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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   45536 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 5, 2022

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My partial-view is that since there is no coordination mechanism/incentive, then there's little reason to start watching ads that outweighs the individual harm.

A classic free-rider problem, and my solution is that you either need to make a coordination mechanism or accept that people will defect.

A coordination mechanism like ''outlaw adblockers" seems to have a bunch of potential negative effects (especially as we get better/more-adversarially-optimized advertisements), and so isn't satisfactory. The proper mechanism is donating.

I would stop using YouTube for music entirely if I wasn't able to block ads. They're a waste of time. They take up time, and they also distract you from whatever you were doing (if you mute them then that's just another distraction, and if muting them was common then you'd eventually lose that ability). I also don't value having my mind adversarially messed with, even if we're not that great yet we are also getting better. The amount of negative value I get from YouTube ads is greater than the average benefit I get from a lot of YouTube (I think this is even more true for other people, because a lot of YouTube's content is bad).

However, I do agree that the better/more-ethical action is to then just not use the service. Download the music locally and listen to it locally, and so then I only have to pay a one-time advertisement/payment cost to the service I downloaded it from. Or nothing at all, because hosting a bunch of relatively small files is pretty cheap. The issue with this is that services like YouTube very much want you to stay on their service and continually watch advertisements. You can download from YouTube locally, but only through something like youtube-dl. This is a sort of platform lock-in. It isn't a hardcore one (though television/movie platforms use hardcore ones), but it is enough of an inconvenience to stop most people from bothering notably. I typically do bother downloading my music, especially since it allows me to listen to it offline, but it is also probably technically against their TOS or something (should I be respecting that?)

Most normal sites have this sort of light platform lock-in, partially just because it is the default but also because they want you to see their advertisements. Most sites don't allow me to easily download an article for local reading, though some do.

I think, also, that advertisements are the wrong method. They encourage making sites filled with garbage, of which there is an absolutely massive number, and putting ads on it. Sometimes this is actually useful content, but you could have gotten it from a less disgusting site. Sometimes it is just stuff they scraped from elsewhere. The best sites are ones where they care about the topic, and those are best incentivized by donating.

If I could 'reset' the internet and disallow advertising, then I would. This would kill off a ton of useful sites, but it would also make it easier for us to have a bunch of disparate smaller sites (which are then cheaper than a massive site like Reddit, and thus able to be ran by someone with some extra cash) which are ran by people who actually care about them. They can, if they get big enough, accept donations to allow their services to continue running. The best sites are those ran by people who actually care about them, and would try running them whether or not they were gaining a sizable profit.

So, I guess a summary of my view: I agree that it is defecting to use an adblocker. However without a coordination mechanism, there isn't a great reason to not defect. The best coordination mechanism is donation/patreon-like-donations, and it also has notable benefits over advertisement since it encourages less spam/garbage. We'll lose a bunch if advertisements disappear, but I think we can also gain a lot.

(I could mess with my argument to say it is actually moral to use an adblocker, since it means ads will be killed off faster, but I don't think I 100% believe that)

So, you're literally just going to ignore the idea of paying a fairly minor fee for Youtube premium?

I didn't even know it existed until earlier this year, so I was primarily capturing what I felt before it existed/was-common/they-started-advertising-it. It was also meant as describing the problem in general. I have been tempted by YouTube premium, though not overly much compared to other sources of media and I've been listening locally a lot. They apparently provide downloading (which I did not know until I looked it up), but it is limited downloading where you have to keep up your subscription otherwise you can't listen to it anymore. More platform lock-in, which I dislike.

Overall, I do actually agree it would be more ethical to buy YouTube premium if I'm going to continue using their service without advertisements. They don't provide all the value I want and they're google (I feel more intrinsically obligated - to move past automatic selfishness - to donate to smaller services where the individual contribution is more important, but that's basically the classic problem that voting has) so I'm unsure if I want to support them at all, but I do agree that it would be more ethical.

I visit Youtube on my desktop PC, I very very rarely use it on my phone, precisely because of the ads and because I don't want to pay yet another subscription to yet another service for something I use occasionally. I don't use Spotify or similar items for music. I listen to music the dinosaur way, on the radio, and if I'm working on my computer, via the national broadcasting service streaming which I already pay for through the TV licence. So yeah, I am outside the mainstream of modern life, and Youtube can just go whistle if they want money out of me. Google owns 'em now, and Google gets its money's worth out of all the data it collects on me and sells on,

If broadcast TV creators told you "give us an extra $5 a month and we'll agree that it's okay for you to skip the ads" it would still be okay to skip the ads without sending them $5 a month.

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