It’s possible for choices and actions to be both ethical and unethical at the same time. Some people (like you, I’m supposing by your comment) fool themselves into thinking that what they are doing is totally ethical because some part of it is.
That’s kind of half the picture though. Adblocking and piracy are not done in a vacuum. You typically block ads in response to the unethical practice of hostile design and the abuse of human psychology to be conditioned positively to something through exposure rather than just making a good product. Piracy is often in response to unethical business practices as well.
If none of those unethical forces existed, you can be sure there would be a lot less pirates and adblockers. But in our current world piracy and adblocking are often straight up ethical in relative terms.
Adblockers are a pain in the ass for many reasons. Small websites can’t realistically fund themselves with other sources, big players like newspapers end up putting paywalls limit access to quality journalism or selling themselves to billionaires who can run them at a loss in exchange of influence on the reporting. You end up with billionaires controlling all media and no way for small shops to compete with them.
YouTube premium: YouTube ads are fucking annoying, adblocking on TVs is unreliable at best, impossible at worst, I want to support the people who create the content I enjoy and the price for a whole family, for a whole month… is one third of the price of going to the movies once.
Google provides tooling, hosting, bandwidth, processing, security, metrics, payment processing, support, filtering, legal protection, captioning, apps for every platform imaginable, etc. Hardly a parasitic intermediary. Plus donating to 50+ creators would be more money in payment fees alone than what I pay for YouTube.
Nobody denies Youtube provides value. It’s the most used video platform in the world. Hence why they called them semi-parastic.
But the tooling gets neglected. The legal protection at times screws over the very creators you say you stand by. Some premium features are literal scams (eg. downloading videos). Some ads they allow on their platform promote literal scams. They censor comments, videos, and dislikes, often in deceitful ways like pretending nothing is being blocked to the poster. I could go on.
For a multi-billion dollar company, they provide ample enough reasons to cut them out of the equation as a form of economic protest, and their disloyalty to their creators in many of their decisions is a forever stain on their trust relationship with the public and creators. Which is why Youtube creators routinely try to detach themselves, like streaming on other sites, and why many of them ask you to donate directly instead, so that if Youtube should screw them over (which they have done many times), they can still afford to pay rent.
Plus donating to 50+ creators would be more money in payment fees alone than what I pay for YouTube.
That’s just wrong. Flat fees aren’t really a thing anymore. Different donation systems have different fees and most charge a percentage of 5% to 12% compared to the 45% of Youtube. But donating to 50 people would be hard on it’s own. Hence why most of us just donate bigger or more frequently to specific creators we want to support more, and over a large amount of people, that somewhat evens out across creators.
Look, nobody is saying that it’s bad to have Youtube Premium, but it’s not exactly good either. I used to have it for years, until I found out they were scamming me on a feature I found important. If none of those things are a concern to you, then go ahead. Just don’t deny the rest of us our grievances.
Yes, Youtube makes mistakes, has bugs and the moderation is not perfect. But it gets you 95% there, which would take years and literal millions to do yourself. The only premium feature I care about is the ads. For downloading things long term I use yt-dlp.
Of course creators want to diversify, even if YouTube was perfect they don’t want to be dependent on one revenue stream.
About payments: Square charges 30c fixed fee per payment (+%). PayPal charges 49c. Stripe 30c. Ayden 37c. Klarna 30c. Please enlighten me how flat fees are not a thing.
Arguing against adblocker and for YouTube premium is the most center of the bell curve IQ meme take I’ve ever heard.
I use adblockers and pirate stuff, but I don’t try to fool myself into thinking that it’s an ethically sound thing to do.
Controlling what content is shown on my screen is unethical? Wow.
It’s possible for choices and actions to be both ethical and unethical at the same time. Some people (like you, I’m supposing by your comment) fool themselves into thinking that what they are doing is totally ethical because some part of it is.
That’s kind of half the picture though. Adblocking and piracy are not done in a vacuum. You typically block ads in response to the unethical practice of hostile design and the abuse of human psychology to be conditioned positively to something through exposure rather than just making a good product. Piracy is often in response to unethical business practices as well.
If none of those unethical forces existed, you can be sure there would be a lot less pirates and adblockers. But in our current world piracy and adblocking are often straight up ethical in relative terms.
Adblockers are a pain in the ass for many reasons. Small websites can’t realistically fund themselves with other sources, big players like newspapers end up putting paywalls limit access to quality journalism or selling themselves to billionaires who can run them at a loss in exchange of influence on the reporting. You end up with billionaires controlling all media and no way for small shops to compete with them.
YouTube premium: YouTube ads are fucking annoying, adblocking on TVs is unreliable at best, impossible at worst, I want to support the people who create the content I enjoy and the price for a whole family, for a whole month… is one third of the price of going to the movies once.
You can donate to most content creators directly, without the semi-parasitic intermediary that is Google.
Google provides tooling, hosting, bandwidth, processing, security, metrics, payment processing, support, filtering, legal protection, captioning, apps for every platform imaginable, etc. Hardly a parasitic intermediary. Plus donating to 50+ creators would be more money in payment fees alone than what I pay for YouTube.
Nobody denies Youtube provides value. It’s the most used video platform in the world. Hence why they called them semi-parastic.
But the tooling gets neglected. The legal protection at times screws over the very creators you say you stand by. Some premium features are literal scams (eg. downloading videos). Some ads they allow on their platform promote literal scams. They censor comments, videos, and dislikes, often in deceitful ways like pretending nothing is being blocked to the poster. I could go on.
For a multi-billion dollar company, they provide ample enough reasons to cut them out of the equation as a form of economic protest, and their disloyalty to their creators in many of their decisions is a forever stain on their trust relationship with the public and creators. Which is why Youtube creators routinely try to detach themselves, like streaming on other sites, and why many of them ask you to donate directly instead, so that if Youtube should screw them over (which they have done many times), they can still afford to pay rent.
That’s just wrong. Flat fees aren’t really a thing anymore. Different donation systems have different fees and most charge a percentage of 5% to 12% compared to the 45% of Youtube. But donating to 50 people would be hard on it’s own. Hence why most of us just donate bigger or more frequently to specific creators we want to support more, and over a large amount of people, that somewhat evens out across creators.
Look, nobody is saying that it’s bad to have Youtube Premium, but it’s not exactly good either. I used to have it for years, until I found out they were scamming me on a feature I found important. If none of those things are a concern to you, then go ahead. Just don’t deny the rest of us our grievances.
Yes, Youtube makes mistakes, has bugs and the moderation is not perfect. But it gets you 95% there, which would take years and literal millions to do yourself. The only premium feature I care about is the ads. For downloading things long term I use yt-dlp.
Of course creators want to diversify, even if YouTube was perfect they don’t want to be dependent on one revenue stream.
About payments: Square charges 30c fixed fee per payment (+%). PayPal charges 49c. Stripe 30c. Ayden 37c. Klarna 30c. Please enlighten me how flat fees are not a thing.