TheDarksteel94 comments on Linus Tech Tips uploaded a video showing how to block ads on Youtube. Which was removed by Youtube for community guidelines violations.

[–] TheDarksteel94@sopuli.xyz 51 points 2 years ago (26 children)

Isn't that essentially what it is? Getting something for free through certain means you wouldn't get for free otherwise? Which means no money goes to whoever owns the service you're using?

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[–] TimeSquirrel@kbin.melroy.org 25 points 2 years ago (21 children)

Say you walk up to some person giving out free samples of food. As a condition of taking this free sample, you also must take a pamphlet of advertisements from the people who are giving you the free sample. You take your free sample, and then walk away while dropping the pamphlet in the nearest trash can. That's essentially what ad blocking is. You're simply preventing certain parts of a web page from being downloaded to your device. That's why people have issues with the "piracy" label, because nothing is being "stolen". You're just refusing to take all of it.

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[–] ContrarianTrail@lemm.ee 16 points 2 years ago

More accurate comparison would be taking the sample but refusing the pamphlet. Dropping it in the nearest bin would be skipping the ad after 5 seconds.

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[–] Aatube@kbin.melroy.org -4 points 2 years ago (2 children)

No, that's not what ad blocking is. You just described viewing a traditional "1 banner at the bottom/top" ad. There's a snowball's chance in hell that you actually check out/click on the ad after seeing it; you throw it away after seeing it. On the off chance you're intrigued by the ad, you take it home.

That's not what ad blocking is. There's no suitable metaphor for ad blocking IRL, but it'd most nearly be raiding the nearest available ad pamphlet warehouse or interrupting the guy who gets the pamphlets to the foodgiver. Sure, the difference is that nobody gets the ads anymore, but that's not a bad thing for you, is it? The foodgiver gets no ad revenue for now until delivery is re-established.

Edit: Please say why you think that I'm wrong, just as I did. Thank you for your cooperation. Let's not be redditors.

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[–] pivot_root@lemmy.world 16 points 2 years ago (1 child)

There's no suitable metaphor for ad blocking IRL

Sure there is.

Every week, your community puts on an old movie in the town park that everyone can watch for free. You, an avid movie enjoyer, watch this movie every week.

But, the movie equipment isn't free. To make this event happen, the community accepts a donation from The Church of Microwaving Babies and Kicking Puppies. In exchange, the Church of Microwaving Babies and Kicking Puppies pauses the movie every 50 minutes and puts on a small two-minute presentation about why you should consider joining and what puppy-kicking can do to improve your life.

You don't care. You do not agree with their views, and you definitely are never going to join. Instead of paying attention to their mandatory presentation, you stare at your phone and read Lemmy. Then, when the movie is back on, you once again pay attention.

That's ad-blocking. Some group gains revenue from their publicly available service by having an advertiser peddle their crap through said service. You take an active role in ignoring said crap, while most people just sit there twiddling their thumbs and pretending to care. The only tangible difference between you ignoring the ad while it plays and you blocking it is 60 seconds of your time and the bandwidth required to serve the ad.

Advertisers don't like it—but fuck the advertisers. The difference that you as an individual makes in how much money is made through advertising is less than a hundredth of a cent. If the impact of the collective using adblockers is enough to be an issue in sustainability, then advertising was not the correct business model to begin with.

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[–] Aatube@kbin.melroy.org -1 points 2 years ago

Again, that is not ad blocking. That's just reading the phone while the ad is playing. That preserves the ad revenue, blocking does not.

The difference that you as an individual makes in how much money is made through advertising is less than a hundredth of a cent.

That's just one view. It adds up within the month.

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[+] TheDarksteel94@sopuli.xyz -8 points 2 years ago (16 children)

The thing being stolen is the advertisers ability to advertise, which in turn pays for the platform. So, it is stealing from the platform.

Also, if you take a quick look at the pamphlet and throw it away, that's the same thing as looking at an ad and ignoring it afterwards. You were still looking at it, so the ad did its job.

Btw, don't get me wrong, I also use ad blockers for a lot of things. But I do pay for anything that I use for a good amount of time, like Youtube, video games, movies or music.

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[–] dustyData@lemmy.world 32 points 2 years ago* (2 children)

Nope, you're not taking anything away from the advertiser. They are free to display but they're not entitled to being watched. You don't get penalized for ignoring or closing your eyes during trailers at the cinema. But that is exactly what arguing against ad blockers is. The entitlement of advertisers to your attention. This fundamentally breaks the social contract of ads. Imagine corporations arguing that municipal anti-billboard laws are theft

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[–] TheDarksteel94@sopuli.xyz 0 points 2 years ago

I'm not arguing against ad blockers, I'm arguing that they are still a form of piracy. Also, if you go to a cinema, you've presumably already paid for the ticket, so the cinema has already made money from you...

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[+] Aatube@kbin.melroy.org -6 points 2 years ago

Yes you are. When closing your eyes during trailers, the cinema still gets paid. When blocking ads, websites don't get paid.* Billboards are also different, as they don't give you some sort of service benefit except "land"; they're equivalent to domain parking ads which are absolutely awful, for which I see no plausible justification whatsoever.

*There was this fork of µblock that tried to just hide them instead of removing them, but that didn't seem to work when I tried it. I also forgot the name.

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[–] transientpunk@sh.itjust.works 14 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (2 children)

Does that make me a pirate if I go to the bathroom during commercial breaks? If I get to a theater late and miss the commercials, am I a pirate?

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[–] TheDarksteel94@sopuli.xyz -1 points 2 years ago*

You've already paid to view the movie, it's not funded by ads. Same with commercial breaks. I presume you're already paying for the channel or service in some form.

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[+] SolOrion@sh.itjust.works -6 points 2 years ago

No. The owner of the media has already been paid in both of those scenarios. It makes zero difference to them whether you're watching the ads.

Adblocking, on the other hand, is actively hurting the owner of the media because they get paid based on how many ads they can serve. If you block the ad, it isn't served, and they don't get paid.

Personally, I definitely think it's piracy. I also still do it.

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[–] grue@lemmy.world 5 points 2 years ago* (8 children)

The thing being stolen is the advertisers ability to advertise, which in turn pays for the platform. So, it is stealing from the platform.

FUUUUUUUUUUUUCK THIS! You seem to think they are somehow entitled to force people to view their shit. They are NOT! I have sovereignty over my computer and my eyeballs, and I have every right to control what happens to them.

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[–] TheDarksteel94@sopuli.xyz 1 point 2 years ago* (4 children)

Okay, and you are not entitled to use the platform. How do you suppose people are to keep it running? Charity? Good luck with that. In the case of Youtube or Twitch, video streaming is more expensive than you can imagine.

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[–] tabular@lemmy.world 0 points 2 years ago (3 children)

Requesting users play ads but giving them the content even if they don't means it's more like asking for a charitable donation than a transaction. They could paywall it but they don't, and it's not like there's a competitor with the same content.

Also, Google feel entitled to record your voice on your phone and send it to their servers. Do they think their users are a charity, or worse?

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[–] TheDarksteel94@sopuli.xyz 1 point 2 years ago (2 children)

Youtube can't paywall the site, since that would create an even bigger outrage than longer ads. But they are already working on unskippable ads, so people won't be able to block them with conventional means. So to them, it's not a simple request. Either you watch ads or you pay. I'm personally not a big fan of that, since it feels way too intrusive and dystopian.

And yeah, Google as a whole sucks ass, we all know that. Again, I'm not arguing against stealing from them, but just that it IS indead still stealing/piracy to block ads. If you want to do that or not is a personal decision, but people still need to be aware of what they're doing.

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[–] tabular@lemmy.world 3 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 child)

Google can make it more difficult but it's like anti-cheat, a losing arms race. In the end users control if adverts play even if Google controls the computer as strictly as North Korea OS.

Words do not have innate definitions and "piracy" can mean whatever you want (when not in a court of law). If people understand what you mean then no direct issue. Due to the association with stealing and murder on boats I won't call copyright infringement "piracy" (thanks music industry propaganda) or when blocking adverts. If you insist on calling me a pirate I will respond with pirate talk, ye landlubber.

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[–] TheDarksteel94@sopuli.xyz 1 point 2 years ago

Arrr, matey! I think we have an understanding! Ye may sail the seven seas, I don' see a thing wrong with it!

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[–] Aatube@kbin.melroy.org -3 points 2 years ago (2 children)

They are not entitled to force people to look at them, but they are entitled to load them in the browser and display them.

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[–] grue@lemmy.world 6 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 child)

No they're fucking not! My browser on my computer is my property, not theirs! I have every right to control what it does!

Where the fuck do you get off, claiming that corporations have some sort of right to colonize my computer and subvert it against me? Why do you hate property rights?

Let me spell it out for you even more explicitly: you're arguing that a fake corporate "person's" fake "right" (i.e. privilege) to their fake "property" (i.e. temporary monopoly) is somehow superior to an actual person's actual right to their actual property. (In fact, it's even worse than that: what you're really arguing here is that fucking website terms of service -- which barely even qualify as a contract! -- are superior to property rights.) Do you comprehend, at all, how fundamentally ass-backwards your argument is‽

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[–] Aatube@kbin.melroy.org -4 points 2 years ago

Yes, you may pirate with your computer and vote for your local pirate party. No, it does not cease to be piracy. You think money just fell out of a coconut tree? Edit: I often do it, and it is piracy, plain and simple.

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[–] Aatube@kbin.melroy.org 0 points 2 years ago

jinx!

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[–] Tja@programming.dev 14 points 2 years ago (3 children)

Exactly. Getting media without paying (either in currency or in data for ads). Which they also address and talk about plex and jellyfin to consume the newly "liberated" media. I find his opinion on this quite fair.

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