4 ms·

> that are enforced on us ! You don’t have to use them and you could pay for them. The users of the internet have made their call and they often don’t want to

by duxup 2y ago

> that are enforced on us ! You don’t have to use them and you could pay for them. The users of the internet have made their call and they often don’t want to pay, so someone does. As a whole the users of the internet are not rewarding anyone for NOT showing ads. We want our content and we want if for free generally.

Jgrubb 2y ago
Every one of the streaming services that I paid extra to go ad free decided to push ads anyway.
- duxup 2y ago
  And they got their subscriber still I guess…. As users of these services as a whole we reward this kinda thing and then are upset when it happens again. I don’t like any of this situation but I also think the user’s choices incentivize it.
  - AlecSchueler 2y ago
    Which choice could they have made differently here? They took the "pay for it" option that you suggested and then you still blamed them for giving the company negative incentives.
  - rchaud 2y ago
    They didn't though. Every single streaming service bar Netflix loses money. On top of that, they've all poisoned the well by creating as many subscription tiers as Dell has laptop SKUs and raising the price every 9 months so nobody knows what the service should cost. This ensures that people start and stop subscriptions just to watch a single series, instead of sticking with a single service all year.
    - friendzis 2y ago
      So it appears paying entrenched IP-hoarding organizations majority of your income further incentivizing their entrenchment is not the best business practice for a middlemen
      - rchaud 2y ago
        The hoarding began once they decided to abandon the DVD market, paranoid about file ripping and sharing. Now TV shows are like videogames now, can't watch without an internet connection phoning home.
_Algernon_ 2y ago
The problem is that advertisement business infects everything. For instance, I could pay for Youtube Premium to ostensibly not be shown ads, but it doesn't change the fact that all the content[^1] in the ecosystem is still produced for maximizing watch time and/or being advertisement friendly. I could pay for news, but that doesn't change the fact that the news is written to receive clicks from the non-paying users. Paying for things does not help escaping the second order effects of advertisement. [^1]: To a close approximation.
- jnsie 2y ago
  Recently I've been annoyed with Youtube Premium. I pay for an ad-free experience and do not see ads in the traditional (wait 5 seconds to skip) way, yet more and more content has inline product promotion where time is spent thanking a sponsor and pitching their product. So I'm paying not to avoid ads, but I'm still seeing paid promotion...
  - fn-mote 2y ago
    > I'm paying not to avoid ads, but I'm still seeing paid promotion... It seems like you have shifted from having a problem with the platform to having a problem with the content producers. Can’t win?
    - jnsie 2y ago
      People all the way down...
  - duxup 2y ago
    > where time is spent thanking a sponsor and pitching their product I’ve been unsubscribing from folks who do that a lot. Instant unsubscribe if the product is questionable. I’m not going to judge their business decision, but it tea sets an odd tone when I’m watching something informative and they bust out into a “someone paid me to say this”.
  - ajsnigrutin 2y ago
    google for "sponsorblock" extension for your browser, crowdsourced data makes it skip all the promotions, intros, "like and subscribe" and all other unneeded parts. And when you're at it, ublock origin also skips the youtube ads. There's also: https://freetubeapp.io/ https://freetubeapp.io/ , but it's a constant cat and mouse game with youtube, where you now have to refresh a video a few times before it starts playing (then it works fine), until they upgrade the software and then it works, until youtube changes something again.
abricq 2y ago
I know that I, as a user, ultimately have 2 choices: to pay for a subscription, or the choice to not use these services. Option (1) does not block infinite scrolling content, it only removes adds. So this is missing the point. All i want is to not see these dumb shorts videos that I genuinely give no fuck about, but that manages to catch my attention regardless. Then sure, I can always delete my social accounts, and ultimately i might end up doing it. But let me try to explain why I think this is difficult, and also unfair. I give 2 purposes to these social networks: First, they play a role in personal-life balance as a way to be more integrated in my group of friends / local communities. Second, they play a role as citizen of my region (in my case, France and switzerland) by being a (sorta reliable) source of information through following accounts and newspapper on them. Initially, none of these social-networks came with this super-fast / addictive content. They only started to integrate it, in my experience, since 5 years. So it seems to me that these companies have broke the initial contract that they "sold" to us: to connect with our friends & communities and to allow us to follow a specific set of public influencers. I guess that I am mad that we, as a society, have allowed these companies to gain such an important role in our daily lifes (social life and public life) that they can now say : we will allow you to interact with some of our friends, but you will also have to watch our stupid videos... And unfortunaltey, it's not easy at all to spin up a concurrent social networks that would be full-filling this initial contract. Probably lots of people actually like to scroll on insta Reels and youtube Shorts.
- ed312 2y ago
  This is why you fundamentally cannot rely on private companies to build the "town square". This will _always_ happen because every company has a profit motive (even if its a loooong tail via SV-style funding). The problem behind the problem is people want great communities and tools, but don't way to provide any effort to build them.
- carlosjobim 2y ago
  > All i want is to not see these dumb shorts videos that I genuinely give no fuck about, but that manages to catch my attention regardless. My recommendations never shows any low quality content. All you have to do is like good stuff, dislike bad stuff, and subscribe to good channels. The algorithm works surprisingly well. > we, as a society There is no we and there has never been. You have to start taking responsibility for your own actions.
choo-t 2y ago
Paying make it worse, paying doesn't prevent ads to be forced later (e.g: Netflix, Prime, Disney+) and split people fight against ad, as the ones with enough money to avoid them will berate the other for not paying, will still providing benefits to an ad-driven company. Never pays to avoid ad, block them or get the content by other means. It's akin to "never negotiate with terrorists" or "never pay ransom", you have to remove the incentive.
windexh8er 2y ago
You could pay for them or Google could choose to take a different approach that is less intrusive. The assertion here seems to put the onus on the viewer. Considering YouTube pays little to nothing comparative to its profits based on content it does not make, I think a realignment of how Google operates YouTube could be an improvement for users of the service. > The users of the internet have made their call and they often don't want to pay, so someone does. Just because YouTube users put up with a broken system doesn't mean it's the correct, fair, or ethical approach. Beyond that many of the views are curated via algorithms that intentionally work against the user with an end goal to hold them in a viewing state regardless of the users original intent. With that in mind users should use tools against those malpractices and not feel bad about not paying for them. If someone is intentionally trying to manipulate you, what's stopping you from doing the same? If Google were a fair and ethical company I think treating them the same would be more in line with your response. However, they are not.
friendzis 2y ago
I'm not that old and yet old enough to remember internets before ad-supported free content, which was just infinitely better.
- sumeno 2y ago
  I've been on the internet since the mid 90s and that entire time it has relied on ad supported free content.
  - Marsymars 2y ago
    Yeah, my first ad blocker was "AdSubtract" in ~2000: https://paulenglish.com/intermute.html https://paulenglish.com/intermute.html
windward 2y ago
Paying users are too valuable not to serve ads to. Their clicks are worth more: ad-free tiers are always temporary. Not that it matters: I pay for the bandwidth and hardware too. So I decide what it serves and runs.
stingraycharles 2y ago
People have voted with their wallets on YouTube that they don’t want to pay for premium, and prefer to watch ads or block them. Ads aren’t “forced” upon YouTube users, people have the option to pay but they just don’t want to pay.
belorn 2y ago
YouTube can always choose to package the content in a financial transaction. They have chosen not to do so, and instead they are supplying advertisement alongside the content for which the viewer may or may not watch. They can always change it, but then there are legal consequences of making it a financial transaction.
merely-unlikely 2y ago
There are corners like Substack that are an exception. And at least services like YouTube and Spotify offer a paid alternative to ads. I for one would rather pay the ~$10/month than sit through ads. But we are still very much a minority of users.

by duxup 2y ago

Jgrubb 2y ago

Every one of the streaming services that I paid extra to go ad free decided to push ads anyway.

duxup 2y ago
And they got their subscriber still I guess…. As users of these services as a whole we reward this kinda thing and then are upset when it happens again. I don’t like any of this situation but I also think the user’s choices incentivize it.
- AlecSchueler 2y ago
  Which choice could they have made differently here? They took the "pay for it" option that you suggested and then you still blamed them for giving the company negative incentives.
- rchaud 2y ago
  They didn't though. Every single streaming service bar Netflix loses money. On top of that, they've all poisoned the well by creating as many subscription tiers as Dell has laptop SKUs and raising the price every 9 months so nobody knows what the service should cost. This ensures that people start and stop subscriptions just to watch a single series, instead of sticking with a single service all year.
  - friendzis 2y ago
    So it appears paying entrenched IP-hoarding organizations majority of your income further incentivizing their entrenchment is not the best business practice for a middlemen
    - rchaud 2y ago
      The hoarding began once they decided to abandon the DVD market, paranoid about file ripping and sharing. Now TV shows are like videogames now, can't watch without an internet connection phoning home.

_Algernon_ 2y ago

The problem is that advertisement business infects everything. For instance, I could pay for Youtube Premium to ostensibly not be shown ads, but it doesn't change the fact that all the content[^1] in the ecosystem is still produced for maximizing watch time and/or being advertisement friendly. I could pay for news, but that doesn't change the fact that the news is written to receive clicks from the non-paying users. Paying for things does not help escaping the second order effects of advertisement. [^1]: To a close approximation.

jnsie 2y ago
Recently I've been annoyed with Youtube Premium. I pay for an ad-free experience and do not see ads in the traditional (wait 5 seconds to skip) way, yet more and more content has inline product promotion where time is spent thanking a sponsor and pitching their product. So I'm paying not to avoid ads, but I'm still seeing paid promotion...
- fn-mote 2y ago
  > I'm paying not to avoid ads, but I'm still seeing paid promotion... It seems like you have shifted from having a problem with the platform to having a problem with the content producers. Can’t win?
  - jnsie 2y ago
    People all the way down...
- duxup 2y ago
  > where time is spent thanking a sponsor and pitching their product I’ve been unsubscribing from folks who do that a lot. Instant unsubscribe if the product is questionable. I’m not going to judge their business decision, but it tea sets an odd tone when I’m watching something informative and they bust out into a “someone paid me to say this”.
- ajsnigrutin 2y ago
  google for "sponsorblock" extension for your browser, crowdsourced data makes it skip all the promotions, intros, "like and subscribe" and all other unneeded parts. And when you're at it, ublock origin also skips the youtube ads. There's also: https://freetubeapp.io/ https://freetubeapp.io/ , but it's a constant cat and mouse game with youtube, where you now have to refresh a video a few times before it starts playing (then it works fine), until they upgrade the software and then it works, until youtube changes something again.

abricq 2y ago

I know that I, as a user, ultimately have 2 choices: to pay for a subscription, or the choice to not use these services. Option (1) does not block infinite scrolling content, it only removes adds. So this is missing the point. All i want is to not see these dumb shorts videos that I genuinely give no fuck about, but that manages to catch my attention regardless. Then sure, I can always delete my social accounts, and ultimately i might end up doing it. But let me try to explain why I think this is difficult, and also unfair. I give 2 purposes to these social networks: First, they play a role in personal-life balance as a way to be more integrated in my group of friends / local communities. Second, they play a role as citizen of my region (in my case, France and switzerland) by being a (sorta reliable) source of information through following accounts and newspapper on them. Initially, none of these social-networks came with this super-fast / addictive content. They only started to integrate it, in my experience, since 5 years. So it seems to me that these companies have broke the initial contract that they "sold" to us: to connect with our friends & communities and to allow us to follow a specific set of public influencers. I guess that I am mad that we, as a society, have allowed these companies to gain such an important role in our daily lifes (social life and public life) that they can now say : we will allow you to interact with some of our friends, but you will also have to watch our stupid videos... And unfortunaltey, it's not easy at all to spin up a concurrent social networks that would be full-filling this initial contract. Probably lots of people actually like to scroll on insta Reels and youtube Shorts.

ed312 2y ago
This is why you fundamentally cannot rely on private companies to build the "town square". This will _always_ happen because every company has a profit motive (even if its a loooong tail via SV-style funding). The problem behind the problem is people want great communities and tools, but don't way to provide any effort to build them.
carlosjobim 2y ago
> All i want is to not see these dumb shorts videos that I genuinely give no fuck about, but that manages to catch my attention regardless. My recommendations never shows any low quality content. All you have to do is like good stuff, dislike bad stuff, and subscribe to good channels. The algorithm works surprisingly well. > we, as a society There is no we and there has never been. You have to start taking responsibility for your own actions.

choo-t 2y ago

Paying make it worse, paying doesn't prevent ads to be forced later (e.g: Netflix, Prime, Disney+) and split people fight against ad, as the ones with enough money to avoid them will berate the other for not paying, will still providing benefits to an ad-driven company. Never pays to avoid ad, block them or get the content by other means. It's akin to "never negotiate with terrorists" or "never pay ransom", you have to remove the incentive.

windexh8er 2y ago

You could pay for them or Google could choose to take a different approach that is less intrusive. The assertion here seems to put the onus on the viewer. Considering YouTube pays little to nothing comparative to its profits based on content it does not make, I think a realignment of how Google operates YouTube could be an improvement for users of the service. > The users of the internet have made their call and they often don't want to pay, so someone does. Just because YouTube users put up with a broken system doesn't mean it's the correct, fair, or ethical approach. Beyond that many of the views are curated via algorithms that intentionally work against the user with an end goal to hold them in a viewing state regardless of the users original intent. With that in mind users should use tools against those malpractices and not feel bad about not paying for them. If someone is intentionally trying to manipulate you, what's stopping you from doing the same? If Google were a fair and ethical company I think treating them the same would be more in line with your response. However, they are not.

friendzis 2y ago

I'm not that old and yet old enough to remember internets before ad-supported free content, which was just infinitely better.

sumeno 2y ago
I've been on the internet since the mid 90s and that entire time it has relied on ad supported free content.
- Marsymars 2y ago
  Yeah, my first ad blocker was "AdSubtract" in ~2000: https://paulenglish.com/intermute.html https://paulenglish.com/intermute.html

windward 2y ago

Paying users are too valuable not to serve ads to. Their clicks are worth more: ad-free tiers are always temporary. Not that it matters: I pay for the bandwidth and hardware too. So I decide what it serves and runs.

stingraycharles 2y ago

People have voted with their wallets on YouTube that they don’t want to pay for premium, and prefer to watch ads or block them. Ads aren’t “forced” upon YouTube users, people have the option to pay but they just don’t want to pay.

belorn 2y ago

YouTube can always choose to package the content in a financial transaction. They have chosen not to do so, and instead they are supplying advertisement alongside the content for which the viewer may or may not watch. They can always change it, but then there are legal consequences of making it a financial transaction.

merely-unlikely 2y ago

There are corners like Substack that are an exception. And at least services like YouTube and Spotify offer a paid alternative to ads. I for one would rather pay the ~$10/month than sit through ads. But we are still very much a minority of users.