads at random times, so more and more users are turning to blockers.
- rightbyte 2y ago
  > YouTube is apparently working very hard at defeating ad-blocking (with varied results so far), etc. They could embed the ad in the video stream. It would be a pita to circumvent. Essentially you'd need to record the video and fast skip the ads.
  - shiroiushi 2y ago
    There must be technical reasons that YouTube hasn't already used this approach, otherwise it seems that they would have done it by now. I'm guessing it would require transcoding for every video played, and the energy cost of that (even with optimized GPU units for this job) just isn't worth what they get paid in ads.