[TechSquidTV]

People are entitled and constantly fed rhetoric online that it is morally acceptable to steal by blocking ads. As a YouTube content creator, who makes educational tech videos, I have seen my share of complaints because I dare to take a sponsorship. People simply do not assign value to digital goods, they are seen as free by default.

[bm3719]

I do this because I have to protect my brain from marketers that are working against my financial interests, time management goals, and general mental hygiene. If I'm searching for, like in your case, tech info, it's because I want a solution to a problem that has nothing to do with getting sold crappy VPN services or mobile games.

We could have a decentralized and open medium for global information exchange. Instead, the web is a cesspool, and a large part of why is because we've commercialized everything.

[koube]

Sundar has made the case before which I think is pretty good point: The open web is basically an ads driven model. Without ads the open web would be very different.

(Opinions are my own.)

The alternative is paywalls everywhere, or existing on donations. Try reading the Atlantic/NYT today and see you like the ad free model. Or try lemmy if you want to see the donation model.

Hacker news is based around tech and entrepreneurship still yes? What is the current audience that drives the upvote consensus that everything needs to be free AND ad-free?

[raspyberr]

They are free by default. Digital goods don't follow regular economics. A carpenter who makes a table can make ONE sale from that table. How many sales of a digital good can you have? What entitles you to potentially unlimited money from a set amount of work? Any attempt to turn limit digital goods to the way physical goods work, introduces friction and extra work only for the legitimate customers. Donation is the only ethical for of payment for digital goods.

[grayhatter]

Nice strawman you got there, would be a shame if someone had a different reason.

10 USD is too much to charge for ad free twitch. I don't WANT to support twitch, their reputation and brand isn't stellar.

They're probably one of the least awful, but I have better places to spend my money. Like the content creators on twitch. I begrudgingly pay twitch to support the streamers I watch and care about. but 10$ so streamers can get none of that... pass, if I care about the streamer, I'll unmute the small window, if I don't I'll close twitch.

Until adtech companies start acting more ethically as a rule. They deserve no consideration. Bad behavior might not excuse bad behavior, but it obviously encourages it.