[elvischidera]

Why don't these companies just offer a paid version of their products? Giving people an opportunity to back out. E.g: Pay X per month to use Google and you get no ads or tracked. YouTube does something similar, but I guess they still track you.

I personally would still mostly use the free ad-supported version.

[jasonvorhe]

I'm paying for YouTube Premium and I wouldn't touch their free product anymore, if they sunsetted Premium. However, almost 35% of most videos I'm usually watching also contain sponsored ads and annoying self advertising for their channel (subscribe to the channel, click the bell icon, shady VPNs, online learning portals, etc)

How would regulation work here? I'm relying on Sponsorblock for now, but that doesn't work on Chromecast.

[kingcharles]

Right. And I don't think YouTube knows how to deal with that issue right now. They expected creators to be happy with just the money they earned from the ad revenue they passed through, but the creators found they could make more through sponsored content which is difficult problem for YouTube to tackle.

[timmg]

> Why don't these companies just offer a paid version of their products?

Youtube is a great example of that. I see post after post of people here bragging about using ad blockers on Youtube -- rather than pay. Nevermind that the creators on Youtube get screwed by this behavior. Most people on HN can afford to pay the monthly fee (easily!) But somehow they think ad blocking is more "moral".

It's ads or subscription fees or all these services go away. Pick one.

[Liquix]

If you pay for it, YouTube will not stop collecting your interests, clicks, how long you spend hovering over each video, which comments you spend time reading, etc. They will continue to feed this data into their AI, making it smarter and building a more complete profile of you, which can then be used to manipulate your political views and change the world at large.

They'll just stop showing you ads, which we can accomplish for free via an adblocker. Many people are willing to pay a premium for actual privacy (see: Apple)

[kingcharles]

I pay for YouTube to get rid of the ads, although the ads I saw were actually really well targetted and I enjoyed most of them the first time around (!). The thing is the data that YouTube collects actually works for and against me - it is used for evil purposes, but it also works to make my experience on YouTube more enjoyable by recommending videos that I would like.

[timmg]

Ad blockers don't change that. They track you for recommendations and view counts and things like that either way.

I suppose you could watch Youtube in a new incognito window for every session. But I doubt that is what most ad-blockers-users are doing.

[Nextgrid]

The problem is that subscribing to YT Premium requires a Google account (with valid personal data - fake details won't work for payment processing), where as "freeloading" with an ad-blocker allows you to stay more anonymous without even signing in (and clearing cookies every time).

[timmg]

Just curious: do you use Amazon? They track everything you've bought, everything you view, all comments you read, etc.

Does that bother you any more or less than Youtube?

[userbinator]

I don't need to pay to close my eyes or plug my ears.

[matheusmoreira]

Many times they do. And then they put ads on it as well because why not make even more money? Also, paying customers are worth more to advertisers.

[elvischidera]

Haha true. And the amount of money made per user with ads/adtech is unbounded, so why bound it to X per month.

This greed? would probably lead them to ruins.

[matheusmoreira]

Exactly. It's pure greed, they will never stop. The only solutions are to make advertising illegal or technologically infeasible.

[comeonseriously]

We see this happening with TVs, etc. Soon cars will have it.

[exikyut]

Because solving that problem is like solving for global warming: at the end of the day (and conversation), the world uses a few gazillion tons of oil and other "bad" resources for Stuff™... which is depended on by a multi-level deep, exponentially large pile of even more Stuff™, and

- humanity is really, really, terribly bad at the kind of large-scale practical cohesion needed to actually go "okay we fix" and actually follow through, for as many dimensions as have developed over the past 100 years

- the only collective impetus that would scale to this sort of challenge would basically amount to a cult-following phenomena (see also: world history full of inexplicable mass deaths and rituals and whatnot that make no sense, and also generally suboptimal religious practices, as a result of cults).

IMO, humanity's ability to keep up with itself and chip/computer complexity kind of dovetail a bit: things were pretty hazy (ahem, okay, academic) in the 40s-50s, academic/industrial in the 60s-70s, reached a peak of industrial design/practicality around the 80s-90s, and basically "exploded in complexity" from the 90s on. Except things didn't really explode in complexity, they just exceeded our ability to "think small" and execute at the same time.

Looking at the Web, I remember reading an article recently that talked about how the Web standards (HTML5 (incl. video/image format support, network I/O, etc), JS (incl. "web stdlib"), CSS (incl. animation), SVG (incl. kitchen sink), etc etc (incl. etc)) are basically tens of thousands of pages long in total, and exceed the complexity of every other protocol, technical standard, file format, architecture specification, etc - in the world, possibly combined. The article made a point of comparison with the 3G cellular protocol being much simpler than the current Web.

And this is being paid for by... advertising.

Chrome is basically a technology that has the "implementation commitment", if you will (it's massive, it has the R&D pedal to the floor, it's constantly refactoring, it continuously pays out massive bug bounties, etc) of something too big to fail...

...all the while it's funded by, IMHO, what amounts to a really big tech bubble.

It's like, how will it crash? Something has never gotten this big before... and something has never gotten this big without anyone realizing, in particular. Chrome is just like, yeah, duh, it replaced the telephone ("my telephone exists to run Chrome"). It's a standard utility. Of course it isn't going anywhere.

Will it somehow become like a broken telephone pole held up by the wires it's supposed to be supporting (https://old.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/3umd5d/buddy_of_mine_..., https://igorpodgorny.livejournal.com/177105.html)? Will we all end up going back to proprietary clients a la AOL and CompuServe? Will the massive 100-to-0 in infosec investment suddenly mean hacks go through the roof 100x?

It probably won't be the end of the world, since the Web is basically just a re-API-ification of desktop OSes, and apps on mobile OSes have enough traction to be a viable escape.

But for now, the entire Web is funded by, basically, hot air. I do wonder if that's part of the reason behind so many JavaScript frameworks - that awareness of existential impermanence, and much subtler sense of unsustainability.

IMHO, buying/using reusable shopping bags, or only using bamboo or metal straws, or buying a zero-emissions car, have much the same amount of impact as deliberately watching ads.

There is absolutely no action you can take, including paying for services, that will match the trillion-dollar advertising industry.

Nothing at all, not even if you were to become a billionaire. That is the problem of advertising.

---

Consider the above a sort of "what if" / "is this right? how close is this?" / thought experiment, presented as though it were fact. (I tend to pose ideas to myself in this style, which I think is probably fairly common, but given the "people writing as though they're right on the internet" thing it seems useful to add something like this.)

[Intermernet]

Thanks for the mind-dump ;-) I appreciate answers that think on their feet!

I think the only thing I can ask you to consider is that, despite how bad fossil fuel use is, and despite how bad we've fucked up the environment using it, no-one can claim it wasn't actually useful (wasteful, short-sighted, wrong, polluting, possibly apocalyptic, whatever, but still physically useful).

Advertising isn't useful. It could be considered a perfectly renewable resource! It'll be viable as long as humans are around! Yay!, but it's not useful. It's actually actively harmful. The primary, secondary and residual effects of advertising could be summed and tallied and they would be shown to be a net negative. Those who are on the positive side of the calculation will have you look at their gains and swoon, but the negatives far outweigh the positives.

It's a fundamentally different question to dealing with global warming because global warming has externalities that we can't immediately control. Advertising has externalities that, given the chance, we could nullify within a generation, if not faster.