I have no desire to steal from /content creators/, which is why I support them via other means. (Patreon etc)
YouTube on the other hand, is an untrustworthy middleman who's going to to their level best to profit off of me and not pass the money on to the content creators. It's YouTube that's stealing from the content creators. If YouTube was a utility that would deliver me the bits that I wanted from the content creators I wanted I'd be happy to pay some sort of volume pricing for the resources they use to do it, however I have no problem "stealing" from them by using an adblocker considering all the user-hostile crap they do to both viewers and creators.
This is such a misguided and confused perspective on this whole matter.
> It's YouTube that's stealing from the content creators
Really?? And these content creators willingly post their content on the site so that Youtube can steal from them? Do you really think that Youtube does not provide any service here? It is really a parasite? My God, try setting up a video hosting platform for a week and see how that goes. It's amazing people can think this way, the ad-based "free for all" internet have ruined multiple generations conception of basic common sense.
Please tell me how Youtube is supposed to stay in business without using ads, without having premium services, without selling your information and all that? Please share with me this secret business strategy that no one bothered to explain how.
The only reasonable alternative that I can think of is making Youtube non-profit ala Wikimedia. But even then, people STILL hate on them because....they have so much money??? Why the fuck not, do people not realize how valuable Wikipedia is?
> Really?? And these content creators willingly post their content on the site so that Youtube can steal from them?
Many no longer do because of this. YouTube "demonetizing" videos they don't like, while continuing to show ads on that exact video and keeping 100% of the reward for themselves is certainly not fully in the right here.
> Please tell me how Youtube is supposed to stay in business without using ads, without having premium services...
As I said, I would be more than happy to pay for a service that actually treated me as a customer rather than an inconvenience. Stop forcing creators to do dumb things like "Shorts" to keep their recommendations up. Stop forcing creators to make videos of a certain length so you can drop ads in. Stop hiding incredibly useful features like the downvote just so you can force me to view content I'm probably going to hate. Just show me the content I want and provide actually useful recommendations next to that, and I'd absolutely be willing to pay money.
I think the real problem is they can't because of the mixed model. They need those dark patterns and anti-features for the ad-supported half of the userbase. Maybe if they were building two entirely separate applications?
Or maybe I'm entirely wrong and Premium actually does what I'm asking for. But I've never seen anybody claim it does, so I haven't even given it a shot.
> Many no longer do because of this. YouTube "demonetizing" videos they don't like, while continuing to show ads on that exact video and keeping 100% of the reward for themselves is certainly not fully in the right here,
If they are no longer using Youtube then it is not longer their problem innit? Good for them.
> dark pattern
This I agree with. I think we as a society need to accept that we are apes. This is what libertarians and free thinkers refuse to accepts. There are certain things that we just don't want to fuck with. You can't actually just say "lol just don't watch it" or "the free market decides what they want!". Guess what, people don't know what's good or bad for them (sometimes).
I wouldn't object to a full ban on short videos like TikTok or Shorts. inb4 "but I can control my desires!" . Okay good for you. Some people are immune to drug addiction too but that doesn't mean it should be legal.
I have a very hard time believing someone is regularly contributing to creators patreons while also being annoyed by the "invasive" reminders of YouTube Premium and would go through means of using a handful of external tools to keep watching YouTube for free and without ads. Surely such a person would avoid YouTube entirely and just stick to supporting their Patreon creators?
I spend more supporting YT creators than what YouTube Premium costs.
I'm fine paying for things when I say "I like this, I want more of it." YouTube itself is the worst part of the experience, it's the part I want less of. YT would have to have way fewer dark patterns and bad behaviors for me to even consider paying for YouTube Premium.
Then stop using it. The content creators you watch use it and that means you are obliged to follow the platform's terms. If they didn't need the platform, they would self host their videos and monetize via other means like Patreon but they don't. That means your contributions compared to the revenue via YouTube pales in comparison.
It's not stealing. They get into this business knowing that adblockers are a thing and are fully legal. Most of them even shill ads inside their video like shady VPNs.
It might not be so ethical but it's not illegal, which is what stealing is.
It is not stealing. I am the ultimate arbiter of what data I accept to be downloaded and viewed on my computer. YouTube offers, free of charge, many pieces of data. I accept the ones I want and politely decline the ones I don't want.
Please enlighten me, what payment do you provide in exchange for the services you are using? You are circumnavigating the payment system in place and providing nothing in return. That's theft.
In fact Google and all other big tech themselves do similar things too. They funnel all their proceeds through tax havens so they avoid paying corporate tax in the countries they turn over in.
Yet it's fully legal, because tax avoidance is not evasion and loopholes are loopholes. And thus they're not stealing from the countries they're depriving of their tax revenue.
When they do it it's totally fine. When I avoid paying it's not?
You're confusing your moral sense with the law. Sure it's unethical, depending on your views immoral but it's not illegal.
Unprosecuted theft is still theft. You are breaking the terms of service, it's just not practical or cost effective to go after every person that does so because each individual damages are low.
I'm glad you agree it's unethical though. Keep that in mind when you see companies do unethical things because they think just like you. Everyone wants something for nothing.
In any case, this is why they're testing blocking ad-blockers. It's cost effective.
Theft is a criminal law term. So is the act of prosecution. Terms of Service are a civil law thing. IANAL but this still makes it not theft in my view, but breach of contract.
It's questionable how enforceable a ToS is though that is only clicked with a button and in some cases (eg NewPipe) not shown at all. But either way it's civil law not criminal.
YouTube is totally within their rights to block adblocking viewers though. Which is a fine solution for this problem IMO. No need to get the law involved.
More and more sites are doing this now though on most of them it's easily bypassed (on the site I use the most I can just turn off JavaScript :) )
Theft is both criminal and civil. If you steal something from me, I can sue you in civil court to recoup the cost, and if it's a significant enough something, then I can also try to file a police report and get the DA to press charges against you. You're right, "prosecution" refers to criminal court, but you know what I meant.
It's not theft for the simple reason that the video producer isn't deprived of anything. If I rewatch the same video a million times can I bankrupt that creator? If I sit five other people in the room with me while I watch does the creator lose something in proportion to the the number of "thieves" present?
Nope, turns out it doesn't actually share that much in common with theft, it's a simple EULA breach at most.
I'm sure it feels righteous to point the finger and yell thief but it's such a sloppy argument. I'm not sure why anyone's still dying on this hill, people were unsuccessfully arguing this on IRC in 2004 with regards to DMCA, it's still not convincing decades down the line.
If everyone blocked ads, do you think content creators would continue making videos?
If I ski at a resort without a ticket, did the resort lose money? If I jump over a turnstile to get on the subway, did the city lose money? If I sneak into a music festival, did the artist lose money? They're all theft of services.
That rule falls apart as soon as you start extrapolating out any further.
If everyone stops riding the subway, the city will lose the same amount of money and the subway will be underfunded. If everyone stops skiing and instead decides to build snowpeople in their back yard, the resort will go out of business. If no one shows up for the music festival, the artist will make zero dollars. So is that theft?
Generally most people would say no. None of those things are theft of service.
Deprivation of revenue on its own is not theft. That's not to say there's no moral implications behind watching public content without paying for it -- there is a moral implication -- but "morally problematic" is not the same as "theft". And a definition of theft that boils down to "loss of potential revenue" is not a definition that stands up to any serious scrutiny.
>If everyone stops riding the subway, the city will lose the same amount of money and the subway will be underfunded. If everyone stops skiing and instead decides to build snowpeople in their back yard, the resort will go out of business. If no one shows up for the music festival, the artist will make zero dollars.
So there will be no more subway, no more ski resort, no more music, and in this case, no more YouTube. Is that what you want?
It's theft because you're not paying your fair share of the usage of the service. If the system remains in balance, you're either stealing from all other users (because they have to pay more for the recipients to earn the same amount), or stealing from YouTube/content creators (because they make less per view but the costs are higher).
It would be unequivocally good for the Internet if Google didn't have a monopoly on independent online video hosting.
> If the system remains in balance, you're either stealing from all other users (because they have to pay more for the recipients to earn the same amount), or stealing from YouTube/content creators (because they make less per view but the costs are higher).
This is incoherent. By this logic if I take a car into the city I am stealing from the railroad. I'm either stealing from all of the riders (because the railroad will need to increase fares so that fewer riders cover the same service) or stealing from the service (since they'll have reduced revenue from running the same number of trains).
Heck, by that logic if I build a competing product to another company and its users switch to my product, then I've stolen money from the other company. It's nonsense.
"I could have made more money if you didn't do that" does not work as a definition of stealing.
There are in fact ethical considerations around watching content for free -- even in instances where a creator might be giving explicit permission to watch that content for free, and certainly in instances where they want/need compensation. There's a reason why we try to fund Open Source projects even though they have licenses giving content away for free. There's a reason why we try to fund creators and give them steady revenue streams even in the instances where we know we won't be watching many of their videos for a month. People do have a moral duty to (when possible) support creators that are building things they care about.
Those ethical considerations are real, but they are orthogonal to theft. Theft is not merely deprivation of revenue.
:shrug: Google gets far too much value out of having a stranglehold on indie video hosting to shut down. I wish other services would take their place to be honest.
But no, they're not going to close down Youtube. Even operating at a loss, Youtube cements a lot of power and influence for Google that they're not going to give up.
I meant because they’re going to break ad blockers. YouTube isn’t going anywhere. Absolutely nothing will change if all the people that block ads are booted from the site except reduced costs. Sounds great!
:shrug: Quite frankly, I'm doubtful that Youtube is ultimately going to do anything that will threaten their monopoly regardless. If enough people are blocking ads that it's seriously hurting Youtube's revenue, Youtube is not going to risk those users going somewhere else -- because the point isn't just to make money, it's to cement a monopoly position over video hosting. That means being a dependable place where when a video is hosted, uploaders can be confident it'll be viewable.
I could very well be wrong about their internal calculations about that, it depends on whether Youtube sees an actual risk of users going elsewhere (and whether there are enough people blocking ads in the first place for them to care one way or another). It'll be interesting to see what Youtube ultimately does.
> except reduced costs.
This in particular is funny though. I would not hold my breath that Youtube premium is going to get cheaper. That's not going to be a thing :)
Youtube premium is not priced around the cost that it takes to keep Youtube running. It's priced around what the market will bear, just like every product is. The only thing that's ever going to make Youtube's pricing or payout model change is competition. That is the only thing that ever makes price go down.
If Twitch starts offering better hosting options than it currently does, or Nebula somehow manages to take off, or there's some completely random mass-migration to Peertube (unlikely), then maybe you'll see prices go down.
> If I ski at a resort without a ticket, did the resort lose money? If I jump over a turnstile to get on the subway, did the city lose money? If I sneak into a music festival, did the artist lose money? They're all theft of services.
The answer to all of these questions is a solid "no", I don't know if this is the point you're intending to make.
Have I stolen the baker's services when I smell the baked bread on the way to work without buying anything? It's an incoherent idea of theft at best, in which you must falsely represent the exchange as zero-sum to demonize.
If you're hoping that Google will decrease the cost of premium in response to getting more ads on screens, I have a bunch of wonderful bridges to sell you.
Everyone uses an adblocker. It's not really circumvention if everyone is doing it. You know it, I know it, Google knows it. It's how they've been able to keep their YouTube monopoly intact. If everyone had ads from day one, YouTube would be another failed Google venture. The bait-and-switch is built on the idea that they can serve ads to people that will tolerate them and enjoy the network effects of having tech-literate people on board too.
YouTube is living counterfactually. I can live counterfactually, too. If YouTube were never free, then I would have never used it. They're trying to have it both ways, and so am I.
No, not everyone uses an adblocker, otherwise services like YouTube wouldn't exist. You are trying really hard to absolve yourself of culpability but nothing you're saying makes any sense.
