youtube getting more aggressive.. i've got firefox and ublock but this shit is still coming up
this post was submitted on 20 Oct 2023
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I don't feel like adressing every point seperately because I'm just slothing with my cat in my bed right now. I'll just be rambling a bit.
Anyways. Yeah sure, Google is a bad company in many regards, I'm with you. Morals and ethics are about as subjective as it gets, so here's my take on that. Just because some entity is morally in the wrong doesn't justify my own actions, whatever they may be. What makes it fair to obtain goods and services from Google without paying the price? It's quasi-stealing but I already brought that up before. If the Alphabet Corp. (Google and stuff) is so bad, then maybe you should avoid their products by principle.
I know in the grand scheme it doesn't matter what I do. The odds of my actions actually doing anything at all are quite low. Where I'm from people used to say "somewhere a bag of rice tipped over". It's inconsequential. And I believe that's true in everyday life but I also know it's not true in the grand scheme. While I am an individual, I have to look at my actions as if they are not. It doesn't matter if I burn through 100 gallons of petrol a day... but it does matter if we all do it.
So yes, I agree with you in each and every way. Except I somehow also don't. It's really hard to live by the same morals and ethics each and every day. Utilitarism sounds good.. but not for everything, same goes for deontology. Many concepts in ethics are not compatible with eachother and I don't think it's "normal" to even strive to find your own morals.
Google may be bad, but their business model with YouTube specifically isn't really all that evil. They maintain a well established, feature rich platform and people get to share their content on that site for free. A small percentage earns money or even gets to make a living through that. They also maintain said platform for advertisers with promises on how often their ads will be shown and how they will be placed, received and forced upon a user. In this instance it's not entirely clear who the bad guy is. All of em, kind of.
I studied for a bit a few years back and we had a series of courses called "ethics for engineers". It was mainly about figuring out what you get to do and what you have to do as an engineer of any kind in terms of ethics. Right now I'm wondering, would I really feel all that bad as a software engineer or whatnot at such a company? It really depends I guess. Sure, increasing the ad counter from 2 to 3 sucks for users. Yet they accept it in some way u know? If they didn't accept, they wouldn't stay on YouTube. Using YouTube is not something you are forced to, you could, at any time, just stop. So, if supplying more ads is really totally nessecary to have the platform be profitable (which, be honest, in some form or another, it must be), it's morally sound. Would it really be better to let the platform die? I don't belive so. I believe the platform kind of self regulates in a sense that it would just die off it they took any negative aspect too far.
I don't know what they promise their content creators... this view might look completely different by the way.
So. Yeah. Dunno. I don't think "cheating" YouTube by blocking ads or whatnot is all that fair. It's still legal, though. Probably still better to stay away if you believe that they are such a bad company.
Ja der Sack Reis :-)
I get you, yes. And I get your argument. Purely logically, ethics shouldn't matter whether being applying to big evil corpo or to tiny mom&pops. That's why it's ethics and not whatever-i-just-fell-like-now. But to me it does matter. And it's not really about blocking ads so google will starve. What I do doesn't matter in the slightest in the grand scheme of things, just like you said. It's just about being able to look in the mirror not spitting at the reflection because I'm true to my values. It's about what google (alphabet, whatever) has become I so despise. I grew up with the net growing up, and I witnessed every single step downwards and it's mostly thanks to google. I must admit i'm a horrible hippocrite, because I only use Pixel-phones. Which is ironic in itself, but they're the only phones you could easily DE-google. All others will throw layer of layer of "protection" in your way, so you'll never really own your own phone. And I hate myself for doing it, but I see no alternative.
Besides that. Yes. I simply don't use ANY google product. Not even youtube. Never cared, never will. Only thing I ocassionaly watch there are music-videos (which I'll then download and never use youtube for that again). If I HAD to see an ad, I would simply close the tab and be done with it.
I couldn't work for such a company. No matter the pay, I would always feel bad. I once worked for a great charity in Krautland (which you'll most likely know) which cares about cancer. As an Admin, so kinda like a software-engineer, but for hardware :-) I thought it was a dream working for a charity! Boy how wrong I was. As an admin, I could see everything (of course). And what I saw was horrible. The only reason for this charity is 0,1% help for cancer, 50% pay for the CEOs and their expensive cars and daily "buisness trips" and 49,9% upkeep. Which includes a complete floor of people who's job it was to extort old people for their inheritance. The cellar full of millions of assets in paintings and whatnot. Simply rotting around. Money's being brokered from shell-charity to trust-fun and whatnot. I quit withing the first 6 months. Disgusted. And it was a good pay and essentially an un-fire-able job (they never do, no matter what you do, just because you could talk bad and ruin their image). And guess what, nobody understood how I could value my "silly morals" over a great job.
Long story short: it's a complex topic for a tiny comment and I don't even know where to cut off or what to include :)
So in a re-phrase: What if I do not block ads, but am totally immune of the effects of ads? Isn't that even more cheating? I can't be influenced by those things. Except maybe having a preference then for NOT choosing the advertised product simply because its ad annoyed me. Wouldn't it be more fair to just block it and accidentially buy that product I never saw an ad of?
Oh buddy I get you so well. I'm not german by the way, but I guess DACH is close enough.
I actually do work software development now, even though I said systems engineering in an earlier comment. Systems engineering is 'just' my past, back when I actually learned stuff. Funny enough, I work for the medical sector. Not IN the medical... oh what ze hell... We make software stuff for hospitals and whatnot. At least that's what I'm up to right now and I don't have to tell you, it doesn't feel as good as it should. I am essentially hired for life. As decent people in IT do, I earn more money than one should reasonably spend and demand is so high, I could just sit back and relax 4 days a week with no major consequences other than my team hiring yet another person to compensate for my lazyness.
I don't wanna work there anymore. I probably won't be working there today one year later. Not because we scam people or anything, I just don't think we do justice to what should be expected from us. Our oh so cool product saves lifes and that's good. But shouldn't we care a bit more about better quality control, more efficient workflows, more reliable products?
We're good enough to "win" the capitalism game. People want the thing we make and the thing we make is a good thing. But is it as good as it could be? Definite no. Do others do better? Probably, they just invest more... higher costs. Could that mean that we are inactively killing people because we force them into buying our product due to cost efficiency? Yeah sure but it's not that easy, is it? There's no right or wrong here, really.
So.. anyway.
I see your point about you not blocking ads actually being harmful for the advertiser, because you differ from the average Joe in terms of advertisement influence. But I don't believe that's for us to decide. By opting for advertising a product, companies risk approaching people like you (and ME if we are being honest.. I guess it's the high rate of autism in IT (I'm not gonna include a sarcasm tag here because they stink)), that don't recieve advertisements well and might actively steer away from their product. They contractually do NOT risk their advert not being displayed at all... you see where this is going.
Genug Moralapostel. The existence of ads in modern media is okay with me. I don't exactly wanna see them, but I understand their business model and it's not really all that reprehensible to me. I do prefer straight up pay walls over ad walls... sometimes. At least for video streaming platforms. To be honest it's probably the other way around for most situations. I gladly accept ads on websites if it means I don't have to pay for each and every single website access all the time. Moral dillemmas everywhere.
I don't think our opinions differ all that much. We basically had a "well if you feel like this, why don't you do this?" "oh it was just a hypothetical, I actually already do this. But this and such.." "Ah yes, but no but, this and that"
Oh man, forgive my ignorance of the DACH. I just assumed based on nothing :)
Totally got you quitting that job. But I think there always IS a right/wrong. You define that for yourself. Of course it's never binary, but with a wide range. And if you happen to end up right in the middle, that's where it gets "difficult".
So, you really think it's not up to us to decide if ads shall be blocked or not? I see how you come to that conclusion, yet I wouldn't sign this. FOR ME it's actually MY decision that blocking them is withing my moral code and really does no harm at all. Even if totally ignoring my insignificance for the total outcome. So just for the fun and sake of the argument let's assume a company shows ONE ad to ONE user in their lifetime and this ad decides their future. If I'd block it, they gain nothing and loose possible income (I might still stumble upon their product and buy it). If I view it, they gain nothing and definitely loose income forever. Your approach would also end up in them definitely loosing income forever. There is absolutely no gain in your approach, or is there?
Yeah of course, I totally understand the the business-model. And I would also prefer paying a bit to be able to not see ads. BUT there is simply way too much I would have to pay (and don't forget the logistical overhead to do so) it's just not practical. Every damn website and app and service? Everyone getting some minor bucks? Of course I make exceptions and either pay or enable ads. Yet trying to ignore ads isn't possible for me, I notice them. They annoy, they disrupt the flow, they're visually inconsistent with the rest.
And nope, our opinions really don't differ much. But it's always fun to discuss incredibly uninteresting topics no one ever cares about :-)
I can't say I had such a civilized discussion on reddit. At least I can't remember. Typical reddit discussions always felt a bit more filled with emotion, maybe hatred. Lots of shitposting too. Might have to do something with the more targeted demographic of Lemmy.
Something being a business model actually doesn't mean it's right. Dropshipping exists after all. Paying everyone for their services can't be a viable solution either. The main business model here usually consists of "pay to upgrade". If you don't pay, it kinda works. If you do want to pay, it works really well. BitWarden is my personal hero in that regard. Their product works really well as freeware. It works even better when you pay for it. But I believe many paying users don't even need the additional functionality, they just pay to give something back. Moral retribution so to speak.
I see how blocking ads on freeware isn't morally wrong, I mean there's not much that's universally immoral. It's quite the topic in ethics, deontology says some acts are universally bad or universally good, no matter the consequences. A common example is honesty: being honest is always good, but I'm sure you thought of a dozen examples where honesty might not be the "good" way.
I still do agree with you. Blocking ads in specific instances can be completely fine. I mean we could construct setups where not blocking ads might lead to nuclear war. But I truly believe that it's fine in everyday use. You don't wanna see ads, they annoy you, you don't feel like paying with your time and brain cells. An individual avoiding ads is so inconsequential for everyone else involved, utilitaristically, that's a net gain of happines. On the other hand, ethics is not a study about individual actions, that's morals. I don't believe that any ethics could realistically support such a choice in the grand scheme. Assuming everyone acts by those rules, buying advert slots is wasted money.
Luckily we are indiviudals and like you said a day ago, there's enough people paying their taxes for you to evade them without consequences for either party.
I, in this instance, decided it's not about the company per se, it's more about the individual action. I'm no sucker for Nestlé, but you can't argue that they don't do good things as well. They are quite the big player in vegan meat alternatives and they actually do seem to put in quite the work to make sensible products in said category. They superficially seem to be sustainable and healthier than many other comparable products. Even if that's not true, even if their products are shipped around the globe eleven times a day, it's pushing for something that's ecologically sensible. If they themselves don't produce an ecological product, they still help to establish shelf space for other, more ecological products. So yeah, I'd buy a Nestlé product in that case. Even just to show Nestlé and the stores that such a product is in demand.
There's other scenarios where I don't act by the same logic simply because I'm a human and humans aren't known for being all that logical after all.
I'm a capitalist consumer and I greatly profit from my financial situation each and every day. I do live in a way too big apartment after all, and plans for individual housing are on the way. Not very ethical in the grand scheme xD