MucherBucher

You are mixing two things. Nobody can just blast ads on your phone without your consent. But you did give consent by accessing YouTube.

I don't see how the pricing for Premium is unreasonable. I do, however see, how they are too aggressive with ads. That's why I said paying for premium is a better deal than watching ads. If you don't agree with either compensation, don't use their service

No, I'm not here to defend Alphabet. I'm just saying it's equal to stealing groceries at Wallmart. They request payment, you deny. Just because it's so much easier to do on YouTube doesn't mean it's any more justifiable.

Oh baby, you don't understand what you just said, do you?

Nobody forces you to watch ads. Close YouTube, don't look back, email content creators to have em send ad free video links directly to you.

Watching ads is your obligation as consumer, if you decide not to pay for their removal.

Or 5. It holds 6 people... 4 € per person best case. As for now, they aren't enforcing same household sharing only, like Netflix do. I can't tell you about the future.

Also, not to support such behaviour, but if you aren't made of money, I'm totally okay with you teleporting to Argentina, subscribing to YT Premium at maybe 5 $ a month, and teleporting back to never go there again. That doesn't require an argentinian CC.

I'm not sure about legal technicalities, but I do know that it currently works. Personally, I don't risk it if they ever decide to ban associated accounts, because u know, they totally can refuse to service you, if they were to feel like it.

Basically, not sure how Apple does it though. You have a Google family group. You can add individual accounts to that. The group owner cannot see any activities of other accounts, but he could remove people without their permission.

Removed users only lose active family subscriptions like youtube premium and google one (storage). Their watch histories and whatnot will remain the same. Watch out with Google one. If you have Google one and use more storage than google free, then remove google one, you only get a limited time period to remove data over the limit. Afterwards it gets inaccessible, I don't think they delete anything, but no insurance on that.

The textbook this person owns:

service provider: "Hello, I'm a window cleaner, do you want me to clean your windows? I'll actually do it for free this time! Please recommend me to your peers"

customer: "yes please"

service provider: "all done! Want me to do it again in three months time?"

customer: "yes, I love free stuff!"

service provider: "actually, I'd have to charge for that, can't work for free all the time."

customer: "Racketeering!"

Homie missed the point. using ublock and sponsorblock is equal to petty theft. Disliking a company doesn't make it morally right to steal from them.

Google tells me 24 bucks for family. That's equal to what I do. I actually do pay that for all of em, but technically, it's just under 5 bucks a person since I share with 4 others.

ITT: "it costs more than 5 bucks a month!" yeah, if you don't share with friends with family, it does. Also, music service included, deduct your spotify payment.

"You can just block ads" You can just miss the whole point.

"I rather support creators directly" I'm happy you do that. YouTube hosting is not free for Google/Alphabet, pay them too, or you'll have to teach each and every creator how to webhost + help em search a "real job" because selfhosted won't pay enough. Also, good fun browsing videos then.

IDK man, paying for YT Premium really isn't that bad. Assuming you already consume YouTube content, that is. And I'm pretty sure that's like 98% of first world population between 4 and 70.

Blocking ads on YouTube is no sustainable solution. Hosting Billions of Gigabytes of on-demand content is SUPER expensive. Like, it actually costs money. Other, wayyy smaller indie creator on-demand video platforms charge 5 bucks a month, but i'ts okay if they do it, because they aren't big bad Alphabet.

If that's your view, you don't have a problem with pricing, you have a problem with morals. And if you still do voluntarily consume YouTube content in private, with or without ads in any which way, you inarguably have a huge problem with your own morals.

YouTube premium is a good deal. It's priced very well compared with competition, it actually does pay indie creators and it let's you access to features that many users really do use.

BUTBUT THEY ARTIFICIALLY LIMIT FEATURES FOR NO REASON WITHOUT PREMIUM. I mean, it's subscription software and streaming, what else would they do? Every for profit subscription software provider and their mother does this. I develop hospital software and we literally do exactly this. If hospital A has feature x and hospital B also wants that, we don't just hand that out for free even when we just have to add it to their system in like 10 minutes... what did you expect? They already use our software (like you use YouTube), we don't have a huge incentive to just randomly add features if nobody paid for it. If we do, be happy about it, send me a gift card, if we or they don't, that's just business.

I can't say I had such a civilized discussion on reddit. At least I can't remember. Typical reddit discussions always felt a bit more filled with emotion, maybe hatred. Lots of shitposting too. Might have to do something with the more targeted demographic of Lemmy.

Something being a business model actually doesn't mean it's right. Dropshipping exists after all. Paying everyone for their services can't be a viable solution either. The main business model here usually consists of "pay to upgrade". If you don't pay, it kinda works. If you do want to pay, it works really well. BitWarden is my personal hero in that regard. Their product works really well as freeware. It works even better when you pay for it. But I believe many paying users don't even need the additional functionality, they just pay to give something back. Moral retribution so to speak.

I see how blocking ads on freeware isn't morally wrong, I mean there's not much that's universally immoral. It's quite the topic in ethics, deontology says some acts are universally bad or universally good, no matter the consequences. A common example is honesty: being honest is always good, but I'm sure you thought of a dozen examples where honesty might not be the "good" way.

I still do agree with you. Blocking ads in specific instances can be completely fine. I mean we could construct setups where not blocking ads might lead to nuclear war. But I truly believe that it's fine in everyday use. You don't wanna see ads, they annoy you, you don't feel like paying with your time and brain cells. An individual avoiding ads is so inconsequential for everyone else involved, utilitaristically, that's a net gain of happines. On the other hand, ethics is not a study about individual actions, that's morals. I don't believe that any ethics could realistically support such a choice in the grand scheme. Assuming everyone acts by those rules, buying advert slots is wasted money.

Luckily we are indiviudals and like you said a day ago, there's enough people paying their taxes for you to evade them without consequences for either party.

I, in this instance, decided it's not about the company per se, it's more about the individual action. I'm no sucker for Nestlé, but you can't argue that they don't do good things as well. They are quite the big player in vegan meat alternatives and they actually do seem to put in quite the work to make sensible products in said category. They superficially seem to be sustainable and healthier than many other comparable products. Even if that's not true, even if their products are shipped around the globe eleven times a day, it's pushing for something that's ecologically sensible. If they themselves don't produce an ecological product, they still help to establish shelf space for other, more ecological products. So yeah, I'd buy a Nestlé product in that case. Even just to show Nestlé and the stores that such a product is in demand.

There's other scenarios where I don't act by the same logic simply because I'm a human and humans aren't known for being all that logical after all.

I'm a capitalist consumer and I greatly profit from my financial situation each and every day. I do live in a way too big apartment after all, and plans for individual housing are on the way. Not very ethical in the grand scheme xD

Oh buddy I get you so well. I'm not german by the way, but I guess DACH is close enough.

I actually do work software development now, even though I said systems engineering in an earlier comment. Systems engineering is 'just' my past, back when I actually learned stuff. Funny enough, I work for the medical sector. Not IN the medical... oh what ze hell... We make software stuff for hospitals and whatnot. At least that's what I'm up to right now and I don't have to tell you, it doesn't feel as good as it should. I am essentially hired for life. As decent people in IT do, I earn more money than one should reasonably spend and demand is so high, I could just sit back and relax 4 days a week with no major consequences other than my team hiring yet another person to compensate for my lazyness.

I don't wanna work there anymore. I probably won't be working there today one year later. Not because we scam people or anything, I just don't think we do justice to what should be expected from us. Our oh so cool product saves lifes and that's good. But shouldn't we care a bit more about better quality control, more efficient workflows, more reliable products?

We're good enough to "win" the capitalism game. People want the thing we make and the thing we make is a good thing. But is it as good as it could be? Definite no. Do others do better? Probably, they just invest more... higher costs. Could that mean that we are inactively killing people because we force them into buying our product due to cost efficiency? Yeah sure but it's not that easy, is it? There's no right or wrong here, really.

So.. anyway.

I see your point about you not blocking ads actually being harmful for the advertiser, because you differ from the average Joe in terms of advertisement influence. But I don't believe that's for us to decide. By opting for advertising a product, companies risk approaching people like you (and ME if we are being honest.. I guess it's the high rate of autism in IT (I'm not gonna include a sarcasm tag here because they stink)), that don't recieve advertisements well and might actively steer away from their product. They contractually do NOT risk their advert not being displayed at all... you see where this is going.

Genug Moralapostel. The existence of ads in modern media is okay with me. I don't exactly wanna see them, but I understand their business model and it's not really all that reprehensible to me. I do prefer straight up pay walls over ad walls... sometimes. At least for video streaming platforms. To be honest it's probably the other way around for most situations. I gladly accept ads on websites if it means I don't have to pay for each and every single website access all the time. Moral dillemmas everywhere.

I don't think our opinions differ all that much. We basically had a "well if you feel like this, why don't you do this?" "oh it was just a hypothetical, I actually already do this. But this and such.." "Ah yes, but no but, this and that"