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Most people put media goods in a different mental bin than tangible physical goods I think, even if the physical good is very cheap. That's why "you wouldn't download a car" didn't land with anyone. The to-go rebuttal is "I bloody damn would, if cars could be downloaded".
I can't say your mindset is something I relate to. Even if I didn't have a reptilian aversion to even looking like I'm in position to take something without paying, I imagine I would feel disgusted with myself for contributing to the lowtrustification of my society for the sake of a few dollars of groceries. (I completely lack that aversion when it comes to downloading pirated media from the internet.)
How would you be contributing?
To be clear, I don't steal from self checkout, and doubt I will begin to. But it grates on me, as a citizen, that I know that I am paying Home Depot, and they have decided to allow dishonest people to steal from them rather than pay an honest cashier, counting on me to not steal from them.
Truth be told, their pricing reflects the extra "shrink", so you actually are indirectly paying for other people stealing due to their corresponding margins that they choose. It's been a while since I worked there, but I'd hazard a guess that they increase margins by about 2-3% to offset increased theft.
You are paying indirectly for other people stealing, but not because they raised prices, just because they couldn't lower prices as much as they'd otherwise be able to after reducing cashier hours.
If the money they have to spend to offset increased theft was less than the money they'd have to keep spending on non-self-checkout cashiers then they'd happily keep the extra cashiers and the extra profit.
That assumes we all just care about store prices, though. If self-checkout raises shrinkage from 1.5% to 2.5% of revenues and reduces labor costs from 15% to 13% of revenues (all numbers here are 10% from Google and 90% pulled out of my hat) then price conscious shoppers are going to push for self-checkout, but there may be shoppers who hate the extra work, or like or hate the reduced contact, or have opinions on changes in line lengths ... or, while we're on the subject, I suppose there may be a few shoppers who would rather pay 2% more to employ more cashiers instead of 1% more to enrich more thieves.
And in fact slightly nicer grocery stores (and fancy ones) both currently still exist and at least appear to be doing well for precisely this reason! Hard to separate out the geographic effects, and I do have an admittedly suburban bias, so can't say that the tradeoff you describe is for sure the reason why, but seems reasonable despite that.
I still opt for the line almost every time though. Scanning, let alone bagging, really does feel like work to me, so if someone will do it for free? Sign me up. I'll wait a little longer in line, no problem (though shorter would be better, and long lines do actually drive some people away -- my mother hates WinCo for this reason)
There's lots of high-end options out there these days. We tried delivery and curbside pickup in 2020, and the former wasn't worth the price but the latter is still how we do our regular grocery shopping. A few bucks extra, and we can't pick produce ourselves, but saving 40 minutes per trip is usually more than worth it.
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Presumably, shops go from "self-checkout" to "hiding shit behind metal bars" because they found out that if they leave things out, they get stolen (more than the shop could absorb through raising prices). Thus, every additional thief contributes to the removal of high-trust features.
(Compare and contrast with media, where several game developers famously endorsed piracy, presumably due to the additional popularity being worth more than the loss on the unsold copies. And music gets uploaded to Youtube by the artists themselves.)
But here the transaction isn't between the developer or the musician, it's between you and the host who builds the platform and pays for it so that you can view the video. Why is youtube obligated not to turn a profit on you?
Youtube's free to choose a profit model that doesn't enshittify my experience of their service, if they find that adblock is making them struggle. They don't seem to be struggling. (Wikipedia famously makes money from donations. I wonder if Youtube could do that, even in theory.)
I find that letting people who watch ads provide Youtube's profit margin instead of me doesn't make me feel guilty. Perhaps it's because I don't believe they're watching ads out of civic duty, but rather out of indifference/ignorance of adblock.
Compare: freemium mobile games where a couple of whales make it profitable, and the rest of the players are just there to bulk the audience up. Should the f2p players feel guilty, or whales feel like chumps? (Whales should feel like chumps in my opinion, but due to vastly overpaying for pixels, not for being taken advantage of by f2p players).
And my point is what right do you have to any experience of their service without paying for it?
Because I can and there is nothing unethical about this?
I can download youtube videos and strip out ads added by creators with sponsorblock, Youtube can try blocking this actions.
And Youtube's free to choose a profit model that doesn't enshittify my experience of their service.
And I am free to not pay for Twitter and Youtube.
This is the tension I don't get. If youtube is allowed to block your actions, then what is enshittifying about it?
Massive amount of ads is enshittifying, therefore I am using workarounds banned by their terms of use, therefore they can block or ban me.
In general nearly all enshittifying is perfectly legal and can be done by companies doing this.
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The same right as I have to play a freemuim game without paying for it, or use a donation-based service without donating. There's no explicit or implicit contract that says I must pay; they simply expect me to willingly make some money for them.
Like I said, I simply don't viscerally parse it as stealing if I'm not taking any physical items away and they're clearly thriving. Whatever their contract is with their ad providers, or a game developer's contract with a publishing platform, it is beyond my inner morality. If and when it turns out that free ad-based platforms are dying out in favor of paid access only, I will consider how my actions contributed to that. Until then, it appears that my eyeballs are payment enough for Youtube.
P.S. Advertisement and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race, in general. If I watch a thousand ads for a product I don't want and would never buy, or in some cases would avoid out of spite, it appears that both me and the ad provider are worse off.
Sure but then they aren't enshittifying your experience, because your experience doesn't exist except in the form they hand it to you.
I don't find it wrong to watch something without paying for it, or even to do so while avoiding the ads. But it's obvious to me that one has no right to complain that one's ability to do so has been unjustly limited, as it had no right in it to start.
If the freemium game were suddenly moved to a pay model, I wouldn't find that a wrong action by the developer.
See, the contradiction here is that my experience is worse if I obey their profit model, rather than avoid it! It's like buying a legitimate DVD of a movie and then... having to watch 2 minutes of piracy warnings at the beginning, rather than ripping it off torrents and having none of that. It's backwards!
The key distinction here is that the service itself is worse for the honest consumer, rather than the consumer being worse off because they pay money. A waiter handing me a receipt doesn't sour the taste of steak in my mouth, but having to look at ads while I ate it probably would.
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What do you mean? Most SocMeds have an alternative open source frontend, that offers a strictly superior experience.
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