I block ads not because I'm completely anti-advert. I'm anti being-stalked-through-my-entire-life-and-having-my-details-sold-like-I'm-a-cheap-peice-of-meat, and unfortunately ATM blocking that also means blocking most online adverts.
So I draw the line before sponsorblock. At least the content creators get a better cut of that than they get from YouTube monetisation & youtube can't take it away from them as easily at a whim, and those segments don't track me, and there is an increased chance that the sponsor is relevant to what I'm looking at (not what I clicked on days ago). One or two channels even manage to make the sponsor segments fractionally entertaining.
I'm also anti irritating adverts of course, which does include manually skipping some sponsor segments or avoiding channels that can be relied upon to be irritating in that way.
I'm curious why you aren't anti-ad. Ads are psychological manipulation. Why would you want to subject yourself to that?
I was recently visiting some family, and saw the garbage my 7-year-old nephew sits through to get to the YouTube video he wants to see[0]. I can only assume we're just training a new generation of kids to believe that ads are a normal, inevitable part of every kind of media consumption.
I agree that creators need to be compensated somehow. And I'd be fine throwing a couple tens of cents per view of a video rather than either watch ads or block them and freeload. But micropayments will never take off (for understandable reasons), so that's pretty much never an option. For creators I watch frequently, I contribute to their Patreon if they have one, at least. But if someone links me a one-off video from someone I've never heard of, and will probably never watch a video from again, I'm not going to do that, and I'm certainly not going to let them pollute my brain with whatever advertising they've decided to push.
But I loathe every form of advertising and will block it any chance I get. If I could wear AR glasses that blocked out things like billboards, I would.
[0] (If my stupid grandfathered free GSuite account allowed it, I'd gift them a family YouTube Premium membership, but of course GSuite breaks random features everywhere.)
> I can only assume we're just training a new generation of kids to believe that ads are a normal, inevitable part of every kind of media consumption.
Maybe? I distinctly remember doing my utmost best to ignore TV ads between my cartoons as a kid. Especially <10yo I'd be basically chanting "boring boring boring" to myself until it was over, or just stay focused on toys.
Then again, today's children have access to Youtube far earlier and with more control over what they watch, so you may have a point in that they're starting earlier and thus it gets normalised instead of "this is a sucky thing I'm going to try to ignore".
The cartoons when I was a kid were advertisements themselves with breaks for further advertising: He-Man, GI Joe, Jem, My Little Pony (the old series), Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Transformers, etc.
Mainly because to an extent they are a necessary evil, or at least we'll never convince enough of the right people that they aren't necessary.
> Ads are psychological manipulation.
They are currently, which is why they get blocked by my anti-stalking-and-other-dickishness kick, but they don't have to be. A simple advert (image and a little text, not directly obscuring what I'm trying to read or bouncing around to break my attention from elsewhere artificially) for a product that might be relevant to what I'm looking at, doesn't seem evil to me. Unfortunately advertises are not satisfied with that and want full-page adverts with forced interaction and full user background tracking.
>I was recently visiting some family, and saw the garbage my 7-year-old nephew sits through to get to the YouTube video he wants to see. I can only assume we're just training a new generation of kids to believe that ads are a normal, inevitable part of every kind of media consumption.
Just like parents have a responsibility to teach their kids about safe sex, I think parents have a responsibility to teach their kids about ad-blockers.
I'm completely anti advert. They declared war on civilization 20 years ago and don't deserve to be treated as anything but a parasitic cultural disease. It didn't have to be this way, but that's where they took us.
20 years ago? Advertising has corrupted every public medium since the dawn of print media, arguably even before that.
In the 19th century, it was quackery and false advertising in newspapers, making snake oil salesmen rich.
In the first half of the 20th century, advertising started using propaganda tactics to psychologically manipulate consumers, as pioneered by Edward Bernays[1], making tobacco companies rich.
Radio and television amplified their reach and power, fueling modern consumerism. People were hooked on tobacco, corn products, sugar, fast food, and a million other mass produced products. Whether the products were harmful to society was irrelevant. The spice must flow.
The internet was another major frontier, where ads could precisely target specific consumer profiles. Adtech was born to give this power to advertisers by facilitating data collection and creating the multi-billion dollar dark data broker market.
Adtech was then (ab?)used by local and foreign agents to spread propaganda, disinformation, and conduct psyops at an unprecedented scale, disrupting democratic processes, toppling governments, causing social unrest, and boosting intolerance, xenophobia and racism on a global scale to levels unseen since WWII.
And we haven't seen the worst of it yet. Once everyone has their own personal AI that is trained on the most intimate details of each personality, ads will become even more personal and manipulative. Advertisers are salivating at this opportunity, and adtech is surely experimenting with this right now.
So, no, I refuse to participate in this perverse system, and subject myself to being psychologically manipulated. Companies and creators who depend on advertising don't deserve my business, attention or respect.
[1] This man was evil beyond words. See Adam Curtis' The Century of the Self.
> advertising started using propaganda tactics to psychologically manipulate consumers
Advertising and propaganda have always been the exact same thing, and in at least some latin languages it is plainly called propaganda in all occasions. As in people will say that they work in propaganda and universities offer degrees in propaganda.
>Advertising and propaganda have always been the exact same thing
They're really not, though they are similar in many ways. They have different connotations: advertising is done generally by for-profit companies trying to sell stuff and make money, while propaganda is generally done by governments trying to shift or control public opinion. We have different words for these things for a good reason.
Wow, Marc Bernays Randolph (first Netflix CEO) is really great-nephew of Edward Bernays (american propagandist) that is uncle of Sigmund Freud. Interesting how one close family shape public realations.
Advertising is inherently immoral and it's our moral obligation to drive advertisers into bankruptcy.
All advertisers are liars. Even when they're not directly saying untrue things, they're presenting a one-sided view of the truth, to the extent of being intentionally misleading.
The harm done by these lies is incalculable. The distraction. The loss of self-esteem caused by ads always telling us we aren't enough, don't have enough. The fear caused by ads telling us we'll lose what we have. The loss of financial stability on things we don't need or want.
And that's just what ads are. That's not even talking about how advertising is done, with a million dishonest tricks to jam themselves in front of you or gather your data to lie to you more interestingly and convincingly.
The only good ad is a blocked ad that cost the advertisers money.
Why?
In principle, advertising is a way to propagate information in a market, trying to match offer with demand. Without any such mechanism, markets would be hugely inefficient (i.e., it would be annoying to find a shop selling what you are looking for, since you would need to visit many before finding one that sells that thing).
The problem with ads, like you are saying, is that being scummy and dishonest is by far the most effective way of attracting demand.
This is really extreme and reductionist. Without advertising, you wouldn't even know that many products and services exist. You can't rely on word-of-mouth for everything.
Of course, so many advertisers have abused their power that blocking ads is a good choice for many reasons, but don't make the mistake of calling all advertising "evil". Without it, how do you know a new movie is coming soon, or that someone's invented and is selling a new computer peripheral, for instance?
The old-style small, highly-targeted, text-only ads that Google used to show alongside search results really were the pinnacle of advertising I think. They were great for learning about something that would fix whatever problem you were googling about.
sponsorblock doesn't just have sponsor segments. There are segments for intro, outros, filler content, non music section for music videos, etc. Depending on the type of content you watch, skipping these segments are great. Sponsorblock has a config option so you can toggle on/off which type of segments you want to skip.
The creator gets zero dollars from you watching sponsored segments, unless you actually go and buy the product using their promo code. So you are not helping them, only wasting your time.
A better option is YouTube Premium + Sponsorblock. Then your time spent watching a video translates to payment to the video creator - at a higher rate than for users watching with ads. And you save your time by skipping sponsored segments.
> The creator gets zero dollars from you watching sponsored segments, unless you actually go and buy the product using their promo code. So you are not helping them, only wasting your time.
That feels like a deliberate misrepresentation of how sponsorship works.
The sponsors are not paying directly for viewings or sales (though number of eyeballs is one consideration in negotiating the worth for a sponsored block) but for the potential opportunity for sales offered by increases market awareness. It is far more subtle than paying for impressions/clicks like other advertising models.
If no one watched them, the creator would get zero dollars full stop because the sponsorship simply wouldn't happen.
> A better option is YouTube Premium + Sponsorblock.
I'll stop using youtube completely long before I pay them to stalk me (you may not get the ads on premium, but you are still being tracked to the fullest extent possible).
> The sponsors are not paying directly for viewings
And in that case you are not contributing by watching the ads. There's also a ton of sponsorship where the creator has a referral code that the viewer uses to purchase a product. In these cases they make money if you buy the product.
If you're not going to buy anything, you are not helping the creator at all by watching any ads. Your are better off just blocking the ads to not waste your time.
They are effectively paying for viewings, they are just not directly paying for viewings. How do you know you will never be interested in something if you are never told things exist?
Of course, if you are so anti-advert that you can't accept the slightest possibility that a sponsor segment relevant to the clip you are consuming can't ever possibly be of interest to you, or you'd avoid it even if it would otherwise interest you simply because you were informed about it by a sponsor segment, then yes, automatically skipping won't make any difference. But I consider that thought process to be somewhat blinkered, perhaps even reductio ad absurdum.
It makes no direct difference, they don't get paid directly per view like with monetising via youtube ads and such, but if no one ever sees the sponsor segments the sponsorship will dry up and the content will need to be paid for by other means (the creators just loving it enough to make it for free, some of the audience paying by some means, etc.) which usually isn't a long-term viable position.
Here's a thought experiment, though: if you manually skip sponsor segments every single time you watch a video by dragging the scrubber, is that any different from having a piece of software do as much for you, in an automated fashion?
If it is the same advert I've seen many times for one of those casual games that all look the same (battle of the tanks, tank war, waring tanks, battling tanks, fantasy tanks, tank fantasy, …) then that isn't even relevant to what I'm watching (I wonder how much they pay for a spot on an LTT vid or similar?) it'll get skipped every time. If it is something that might be relevant but I'm already aware (either I already was, or I've already seen the ad four times this week) again it'll get skipped.
The Running Is BS podcast is sponsored by a tea company: irrelevant to me as I don't drink tea at all (there is some relevance to the people making the cast, which is how the segment came about initially), hitting skip-forward-30s a couple of times each fortnight is no hardship to me. I listen enough that I perhaps should consider doing the Patreon thing, the fact that I and no doubt many others in a similar position don't do the Patreon thing is why the sponsor segment is useful to the creators.
> is that any different from having a piece of software do as much for you
The difference is that something new and potentially useful doesn't get skipped and it would automatically with sponsorblock. Hitting the right arrow key a couple of times is hardly a hardship. Before the sponsor segments on a video channel or podcast get to the point of irritation where I'd use something like sposorblock, I'll probably just start avoiding looking at that channel at all.
It’s not that it’s a hardship to press right a few times, it’s more that I’m trying to understand, academically, how to make a “respectful” skipping tool. Because I believe both that in-content ads are the most user respecting ads and deserve better engagement/treatment than “universally skip”, but also that users are not morally obligated to consume ads even for ad-sponsored content (is’t the advertiser’s, and only the advertiser’s, problem if users aren’t interested).
Sounds like the requirements would be: 1) it plays every new sponsorship pitch once, which you can still manually skip, and 2) it maybe asks you whether you want to skip on a per-instance level?
Perhaps once in a specified amount of time. Every two weeks? Sometimes I forget things and a reminder isn't inappropriate. Spread over all channels if possible, rather than once per channel per period.
Also rather than silently skipping, perhaps a couple of seconds pause with “sponsor segment for <product> skipped” displayed, at least as a default the individual users can switch off.
If you're looking for a Bromite successor, right now best way is to download the uazo builds direct from GitHub: https://github.com/uazo/bromite-buildtools There are some third party tools that will download the releases for you, but I'm fine to just manually pop by the repo whenever ungoogled-chromium[0] updates on my desktop.
So far the uazo builds have only run up to a couple weeks behind Chromium mainline, unlike Bromite which could fall months behind. I'm not sure if there is a better privacy-oriented browser for Android right now if you want just want a stripped back Chromium. The other privacy-oriented browsers all seem to add a bunch of extra stuff.
I need to actually try Fennec one of these days instead letting it sit on my phone.
I still don't exactly trust these builds since they are small fries and I imagine not a ton of people are combing the code to make sure data isnt getting logged somewhere. They are great for browsing the internet, but I typically don't put passwords in them.
Oh man, I'd never heard of NewPipe until now. I've literally had it installed for three minutes, and I am amazed. I was able to dial up a music video that I frequently listen to without ads, I could immediately background the app, and even turn off my screen while still listening.
> I could immediately background the app, and even turn off my screen while still listening.
Ads are a major nuisance but those features are also really important because YouTube deliberately crippled their free-as-in-beer mobile app, to push folks toward a paid app.
I also just installed the app yesterday. I like it too but this "turn off the screen" thing happens when I watch videos in full screen too to me. I happily watch a video and suddenly the screen turns off while the audio is still on. Didn't find a way to solve that yet.
To be specific: In full screen mode it turns off the screen after a while and so far I could not find any setting that disables this behavior. The things I found on the internet where about dimming the screen and the suggested solutions against it did not work for me. It seems that is goes into "audiobook" / "listening" mode for some reason.
When I press the power button of my smartphone again the video player is a floating mini player.