Quick, without cheating, can you name the second human being to run a mile in less than four minutes? Can you name the current world record holder?
I guess that most people in my small town don't know who Roger Bannister is. A lot more of them can tell you the name of the first local to officially run a mile in less than four minutes. They couldn't tell you if anybody from my state has done it since.
I guess that's just a long way to say, "That's natural."
A lot of those people work for adtechs. Once you realize that 50% of bigtech is relying almost entirely on ads, a lot of people are simply advocating for keeping their FAANG salaries by forcing us to watch debilitating ads.
They pay to display the ad. Think of a highway ad. If you sell a highway ad placement and then cover it with a big blanket (with maybe another ad on it) so nobody sees it, that would be a serious case of fraud.
So if you tell them the ad has been displayed so you get the video, but no ad was displayed for you, then that is a form of fraud. I don't think that would hold in court since it is such a petty crime, but it is still fraud. You lie to their server so that you can see the video without ads, that is fraud.
> Since when is watching an advertisement a moral imperative?
Since you got paid for it. Youtube pays you by serving you content for those ads.
Note that I also block ads. However, unlike you I don't try to tell myself that I am morally right when I do so, I know that it isn't a nice thing to do and that the content I consume when doing it is paid for by all the users who doesn't block ads.
I am not sure why you try to argue that you are morally good when you block ads. Does that really matter to you? That is the most interesting part of this discussion to me, all the people who want to see themselves as good people even though they leech off others.
It is overall better for society to block ads because ad-funded services have bad incentives, and so anything you can do to hurt the business model is a plus.
The specific act of not watching the ad is morally neutral, you can render content sent to your computer however you want or not at all.
> Since you got paid for it. Youtube pays you by serving you content for those ads.
Is that technically true though? Legally it certainly wouldn’t be, there is no explicit agreement between you and Google. Even if some people feel that they have some ‘moral’ obligation to watch those ads..
I consider pervasive advertisement a moral wrong. I don't have to tell myself anything to know that blocking ads is the ethical thing to do. They are already a moral perversion.
Edit:
I kind of consider it disgusting that watching a video is considered by anybody to be "payment", or that anybody legitimately believes it's somebody's duty to watch an advertisement. The worship of abusive corporations in our culture has gotten insane.
You already aren't understanding us when you come in believing that we're convincing ourselves of anything. We actually do have an ethical and moral map that is consistent with blocking ads, and we don't consider not watching a commercial to be the same thing as theft, or even to be morally questionable.
The simple fact is that video hosting is incredibly expensive. Do you still want information on the internet to be freely shareable via video? Ads are the price.
> Do you still want information on the internet to be freely shareable via video?
Yes. And I'm willing to pay for it in taxes, or directly to creators and hosts, but I'm not going to pay Google after the massive amounts of abuse and anti-competitive behaviors. I will never pay Google.
> Ads are the price.
I don't accept that. Ads as "funding" for "free" content is a myth.
I don’t think that true. Users have no have signed no contract and/or have any obligations to watch those ads.
Of course it would still be fraud if ad buyers were paying for ads which were never displaying it, except Google would be committing it. In most cases on a significant scale to warrant legal action.
Most people have kids because they see it as a positive personal trade off (when you are older and you have a family that will come to visit you for example). Most people are not thinking about the benefits to society when they decide to have kids.
Well, it certainly may be a net positive for the individual parent, but it’s no doubt a service to society. I’d suspected your opinion was out there, but it’s still disheartening to have proof.
After watching the movie "The Wizard of Lies", i changed my mind if Madoff.
He was a prisoner of his own vice and it consumed him and killed his whole family
He brings to my mind the man who loses his job, but, too ashamed to tell his wife, continues to leave the house in his suit every morning, his wife not discovering the true situation until the house is foreclosed, at which point it is too late.
A tragic figure, who unfortunately brings down others with him.
