I was a bit surprised to find that Patreon also keeps a pretty large commission. But, yeah, at least it's not owned by Google and what else are you going to do when most creators list this as their only option. I'm just confused when there's easy options like sending cash directly to their IBAN or using a nonprofit like Liberapay (they just have their own donation page and, instead of taking a cut, make money that way: https://liberapay.com/Liberapay)
I believe them. The restrictions are reasonable and appropriate for nearly everyone. Extensions are untrusted code that should have as little access as possible. If restrictions can be bypassed, that's a security bug that should be fixed because it directly affects users.
I also think uBlock Origin is so important and trusted it should not only be an exception to the whole thing but should also be given even more access in order to let it block things more effectively. It shouldn't even be a mere extension to begin with, it should be literally built into the browser as a core feature. The massive conflicts of interest are the only thing that prevent that. Can't trust ad companies to mantain ad blockers.
> Extensions are untrusted code that should have as little access as possible.
It's entirely possible to manually vet extension code and extension updates in the same way that Mozilla does as part of their Firefox recommended extensions program.
> Firefox is committed to helping protect you against third-party software that may inadvertently compromise your data – or worse – breach your privacy with malicious intent. Before an extension receives Recommended status, it undergoes rigorous technical review by staff security experts.
Why am I not allowed to trust an extension just as much as I trust the platform it is running on? This is the same logic behind mobile OSes creators deciding what apps can do.
Would that rip off the how-do-we-fund-the-web bandaid, forcing new solutions? Worry about the interim where some publishers would presumably cease to exist. And who would remain afloat—those with proprietary apps, as Zucky as they are, I’d guess…
UBO is absolutely incredibly important. Figure you might know more than me about how journalists and reviewers and the like can still earn a keep in a world with adblockers built in to every browser.
> Would that rip off the how-do-we-fund-the-web bandaid, forcing new solutions?
Absolutely. The web is mostly ad funded. Advertising in turn fuels surveillance capitalism and is the cause of countless dark patterns everywhere. Ads are the root cause of everything that is wrong with the web today. If you reduce advertising return on investiment to zero, it will fix the web. Therefore blocking ads is a moral imperative.
> Worry about the interim where some publishers would presumably cease to exist.
Let them disappear. Anyone making money off of advertising cannot be trusted. They will never make or write anything that could get their ad money cut off.
People used to pay to have their own websites where they published their views and opinions, not the other way around. I want that web back. A web made up of real people who have something real to say, not a web of "creators" of worthless generic attention baiting "content" meant to fill an arbitrary box whose entire purpose is to attract you so that you look at banner ads.
I get what you mean and I think we align here, but I trust the uBlock team infinitely more than I trust Google to make my own extension decisions. I know there's a subset of regular users who fall for all manner of scam, but Manifest V3 doesn't even solve any of those issues, the majority of the same attack vectors that existed before still exist now, except useful tools like uBlock can no longer do anything since they got deliberately targeted.
Besides, there's ways of having powerful extensions WITH security, but this would obviously go against Google's data harvesting ad machine. The Firefox team has a handful of "trusted" extensions that they manually vet themselves on every update, and one of these is uBlock Origin. They get a little badge on the FF extension store marking them as Verified and Trusted, and unless Mozilla's engineers are completely incompetent, nobody has to worry about gorhill selling his soul out to Big Ad in exchange for breaking uBlock or infecting people's PCs or whatever.
Youtube isn't free, and unlike a simple blog, requires tons of infrastructure and content creation. None of that is free, and people wanting that to be free is why we're in adscape hell.
Edit: I'd love for a competitor to youtube, but there isn't. Rumble isn't a real competitor, and none of my favorite channels place their content there either.
I wish there was a youtube alternative that was more of a federation, but every attempt I've seen of federations have been mess.
Then charge for it like the other streaming services. If they send me ads, I'll block and delete them, manually or automatically, and I won't lose a second of sleep over it.
> requires tons of infrastructure and content creation
Not our problem. It's up to the so called innovators to come up with a working business model. If they can't, they should go bankrupt.
That’s quite a stretch. I loathe ads as much as anyone else here, but I don’t consider being exposed to them as violating the sanctity of my mind (is my mind even sacrosanct, such that it could be violated?) it’s just something I don’t like.
And yes, attention is absolutely a currency that can be used to pay for things. Like any other voluntary transaction, no one is entitled to my attention unless we both voluntarily agree to it.
That implies voluntarily paying attention to adverts, as an informal contractual obligation. You aren't allowed on Youtube any more because you haven't been allowing the adverts to influence you enough. You can't look away or think about something else, that's cheating on the deal.
Advertisements have been proven countless times to be a form of psychological manipulation, and a very potent one that works very well. After all, if it didn't work we wouldn't be seeing ads crop up literally every-fucking-where, including these days even in our very own night sky in the form of drone lightshows. The ad companies have huge teams of mental health experts in order to maximize the reach & impact of their advertisements on the general populace.
Ads are so powerful that they've even managed to twist the truth about plenty of horrific shit happening to the point of affecting the health and safety of real people, sometimes literally on a global scale. Chiquita bananas, De Beers, Nestle, Oil & Gas companies, and must I remind you of Tobacco companies (and surprise surprise, the same people who were doing the ads for Big Tobacco are the ones doing ad campaigns for O&G companies now)? There have been SO MANY examples from all these companies of using advertisements to trick and manipulate people & politicians, oftentimes just straight up lying, like the Tobacco companies lying about the adverse health effects despite knowing for decades what the adverse health effects were, Or Oil & Gas companies lying about climate change via comprehensive astroturfing & advertisement campaigns [1].
This all barely scratches the surface, too, especially these days where you have platforms like Google and Meta enabling genocides, mass political interference and pushing things like crypto scams, gambling ads and other similarly heinous and harmful shit to the entire internet.
The TL;DR of all of this is that yes, advertisements absolutely are psychological warfare. They have been and continue to be used for absolutely vile and heinous activities, and the advertisers employ huge teams of people to ensure that their mass influence machine runs smoothly, overtaking everyone's minds slowly but surely with nothing but pure lies fabricated solely to sell people products they absolutely do not, and will never need.
> I don’t consider being exposed to them as violating the sanctity of my mind
I do. I think it's a form of mind rape. You're trying to read something and suddenly you've got corporations inserting their brands and jingles and taglines into your mind without your consent. That's unacceptable.
> attention is absolutely a currency that can be used to pay for things
No. Attention is a cognitive function. It has none of the properties of currency.
These corporations are sending you stuff for free. They are hoping you will pay attention to the ads. At no point did they charge you any money. You are not obligated to make their advertising campaigns a success.
They are taking a risk. They are assuming you will pay attention. We are entirely within our rights to deny them their payoff. They sent you stuff for free with noise and garbage attached. You can trash the garbage and filter out the noise. They have only themselves to blame.
If you are a paying subscriber, you are self-identifying as (likely) a higher net-worth. The problem for ad platforms allowing paid opt-out is that the most valuable users leave the network.
Then they have to go to advertisers and say, “advertise on our network where all the wealthier people are not.” A brand like Tiffany’s or Rolex (both huge advertisers) aren’t going to opt into that.
It's a decent chunk of change for the sole purpose of avoiding ads on a single platform that barely pays the people actually producing the content. If you're looking to access premium content and YouTube Music, it's a slightly better value proposition (but only slightly, because YTM sucks, especially compared to what GPM used to be). For that ~$120 a year, you could buy a bunch of Steam games to occupy the same amount of time as your YT habit. Or you could buy a sub to services like Nebula which actually pay content creators decently. Or you could buy an external hard drive, install yt-dlp, and embrace Talk Like A Pirate Day, Groundhog Day-style.
I mean, yeah, if you don’t actually get much use out of YouTube, then it might not be worth it to you. But that’s the same for all streaming services. And I wasn’t commenting on whether it’s worth it or not, which of course is subjective, but on how big an expense it is in absolute terms. The former doesn’t relate to the “higher net worth ads” argument, the latter does.
Personally I do like YouTube Music, due to all the user-uploaded content that isn’t available on other platforms.
$12 is a week of chicken thighs, man. It's enough gas to make $60-$80 running UberEats orders. In America. In "absolute terms", it's $100+ dollars a year to turn off ads on a single platform for content the creators are compensated pennies for.
People who choose that without much thought - because it's barely an expense for them - are definitely tending towards "higher net worth" nationally, let alone globally. A lot of those people just don't realize it, because the entire point of seeking that kind of status is so that they can enter a socioeconomic bubble and not have to care about annoyances (like advertising).
Because by paying you are demonstrating you have more than enough disposable income to waste on their extortion. You're paying for the privilege of segmenting yourself into the richer echelons of the market. You're basically doing their marketing job for them and paying for the privilege.
At some point some shareholder value maximizing CEO is going to sit down and notice just how much money he's leaving on the table by not advertising to paying customers like you. It's simply a matter of time.
Take a third option. Don't pay them and block their ads. Block their data collection too. It's your computer, you are in control.
You gotta love the mental gymnastics people will go through to convince themselves that not paying and blocking ads is the morally correct thing to do.
If you truly have those beliefs the right moral action is to not use YouTube at all but god forbid you'd have to make any sort of sacrifice.
I don't use Youtube at all, but I keep thinking I'm missing out and should make the effort to find a way to circumvent tracking. I can't see that the morality points to an obligation to absorb adverts. There can be no contract on the basis of what your mind must do.
Edit: let's step through this. If I use a towel placed over the computer to block ads, that's morally the same as using blocking software, I think? If I block the ads by putting my fingers in my ears and staring at the ceiling, also the same thing, morally. If I block them by watching them in a negative frame of mind, saying that I dislike ads and won't do what they suggest, I'm still doing the bad thing, the same as using an ad blocker - if it is a bad thing. My obligation, if it is an obligation, is to be receptive. Otherwise what, it's a sort of mind-fraud?
Adding: advertisements use as many hacks as possible to grab your attention. You could broadly categorize things that behave in this way as akin to a) a baby's cries (attention-seeking by something that absolutely requires your assistance), b) an alarm (attention-seeking by something that seeks to warn you), or c) being accosted (attention-seeking by something that seeks to harm you for its own benefit). Which are advertisements most closely aligned with? Is it the same across all advertisements, or do intentions vary? People likely assign varying levels of morality to the above examples; does advertising inherit the morality of the most closely aligned example?
There is nothing immoral about this at all. They're the ones who chose to send people videos for free, gambling on the notion that people would look at the ads. Nobody is obligated to make their unwarranted assumptions a reality. They are as entitled to our attention as a gambler is entitled to a jackpot.
If someone gives you an ad filled magazine, you can rip out the ad pages and throw them in the trash, leaving only the articles you actually want to read. Same principle applies here. If some random person on the street gives you a propaganda pamphlet, are you obligated to read it just because some businessman paid for it? Of course not.
The point is most people will never pay. That makes the Adblock/anti-adblock war inevitable for them. If you can afford it, you sidestep it. If you can’t or won’t, you don’t. Pretending there is some point where those folks would pay is a little delusional in my view.
I'm not pretending. I know most people won't pay. The point is it doesn't matter.
They're giving their stuff away for free instead of charging money for it. They gambled on the notion that people would "pay" by watching ads. Unfortunately for them, attention is not currency to pay for services with. We will resist their attempts to monetize our cognitive functions. The blocking of advertising is self defense.
They have absolutely nobody but themselves and their own greed to blame. Instead of charging money up front like an honest business, they decided to tap into that juicy mass market by giving away free sfuff. Their thinking goes: if I give them free videos with ads, then they will look at the ads and I will get paid. That's magical thinking. There is no such deal in place. We are not obligated to look at the ads at all. They don't get to cry about their gamble not paying off.
> They have absolutely nobody but themselves and their own greed to blame
They’re one of the most profitable media platforms on the planet. They’ll be fine. Nobody is crying. There are just willing participants—as you say, on both sides—in what I consider a pretty silly battle one can opt out of with a small amount of money.
Grab some popcorn then because it looks like Lula is heading down that path. Things are gonna get fun very soon.
Not even two days now and we've got leftists burning with patriotic fervor on social media. They've suddenly found a willingness to defend Brazil's sovereignty against US interference despite the fact they're unrepentant globalists. These are the same guys who hate the military and everything it represents. The same people who did everything in their power to destroy Bolsonaro, the guy who revived brazilian nationalism for a brief four years.
Watching this circus is truly a surreal experience.
> The same people who did everything in their power to destroy Bolsonaro, the guy who revived brazilian nationalism for a brief four years.
it is laughable to see Bolsonaro supporters destroy logic and call nationalism congressmen and ex-presidents asking for the US to tariff the Brazilian economy. But it is even more funny to see this backfiring - which is obvious, there is always a limit to how much you can attack your own country for political gains, including for the globalist far-right.
I didn't say the calls for tariffs were nationalism either. I said Bolsonaro managed to revive brazilian nationalism during the brief four years he was in power. I meant to imply that the current administration managed to destroy said nationalism. Destroying it was one of their explicit goals. They likened it to the denazification of Germany. Watching them appeal to nationalism now is just hilarious to me.
This is exactly what brazilians asked for and it's exactly what they should get. It's gotten to the point I think it'd be great if Lula was reelected. The brazilian right wing shouldn't have to spend years cleaning up the messes they leave behind only for them to come back later to enjoy the good times we've created. Let them hold onto power a little longer so that the bomb blows up in their hands.
Refrain from replying to me again if you can't muster enough respect to have a coherent discussion about our country's politics without calling others "minions". Bolsonaro is a coward who betrayed everyone who supported him. People went to jail for this guy while he was hiding in the USA like a rat. Don't call me a "Bolsominion".
So much for peace and diplomacy. Looks like Lula is gonna retaliate and start a trade war with our second biggest trade partner even though we're exporters of commodities.
Lula said today that they will try to negotiate (how? Trump is asking something that you can't negotiate), and if the day comes the tariff starts, then Brazil will retaliate with another 50% back.
So your point is president Lula's own statements are worthless and we should be discussing possible diplomatic backroom deals instead. Who's really discussing rumours here?
The only diplomacy I want to see is of the gunboat kind. The supreme court made it clear gunboat diplomacy was their condition for folding. They said something akin to "if they park an aircraft carrier next to us then we'll see". I would have loved to see that.
Perhaps I'm saying he trusts the Itamaraty with official information. Official diplomatic channels are the norm, not media theatrics (miles ahead of you, "do your art of the deal thing" was the first thing I said, you failed to see behind the nuance).
Perhaps I'm saying nothing about election politics, and I'm more worried about the longstanding brazillian diplomatic tradition.
Perhaps I knew someone would bring a specific discussion to this, and disarmed it beforehand (which is super weird, I agree, but within the realm of previsibility).
Let's put some possibilities on the table:
1. You have no knowledge about diplomacy. You think it's talking soft or something like that, and you're repeating things you heard from someone else.
2. You know what diplomacy is, and you're playing dumb.
2a. You know what diplomacy is, and you're playing dumb to provoke me into going into a discussion that clearly has no conclusion.
2b. You know what diplomacy is, and you're playing dumb because you're suspicious of the way I approached the subject outside of common narratives.
3. You understand as much of the dynamics as I do, but you're putting me in a situation that I need to explain it more pedanticly (totally fine, I already explained in a simple way before, so this would be dumb on your part).
---
Which one is the closest to what you feel? Is there another one? Please, enlighten us. Don't be shy to assume option 1 if that's what it really is.
See? Cards on the table. Honesty. Try it, it's good.
It would be a better interaction if you made things more clear in place of thinking we thought too much about your way to write.
> I did gave a big hint though (mentioning the Itamaraty)! It was hard to miss, but somehow you missed it.
I approve the Itamaraty's reaction of not acknowledging the letter and sending it back.
Lacking a proper world leader, we the people must take the responsability of actually not negotiating with terrorists. We need to step up.
Missed what? Your point is that the Itamaraty did not acknowledged a tweet-letter and "sent it back"? Are you talking that our foreign ministry is competent? If that is the case, I agree, that is obvious for any brazilian that knows the bare minimum of foreign relations.
Trump has already threatened to retaliate if he does that. Said he'll throw whatever value Lula musters up right back at him on top of the 50%. If he does what you're saying, Trump is expected to make ours a 100% tariff.
He's also threatened to apply 100% tax on countries trying to replace USD as their reserve currency, which is exactly what Lula and his friends are once again threatening.
China has a lot of leverage due to the fact they manufacture the USA's technology. We sell commodities. Natural resources and soy.
Their power keeps increasing to this day. It disgusts me every time they utter the word democracy.
I for one am very happy to see Trump sanction this place. Right now it looks like he's the only person in the world able and willing to put pressure on this dictatorship of the judiciary. I hope I'm around to see him personally sanction everyone involved.
You sound like you cannot refute even a single one of the arguments presented.
Not the first time people try to gaslight me and call me mentally ill for expressing my views. Please note that I'm absolutely open to counterpoints. I'm secretly hoping someone will convince me that this country isn't the judiciary dictatorship I believe it is. Sadly it looks like you're not going to be that person.
A very dark day for my country. I fully expect social media companies to engage in large scale preemptive AI-assisted content removal in order to dodge liability. I might even witness Venezuela tier arrests over government criticism within my lifetime.
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