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by Goronmon 971 days ago
What's tiring is trying to figure out why people just don't use sites/services that show them ads. It's extremely simple and from my experience pretty effective at avoiding the ads those sites/services display.
3 comments

> don't use sites/services that show them ads

Cable TV shows ads. Spotify Premium shows ads. Paramount Plus shows ads.

Roads have ads (billboards), but so do the subways.

Even paperback books often have an ad in the back for the next book in the series.

If you think it is possible to avoid ads, it is because you are so surrounded by ads that you are tuning them out.

Cable TV shows ads. Spotify Premium shows ads. Paramount Plus shows ads.

I don't use those services. Problem solved. See how simple that is?

Roads have ads (billboards), but so do the subways.

Sure, that is a problem. But I don't consider a roadside billboard to be a "website or service" as I mentioned in my original post. So, I don't see how that comparison applies.

If you think it is possible to avoid ads...

I didn't say it was possible to avoid all ads, I asked why are you using a service if you don't like the service itself? Just don't use it. You haven't stated why you feel that's so difficult to do.

Because they're a monopoly. Finding creators without using YouTube is very hard, at least for me. It's hard even inside YT.

But most creators are exclusively on YT because that's the only choice that matters.

There is Nebula now that does have some nice content, but they're orders of magnitude smaller (plus their UX is very rough) so it's hard to even call them a competitor.

That's why monopolies - capitalism's inevitable end goal - destroy everything they touch. In order to argue "you can choose to not do X" requires the choice part to be true. Sure, we can argue people can completely forego X. But that's basically a nuclear option that even if they wanted to do, will be hard. People will still send you YouTube links.

One example of this is WhatsApp. I hate it and don't want to support Meta, but 100% of my peers use it so I have to use it.

Having said all that, when YouTube starts to price hike subscriptions and/or showing ads even for paying users (inevitable because of profits), I'll force myself to stop using it.

> why people just don't use sites/services that show them ads

The point I'm trying to make is that everything shows ads.

Most content is only available on services that show ads.

How do you consume media?

Who says people who use adblock don't do that? I certainly avoid those sites, that's also why I self-host Invidious and often use youtube-dl.

But no, people have a problem with those things too, because at its core, they disagree with allowing users being able to choose what their browsers download.

Who says people who use adblock don't do that? I certainly avoid those sites, that's also why I self-host Invidious and often use youtube-dl.

If you are using a different front end for a service, you aren't avoiding using that service...

Why can't you just choose to use a different video sharing platform if you don't like what Youtube offers? Why bother using Invidious and youtube-dl?

Yeah, I kind of anticipated that argument hence the second half of my comment.

I would use a different streaming platform (and I do for some creators like Louis Rossman). But at this point, and you may already know this, YouTube has a monopoly on the video sharing/streaming market and mindshare. You simply can't avoid YouTube in 2023, else you forfeit watching 98% of all video content produced on the internet.

The maintainers of frontends like Nitter/NewPipe/Invidious/Scribe.rip know this. And I'd bet most of them wish their applications had no reason to exist. If YouTube or Twitter were simply good, privacy-respecting and performant products, there would be no reason to use these (or adblock).

Or just use an ad blocker. Also extremely simple.
How simple is it for a normal person to use an ad blocker on their TV, where they want to watch YouTube?

And don't "just pihole" me, mister!

At least for Roku, I recently found and had good luck with https://github.com/iBicha/playlet
Very cool!
Smarttube is one of several apps that work just like YouTube but without ads.

Also skips sponsor Blocks