[matheusmoreira]

Yes. Advertising should be illegal. Failing that, there should be ubiquitous technology to render it completely ineffective by deleting ads in real time, destroying any and all returns on their advertising investment.

One day someone smarter than me will make some machine learning thing that deletes brands from videos in real time.

[devoutsalsa]

YouTube figured it out, whether it was intentional or not. Let me pay money to not see ads. I watch a lot of YouTub & have a premium subscription. If I needed to watch unskippable ads, or any pre roll ads, I’d mostly stop using YouTube at all.

[matheusmoreira]

No. Paying money not to see ads is completely backwards, it's just extortion. Why should I pay to avoid having my attention stolen or my mind programmed with corporation trademarks? It should be illegal for them to even attempt to invade my mind like this. My mind is mine, it's not a blank slate for them to insert their little brands at will. Advertising is aggression and ad blocking is self defense.

Paying any amount of money just drives up the value of your attention. If you can afford to pay off the advertising platform, then you obviously have enough disposable income to waste on the products the advertisers wants to sell to you. In the end, you're helping them segment the market and paying for the privilege.

In YouTube's case, you're paying to avoid ads but you're still being advertised to since videos now have hardcoded sponsored segments. You're also being constantly tracked by Google's surveillance. So you're still gonna have to use uBlock Origin and SponsorBlock if you want to avoid advertising or tracking.

[wrycoder]

You are paying directly for servers, admin, content creators, and bandwidth in real money.

Instead of wasting time watching annoying ads.

I think it’s a great deal.

[bbbobbb]

Advertising being illegal would be completely different story: no ads in the content itself. No 'sponsored' videos, no ads meant for other people (inside a browser in the video, on the street in the video).

Also, it's just not feasible to say 'let me pay money to not see ads'. You can pay for netflix, youtube, google search.. but what about the long-tail of all the sites you visit? I think Brave or somebody tried solving it with micro transactions but automatically deducting money also does not work that way because most of the content is trash I would not be happy to pay $0.005 for.

[Animats]

> Advertising should be illegal.

Arguably, it should not be a tax-deductible business expense for businesses. At least not beyond, say, 20% of cost of goods sold.