[dspillett]

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.

[kelnos]

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.)

[TheCapeGreek]

> 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".

[phone[phone]]

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.

[dspillett]

> I'm curious why you aren't anti-ad.

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.

[midoridensha]

>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.

[yetanotherloss]

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.

[imiric]

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.

[carlosjobim]

> 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.

[midoridensha]

>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.

[carlosjobim]

But is there really a good reason? The only difference is that one tries to make you buy something and the other tries to make you do something. It works in the same way, an entity trying to propagate their agenda.

[midoridensha]

Yes, there's a good reason, because those two things are different, as you yourself point out. Different words for different things.

[t0bia_s]

After WWII in US propaganda was renamed to "public relations".

[stOneskull]

i find it doubly interesting that edward bernays's uncle was sigmund freud, and his nephew a founder and ceo of netflix.

[t0bia_s]

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.

[phone[phone]]

I agree with Bill Hicks about what advertisers should be doing other than dreaming up new jingles.

[robertlagrant]

As long as you avoid things that are paid for by ads, there's no moral problem.

[kerkeslager]

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.

[kelnos]

> Advertising is inherently immoral and it's our moral obligation to drive advertisers into bankruptcy.

I agree with this on principle, but in reality I wonder how we'll pay for content online if this were to happen.

Micropayments will never be a thing, and subscriptions don't make sense for random one-off videos or articles.

[hughesjj]

> Micropayments will never be a thing

Why not?

I'd love to see something like "I donate xx CPU cycles upon viewing this content" or something. Computebis a resource, same with networking, and there's already a lot of them demanded by shitty ad platforms.

I'd much rather donate those cycles to BOINC or hell, even ETH over ads

[robertlagrant]

Isn't that just gating websites with crypto payments?

[blackbear_]

> Advertising is inherently immoral

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.

[kerkeslager]

> In principle, advertising is a way to propagate information in a market, trying to match offer with demand.

No, that's what a Consumer Reports-style review site is. Independent review matches offer with demand. Search engines (not including the ads on search engines) match offer with demand.

There's no "matching" with ads: the goal is to jam your product in front of people as much as possible. And in fact there's often no demand to match with. Ads are just rich barging into your attention to beg for more money with lies.

> 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).

I'd caution you against trusting anyone who talks about "efficient" without talking about what benefit is being maximized and what cost is being minimized. Ads are efficient in the sense that they help maximize sales for minimum quality of product: that's not a desirable efficiency. If we (consumers) want to maximize quality and minimize cost, then independent review is a much better way to find products.

[t0bia_s]

And that is a huge part of problem with sustainability and magnification of problems that would otherwise stay local. PFAS, microplastics, pollution... It's all consequence of overproduction of useless things that are consumed by society manipulated by ads.

The product is "ad" itself if it is good. If not, you need extra advertisements.

For me it is immoral to consume ads.

[robertlagrant]

I think this is a category error. Those bad things aren't driven by ads. Ads drive economies of scale possible if people have heard of your product without word of mouth, which lower prices and help producers understand what people want. Productiveness will sometimes drive things like microplastics, as it's hard to know the effects of doing something new without doing that thing.

That's the theoretical response. In practice: how would I sell my car without ads? Would I sit and wait for people to be attracted to it and ask me if it's for sale?

[jraph]

You can look things up when you need something, you don't need to wait for an ad to annoy you to discover something.

What's more, usually, you hear ads for big players, not the small ones, which are often the most interesting.

In particular, hearing about NordVPN every other video is not necessary.

[robertlagrant]

Look things up where?

[midoridensha]

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.

[imiric]

> Without it, how do you know a new movie is coming soon

By visiting and/or subscribing to cinema listing web sites, subscribing to cinema-related YouTube channels or social media accounts, visiting my local cinema and watching 30 minutes of trailers, seeing cinema listings in the newspaper, or calling Moviefone.

> or that someone's invented and is selling a new computer peripheral

By visiting and/or subscribing to computer-related web sites that announce, review or sell computer peripherals.

None of the advances in advertising in the last 50 years have improved my lifestyle or consumer experience. All it's done is improve the efficiency of manufacturing the need for a product, embedding brand names in the consumer subconscious, and manipulating them into buying a specific product, regardless if it solves their problem, or even if it's detrimental to their wellbeing and health. And since the advent of the internet, adtech is responsible for creating and supporting a user data gold rush, violating the privacy of every internet user in the process, as well as enabling hostile forces to use the same system for information warfare.

So, no, advertising is not a required or even necessary part of society, and is responsible for incalculable damages caused by the harmful products it promotes. The only reason it is so prevalent is because psychological subversion tactics are very effective, and it's the easiest way for companies to increase revenue.

[kerkeslager]

> Without advertising, you wouldn't even know that many products and services exist.

This is a vastly positive tradeoff. The number of products which would improve my life, versus the number of products I am inundated with daily, is a negligible ratio.

> You can't rely on word-of-mouth for everything.

That's true. However, I can rely on independent review sites, and I could probably rely on search engines to find me products that solve problems when I search for them, if they weren't controlled by advertisers.

Nobody is saying rely on word-of-mouth. That's a straw man.

> 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?

There are a number of movie reviewers I follow, and a few friends who have similar taste in movies as me. I'm not interested in computer peripherals, but if I were, I imagine Wirecutter contains information, and there are probably other similar sites.

Advertisers are not helping me find movies to watch or computer peripherals I need. They're helping themselves, and in a way that's aligned with harming me. I never saw an ad for Everything Everywhere All At Once, which was my favorite movie last year--my friend Adam invited me to see it. I did see a ton of astroturfing for White Lotus, which was a complete waste of my time to watch two episodes of. Why would I want ads?

Stop this nonsense about how we need ads. We don't.

> 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.

God forbid Google return the solution to your problem as a search result, you know, like a functioning search engine.

This really is the most absurdly missing-the-point example you could have chosen.

[mcpackieh]

We're under no moral obligation to play by their rules. Read Rules for Radicals.

[BigElephant]

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.

[carlosjobim]

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.

[dspillett]

> 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).

[carlosjobim]

> 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.

[dspillett]

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.

[carlosjobim]

I think life is too short to waste any time watching ads, with the absolutely minuscule chance that something relevant will be presented. My time is much more valuable than that, so I have nothing against paying for the content.

[dspillett]

> so I have nothing against paying for the content

In theory nor do I, as long as paying gets rid of the tracking as well as the adverts which I'm sure it won't, so for now I'll keep blocking the stalking (and adverts while they are intimately linked) and accepting sponsor segments.

[ktosobcy]

If you use NewPipe then there is virtually no difference if you view the sponsor part or not?

[dspillett]

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.

[dcow]

I agree with you in spirit.

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?

[dspillett]

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.

[dcow]

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?

[dspillett]

> it plays every new sponsorship pitch once

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.