9 ms·

I do pay for YouTube Premium, I see no ads, and everything works pretty conveniently. What's your point, that with a bit of extra effort you can pirate content?

ahartmetz 11mo ago
It's not piracy.
tcfhgj 11mo ago
Blocking ads is hardly "pirating" content
- crazygringo 11mo ago
  I don't really see what the difference is. They're not getting the payment for the video either way. Morally I don't see how they aren't equivalent. I'm not going to stand on a high horse saying you shouldn't do either, but I don't really see how you can pretend one is less harmful to creators than the other, in terms of the basic principles involved.
  - akersten 11mo ago
    > the payment for the video either way. "the payment for the video" as if it's a given that my ad impression is required for me to watch some video that they made available to me on their website for free. Morally, YouTube shows the most heinous and scummy ads 24/7 on their platform and fails to take them down when reported. Gambling, AI sex games, "cure what doctors miss" ads for human use of Ivermectin - it's your moral duty to block them.
  - deleted 11mo ago
    [deleted]
  - Nextgrid 11mo ago
    Piracy involves obtaining media content for free for which you should normally pay for, as a result of someone sharing the media meant for their own personal use to the general public. YouTube does not ask for payment, it sends the video data you want alongside some bullshit you’ll ignore and waste precious human time doing so. Ad blocking just involves offloading the ignoring to the computer, as it should, since computers are meant to automate menial tasks.
    - renewiltord 11mo ago
      I've tried to explain this to people repeatedly and they don't get it. They're always like "oh no the AI scraper is slamming my website it's ruining everything". Um, maybe configure your web browser to not send me data if you don't want me 'scraping' your website. It's literally your server's choice to send me data. I'm just asking from a few IPs. If you want to send data to all of them that's your server's choice. But I think people don't get the fact that they can just request payment or only send to authenticated users from authorized IPs and so on. Instead they want to send to all IPs without payment but then get upset when I use a bunch of IPs without paying. Weird. I'm trying to read a bunch of stuff. The entire point of a computer is to make that easy. I'm not going to repetitively click through a bunch of links when a bot can do that way faster.
      - gusgus01 11mo ago
        And what is the surefire way to stop AI scrapers from accessing your website? If there is no way, how can this be an acceptable ask? It already sounds like you're using several IPs to access sites, which seems like a work around to someone somewhere trying to limit the use of one IP (or just lack of desire to host and distribute the data yourself to your various hosts). Just because you can do something doesn't mean everyone must accept and like that you are doing that thing.
        renewiltord 11mo ago
        The answer is right there: use authentication with cost per load, or an IP whitelist. GP is absolutely right. If your server is just going to send me traffic when I ask I’m just going to ask and do what I want with the response. Your server will respond fine if I click through with different IPs and it’s just a menial task to have this distribution of requests to IPs, which is what we made computers for. Yeah, you’re right of course that no one has to like the “piracy” or “scraping” or whatever other name you’re giving to a completely normal request-response interaction between machines. They can complain. And I can say they’re silly for complaining. No one has to like anything. Heck you could hate ice cream.
- danpalmer 11mo ago
  To be clear, this is not a value judgement. I pirate content sometimes, and I use adblockers, but ad blocking is definitely piracy – you're circumventing the method of paying for content. I realise that online ads have other implications such as tracking that, say, a blu-ray rip downloaded from a torrent doesn't have, but the reason for piracy doesn't change the fact that it is.
  - komali2 11mo ago
    > but ad blocking is definitely piracy This is a huge escalation of an already over-stuffed term. Equating piracy to theft was bad enough, now choosing to not view ads is also piracy, which is theft? I try to be chill here but no, foot down, absolutely not. Blocking ads is nothing more than determing what content comes in on the wire to the computer you own, or what content is rendered in your web browser. That's it. If that means someone isn't making money when they could be, well, too bad so sad. It's like, "if you walk past a Nike store without pausing to hear the sales pitch, you are stealing from Nike." Capitalist hellscape.
    - HDThoreaun 11mo ago
      [flagged]
      - Nextgrid 11mo ago
        I don’t make a deal when I visit a website, and especially not when I have to visit it because it became the de-facto standard when sharing video content. I just get my computer to ask for some bytes and the server happily sends them to me. If the server happened to send me some garbage in addition, I am free to make my computer ignore it.
        JAlexoid 11mo ago
        [flagged]
        11mo ago
- tonyhart7 11mo ago
  its pirating content in a way that you dont generate revenue for youtuber that expect from ads
  - akersten 11mo ago
    I'm sure that trillion-dollar analytics empire is worth something even without my eyeballs consuming some shitty pre-roll.
    - JAlexoid 11mo ago
      Most of the ad revenue actually goes to the people uploading content. But sure... they're all clearly are "trillion-dollar analytics empire"
  - archargelod 11mo ago
    Most content creators have links to support them with donation or patreon. Once a year choose 3 small youtubers (larger ones are already multi-millioners, they don't need your help) and drop them $5 each. Now you just did 1000% of what they could get from you watching ads.
    - chrneu 11mo ago
      what's insane, even $1 is more than they'll get from you watching every single one of their videos. The issue is processing fees on that payment, so might as well give em a bit more. It's wild how low the payout on ads is. Seriously, just flip people $1 every once in a while and it's more support than ads. It's so stupid how people get all morally superior when they figure out that someone block ads.
      - tonyhart7 11mo ago
        "what's insane, even $1 is more than they'll get from you watching every single one of their videos." how can you confidence with being so wrong btw ???? Ads bringing more money than donation ever would be
- thaumasiotes 11mo ago
  You wouldn't not download a virus.
deleted 11mo ago
[deleted]
mattacular 11mo ago
I pay for YouTube Premium too (probably not much longer) but can only 'comfortably' use the site through a series of increasingly hacky extensions for Firefox. On non-web apps, there is no recourse from the UI enshittification. The general theme is the same as the article: less real estate dedicated to actual videos you might want to watch. There were two rows of completely useless garbage that I had to add to my uBlock Origin filter just now: one for Shorts (which I have blocked in the past) and a new one for some sort of Youtube Games thing (?) that looked like the worst AI generated slop you'd never want to play. If this is the premium experience then I don't want it.
- zahlman 11mo ago
  > The general theme is the same as the article: less real estate dedicated to actual videos you might want to watch. There were two rows of completely useless garbage that I had to add to my uBlock Origin filter just now: one for Shorts (which I have blocked in the past) and a new one for some sort of Youtube Games thing (?) that looked like the worst AI generated slop you'd never want to play. This is the same stuff you get without buying Premium. So I guess they figure you're only paying to dodge the ads. Which seems, to me, like a lot of money compared to (ad cost * number of ads you would see).
makeitdouble 11mo ago
You still get the autogenerated dubs by default, the comments moved to end of the earth, and many other stuff (shorts etc.) people get pissed about. At this point ads are just one of the annoyances amoung so many others.
polotics 11mo ago
The massive overlays of what-to-watch-next hiding most of the video much too early, ie. before the very end, of the video you were trying to watch until the end but now just ragequit and downloaded instead... are very ugly
- jonas21 11mo ago
  Those are there because the content creator you’re watching decided to put them there. It’s entirely up to them whether they show up and when they show up.
  - opello 11mo ago
    And they can be hidden, so it's not exactly entirely up to them, nor should it be. If they wanted them in the video content they could put them there.
    - polotics 11mo ago
      how can they be hidden?
      - opello 11mo ago
        Most easily using an add-on like Enhancer for YouTube[1], which has been hidden in addons.mozilla.org[2] but is still available on the author's site. But the player is HTML so writing element hiding rules (like `youtube.com##.ytp-ce-element`) is the easiest, which I figure out the relevant element using the Developer Tools Inspector tool, but the uBlock Origin Element Picker tries to make that easier. In this case the .ytp-ce-element-shadow is chosen first in the uBlock picker and then you can pick the element class I mentioned first, but it's nicer to have fewer rules to effect the desired outcome. [1] https://www.mrfdev.com/enhancer-for-youtube https://www.mrfdev.com/enhancer-for-youtube [2] https://www.mrfdev.com/contact https://www.mrfdev.com/contact
chrneu 11mo ago
For me, and many people, advertising is a mental health issue. I don't enjoy those ads, they are very disturbing and jarring. It causes me anxiety and I don't like the things that those ads normalize. I don't think most people, especially americans, realize how far off the rails our society is in terms of our normalization of insane shit. So, for health reasons, I block nearly all advertisements. It is a HUGE mental health win. There is a ton of research behind this, as well. I'm not going to pay extra money to disable a health concern. I'll block ads instead. I should not have to PAY MORE for a product that doesn't damage my health. I will always happily directly support content creators. I will not watch ads.
- cindyllm 11mo ago
  [dead]
- timcobb 11mo ago
  You're responding to a comment that says they pay and don't see ads
- deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
- andrewinardeer 11mo ago
  > I should not have to PAY MORE for a product that doesn't damage my health. Is this the same way of saying your mental health is important to you but you're not prepared to pay a service money to protect said mental health and support creators you like?
- DocTomoe 11mo ago
  > I'm not going to pay extra money to disable a health concern. Honest question: Why? You do pay for toothpaste, right? If you have a gym membership, you pay extra for the convenience not to do cardio in the woods (which is great in late May, much less so in late November). You tend to pay more for nutritious food as compared to things you get at a fast food joint. What makes a health concern related to $genericOnlineService different?
brikym 11mo ago
As a premium user I'd like to block shorts.
thomassmith65 11mo ago
If it weren't for piracy, there would be nothing on Youtube except highschool dropouts lobbing accusations at each other, and AI-generated slop.
snicky 11mo ago
Just here to say thank you to everyone arguing/explaining why ad blockers are not piracy using interesting arguments better than my own. You will never walk alone.
Brian_K_White 11mo ago
I also pay for premium, and have for at least 15 years since it was called Red, and the experience is complete garbage. If you turn off history, you get zero videos on your home screen. This is not because the history is needed to generate the suggestions, because the blank home only started a few years ago. I used to never subscribe to any channels, I just got reasonable feed of suggestions based off of whatever I happened to search for explicitly or if I got there by clicking a link, or by what I chose to click on even if the list starts out totally random, except of course it never was totally random because they still have ip address and other fingerprnting signals. After they blaked out the home screen and started showing the "you're not logged in, go here to fix this error", I subscribed to a bunch of channels to provide data for generating a feed. They still don't provide any. You can take extra clicks (which is agonizing on the Roku since it just doesn't react well and misses button presses all the time) to get to the subscriptions page, which will show recent uploads exactly from those channels and no others. I also still get several other forms of ads in the form of the embedded/native ads and the irrelevant suggestions that come from youtube's interests instead of my own, like shorts. I also still get ads simply because I don't get to use my own account all the time. When you watch youtube anywhere but your own laptop by yourself, you are at the whims of someone else's account and some other platforms app limitations. And even on your own machine, I absolutely resent having to tie my viewing history to my identity and have someone else log all of that. So there is reason to intentionally use no account even if you otherwise have no problem paying to support not only the content producers but even the delivery system. Why can't I disable shorts? There is no amount I can pay to hide all shorts, but I can have it for free i=on a pc with a tampermonkey or ublock script. But that only helps on a pc. I watch mostly on a TV and I have no ability to hack the roku app. Maybe if I switch to a google tv I could use newpipe or something. Paying for premium does not make youtube good. It does not resolve much of anything. It is not remotely the touche this smarmy comment attempts to suggest. Paying for premium takes youtube from being like pulling out 10 of your fingernails to only pulling out 8 of your fingernails. That 2of10 fingernals relief and for the sake of the creators, that's the only reason I still pay for premium.
- nullc 11mo ago
  They keep doing it because you keep paying them. Use the money you save to buy a media pc that can block shorts to use to watch youtube on the tv.
DocTomoe 11mo ago
I do pay for YouTube Premium - and I still get ads when someone has YT Videos embedded on their website. YouTube knows who I am, the cookies are set, there is no reason to give me ads. It is not yet painful enough for me to invest time and energy to research less convenient ways of UX improvement. Not ... yet.
array_key_first 11mo ago
The point is that the pirated experience is both easier to access and more convenient. If I'm paying, I expect the best possible experience, and you just don't get that. It's not just YouTube, many streaming services are objectively inferior to pirating.
joquarky 11mo ago
If I go to the bathroom during an ad break, am I "pirating" the content?
nojs 11mo ago
I also like that there’s no ads in premium. Speaking of premium things, I also really like Brilliant for learning things quickly and Surfshark VPN because it protects my privacy when I’m on the go.

ahartmetz 11mo ago

It's not piracy.

tcfhgj 11mo ago

Blocking ads is hardly "pirating" content

crazygringo 11mo ago
I don't really see what the difference is. They're not getting the payment for the video either way. Morally I don't see how they aren't equivalent. I'm not going to stand on a high horse saying you shouldn't do either, but I don't really see how you can pretend one is less harmful to creators than the other, in terms of the basic principles involved.
- akersten 11mo ago
  > the payment for the video either way. "the payment for the video" as if it's a given that my ad impression is required for me to watch some video that they made available to me on their website for free. Morally, YouTube shows the most heinous and scummy ads 24/7 on their platform and fails to take them down when reported. Gambling, AI sex games, "cure what doctors miss" ads for human use of Ivermectin - it's your moral duty to block them.
- deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
- Nextgrid 11mo ago
  Piracy involves obtaining media content for free for which you should normally pay for, as a result of someone sharing the media meant for their own personal use to the general public. YouTube does not ask for payment, it sends the video data you want alongside some bullshit you’ll ignore and waste precious human time doing so. Ad blocking just involves offloading the ignoring to the computer, as it should, since computers are meant to automate menial tasks.
  - renewiltord 11mo ago
    I've tried to explain this to people repeatedly and they don't get it. They're always like "oh no the AI scraper is slamming my website it's ruining everything". Um, maybe configure your web browser to not send me data if you don't want me 'scraping' your website. It's literally your server's choice to send me data. I'm just asking from a few IPs. If you want to send data to all of them that's your server's choice. But I think people don't get the fact that they can just request payment or only send to authenticated users from authorized IPs and so on. Instead they want to send to all IPs without payment but then get upset when I use a bunch of IPs without paying. Weird. I'm trying to read a bunch of stuff. The entire point of a computer is to make that easy. I'm not going to repetitively click through a bunch of links when a bot can do that way faster.
    - gusgus01 11mo ago
      And what is the surefire way to stop AI scrapers from accessing your website? If there is no way, how can this be an acceptable ask? It already sounds like you're using several IPs to access sites, which seems like a work around to someone somewhere trying to limit the use of one IP (or just lack of desire to host and distribute the data yourself to your various hosts). Just because you can do something doesn't mean everyone must accept and like that you are doing that thing.
      - renewiltord 11mo ago
        The answer is right there: use authentication with cost per load, or an IP whitelist. GP is absolutely right. If your server is just going to send me traffic when I ask I’m just going to ask and do what I want with the response. Your server will respond fine if I click through with different IPs and it’s just a menial task to have this distribution of requests to IPs, which is what we made computers for. Yeah, you’re right of course that no one has to like the “piracy” or “scraping” or whatever other name you’re giving to a completely normal request-response interaction between machines. They can complain. And I can say they’re silly for complaining. No one has to like anything. Heck you could hate ice cream.
danpalmer 11mo ago
To be clear, this is not a value judgement. I pirate content sometimes, and I use adblockers, but ad blocking is definitely piracy – you're circumventing the method of paying for content. I realise that online ads have other implications such as tracking that, say, a blu-ray rip downloaded from a torrent doesn't have, but the reason for piracy doesn't change the fact that it is.
- komali2 11mo ago
  > but ad blocking is definitely piracy This is a huge escalation of an already over-stuffed term. Equating piracy to theft was bad enough, now choosing to not view ads is also piracy, which is theft? I try to be chill here but no, foot down, absolutely not. Blocking ads is nothing more than determing what content comes in on the wire to the computer you own, or what content is rendered in your web browser. That's it. If that means someone isn't making money when they could be, well, too bad so sad. It's like, "if you walk past a Nike store without pausing to hear the sales pitch, you are stealing from Nike." Capitalist hellscape.
  - HDThoreaun 11mo ago
    [flagged]
    - Nextgrid 11mo ago
      I don’t make a deal when I visit a website, and especially not when I have to visit it because it became the de-facto standard when sharing video content. I just get my computer to ask for some bytes and the server happily sends them to me. If the server happened to send me some garbage in addition, I am free to make my computer ignore it.
      - JAlexoid 11mo ago
        [flagged]
        11mo ago
tonyhart7 11mo ago
its pirating content in a way that you dont generate revenue for youtuber that expect from ads
- akersten 11mo ago
  I'm sure that trillion-dollar analytics empire is worth something even without my eyeballs consuming some shitty pre-roll.
  - JAlexoid 11mo ago
    Most of the ad revenue actually goes to the people uploading content. But sure... they're all clearly are "trillion-dollar analytics empire"
- archargelod 11mo ago
  Most content creators have links to support them with donation or patreon. Once a year choose 3 small youtubers (larger ones are already multi-millioners, they don't need your help) and drop them $5 each. Now you just did 1000% of what they could get from you watching ads.
  - chrneu 11mo ago
    what's insane, even $1 is more than they'll get from you watching every single one of their videos. The issue is processing fees on that payment, so might as well give em a bit more. It's wild how low the payout on ads is. Seriously, just flip people $1 every once in a while and it's more support than ads. It's so stupid how people get all morally superior when they figure out that someone block ads.
    - tonyhart7 11mo ago
      "what's insane, even $1 is more than they'll get from you watching every single one of their videos." how can you confidence with being so wrong btw ???? Ads bringing more money than donation ever would be
thaumasiotes 11mo ago
You wouldn't not download a virus.

deleted 11mo ago

[deleted]

mattacular 11mo ago

I pay for YouTube Premium too (probably not much longer) but can only 'comfortably' use the site through a series of increasingly hacky extensions for Firefox. On non-web apps, there is no recourse from the UI enshittification. The general theme is the same as the article: less real estate dedicated to actual videos you might want to watch. There were two rows of completely useless garbage that I had to add to my uBlock Origin filter just now: one for Shorts (which I have blocked in the past) and a new one for some sort of Youtube Games thing (?) that looked like the worst AI generated slop you'd never want to play. If this is the premium experience then I don't want it.

zahlman 11mo ago
> The general theme is the same as the article: less real estate dedicated to actual videos you might want to watch. There were two rows of completely useless garbage that I had to add to my uBlock Origin filter just now: one for Shorts (which I have blocked in the past) and a new one for some sort of Youtube Games thing (?) that looked like the worst AI generated slop you'd never want to play. This is the same stuff you get without buying Premium. So I guess they figure you're only paying to dodge the ads. Which seems, to me, like a lot of money compared to (ad cost * number of ads you would see).

makeitdouble 11mo ago

You still get the autogenerated dubs by default, the comments moved to end of the earth, and many other stuff (shorts etc.) people get pissed about. At this point ads are just one of the annoyances amoung so many others.

polotics 11mo ago

The massive overlays of what-to-watch-next hiding most of the video much too early, ie. before the very end, of the video you were trying to watch until the end but now just ragequit and downloaded instead... are very ugly

jonas21 11mo ago
Those are there because the content creator you’re watching decided to put them there. It’s entirely up to them whether they show up and when they show up.
- opello 11mo ago
  And they can be hidden, so it's not exactly entirely up to them, nor should it be. If they wanted them in the video content they could put them there.
  - polotics 11mo ago
    how can they be hidden?
    - opello 11mo ago
      Most easily using an add-on like Enhancer for YouTube[1], which has been hidden in addons.mozilla.org[2] but is still available on the author's site. But the player is HTML so writing element hiding rules (like `youtube.com##.ytp-ce-element`) is the easiest, which I figure out the relevant element using the Developer Tools Inspector tool, but the uBlock Origin Element Picker tries to make that easier. In this case the .ytp-ce-element-shadow is chosen first in the uBlock picker and then you can pick the element class I mentioned first, but it's nicer to have fewer rules to effect the desired outcome. [1] https://www.mrfdev.com/enhancer-for-youtube https://www.mrfdev.com/enhancer-for-youtube [2] https://www.mrfdev.com/contact https://www.mrfdev.com/contact

chrneu 11mo ago

For me, and many people, advertising is a mental health issue. I don't enjoy those ads, they are very disturbing and jarring. It causes me anxiety and I don't like the things that those ads normalize. I don't think most people, especially americans, realize how far off the rails our society is in terms of our normalization of insane shit. So, for health reasons, I block nearly all advertisements. It is a HUGE mental health win. There is a ton of research behind this, as well. I'm not going to pay extra money to disable a health concern. I'll block ads instead. I should not have to PAY MORE for a product that doesn't damage my health. I will always happily directly support content creators. I will not watch ads.

cindyllm 11mo ago
[dead]
timcobb 11mo ago
You're responding to a comment that says they pay and don't see ads
deleted 11mo ago
[deleted]
andrewinardeer 11mo ago
> I should not have to PAY MORE for a product that doesn't damage my health. Is this the same way of saying your mental health is important to you but you're not prepared to pay a service money to protect said mental health and support creators you like?
DocTomoe 11mo ago
> I'm not going to pay extra money to disable a health concern. Honest question: Why? You do pay for toothpaste, right? If you have a gym membership, you pay extra for the convenience not to do cardio in the woods (which is great in late May, much less so in late November). You tend to pay more for nutritious food as compared to things you get at a fast food joint. What makes a health concern related to $genericOnlineService different?

brikym 11mo ago

As a premium user I'd like to block shorts.

thomassmith65 11mo ago

If it weren't for piracy, there would be nothing on Youtube except highschool dropouts lobbing accusations at each other, and AI-generated slop.

snicky 11mo ago

Just here to say thank you to everyone arguing/explaining why ad blockers are not piracy using interesting arguments better than my own. You will never walk alone.

Brian_K_White 11mo ago

I also pay for premium, and have for at least 15 years since it was called Red, and the experience is complete garbage. If you turn off history, you get zero videos on your home screen. This is not because the history is needed to generate the suggestions, because the blank home only started a few years ago. I used to never subscribe to any channels, I just got reasonable feed of suggestions based off of whatever I happened to search for explicitly or if I got there by clicking a link, or by what I chose to click on even if the list starts out totally random, except of course it never was totally random because they still have ip address and other fingerprnting signals. After they blaked out the home screen and started showing the "you're not logged in, go here to fix this error", I subscribed to a bunch of channels to provide data for generating a feed. They still don't provide any. You can take extra clicks (which is agonizing on the Roku since it just doesn't react well and misses button presses all the time) to get to the subscriptions page, which will show recent uploads exactly from those channels and no others. I also still get several other forms of ads in the form of the embedded/native ads and the irrelevant suggestions that come from youtube's interests instead of my own, like shorts. I also still get ads simply because I don't get to use my own account all the time. When you watch youtube anywhere but your own laptop by yourself, you are at the whims of someone else's account and some other platforms app limitations. And even on your own machine, I absolutely resent having to tie my viewing history to my identity and have someone else log all of that. So there is reason to intentionally use no account even if you otherwise have no problem paying to support not only the content producers but even the delivery system. Why can't I disable shorts? There is no amount I can pay to hide all shorts, but I can have it for free i=on a pc with a tampermonkey or ublock script. But that only helps on a pc. I watch mostly on a TV and I have no ability to hack the roku app. Maybe if I switch to a google tv I could use newpipe or something. Paying for premium does not make youtube good. It does not resolve much of anything. It is not remotely the touche this smarmy comment attempts to suggest. Paying for premium takes youtube from being like pulling out 10 of your fingernails to only pulling out 8 of your fingernails. That 2of10 fingernals relief and for the sake of the creators, that's the only reason I still pay for premium.

nullc 11mo ago
They keep doing it because you keep paying them. Use the money you save to buy a media pc that can block shorts to use to watch youtube on the tv.

DocTomoe 11mo ago

I do pay for YouTube Premium - and I still get ads when someone has YT Videos embedded on their website. YouTube knows who I am, the cookies are set, there is no reason to give me ads. It is not yet painful enough for me to invest time and energy to research less convenient ways of UX improvement. Not ... yet.

array_key_first 11mo ago

The point is that the pirated experience is both easier to access and more convenient. If I'm paying, I expect the best possible experience, and you just don't get that. It's not just YouTube, many streaming services are objectively inferior to pirating.

joquarky 11mo ago

If I go to the bathroom during an ad break, am I "pirating" the content?

nojs 11mo ago

I also like that there’s no ads in premium. Speaking of premium things, I also really like Brilliant for learning things quickly and Surfshark VPN because it protects my privacy when I’m on the go.