this post was submitted on 05 Jan 2024
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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Yeah it's weird how privacy and piracy have blended together over the years.
With some games you need to pirate them if you don't want a Russian nesting doll of launchers and accounts that are able to leak your information and fill your computer with bloat.
I do find the argument interesting some YouTubers try to make about ad blockers being a form of piracy.
To be fair, it makes sense to liken the use of ad blockers with piracy. Consuming the content without paying for it either way, either without directly paying yourself or without indirectly paying through watching ads. Doesn't change that ads on most parts of the internet are extremely invasive and far too much.
I feel fully entitled to protect myself from the ads because of the problems with them. But I don't feel the need to lie to myself about the fact that I'm consuming content without paying for it in some way. Then again I support some content creators that I feel deserve it. Not sure if that helps offset it somewhat or not, but I don't really care that much either.
Please stop doing this. It just gives bad actors better tools to fuck content creators.
If ads arent chosen and paid to the content creators directly then its a damned cancer on the entire industry and you, by giving them this, are supporting wage theft at best and exploitation at worst
How many content creators have been demonetized for no reason at all yet ads are still injected into their content anyway?
Sorry for being angry about this, but if we as a whole accept this then we are watching enshitification in action and im sick of the amazing thing that is the internet continually get worse
No, I fully believe you're making different issues into one, which is dishonest argumentation.
Adblockers are functionally equivalent to piracy, the fact that some entities abuse others is a different issue. It's the same as with gambling mechanics in games, the fact that most people would think that those are predatory and bad does not change that not paying for the game is piracy. It's possible to be more nuanced about things than to group everything together.
v
Your spelling also doesn't help your credibilityIf you can't see past someone's spelling mistakes then your credibility is the one I think is in question. Just ask me to fix it if the meaning is unclear or ambiguous instead of attacking my credibility(pot kettle black). Perhaps I did make some spelling mistakes, but do you know if english is even my first or third language?
It's interesting that you both tell me not to connect one issue and also its downstream effects, but then turn around and say that my argument lacks nuance(if that's a fair summary of your response, as I take it to be)
I'm saying that calling adblocking piracy has downstream effects that complicate the larger issue of the enshitification of the internet in general, and you want to boil things down to a simple binary of circumvention, i assume. But I reject the statement that adblockers are piracy without explanation.
So please, explain it so that the basis for this opinion can be understood instead of simply repeating it. What is it that makes adblocking equate to piracy in your opinion?
I'm passionate about this. I see it very much like a repeat of introducing micro transactions in the form of DLC into gaming which ruined gaming for me and many other people. Enshitification seems rampant these day. I believe that ive seen it in action before and that im seeing it again with this idea that adblocking is piracy.
Oh, I could see past your errors, I was just pointing it out. Errors do not help credibility, almost ever. (There might be some times it does, but I'm not sure I would want to gain credibility with people that would take such as helping my credibility). If you disagree with this I don't know what to tell you. I also didn't actually attack your credibility (I don't really think you have any, but that's a different matter), but made an observation that you could make sure your writing is better to not detract from your credibility. With the amount of tools available to avoid spelling mistakes it doesn't really matter whether English isn't a language one is perfectly proficient in.
I have clearly expressed what makes adblocking equate to piracy. It's in the first paragraph of the first comment of mine you replied to. It should be fairly straight forward. Consuming without paying.
I reject your premise that it's like microtransactions in gaming, unless you specifically mean in "free" games. Of course microtransactions and a lot of DLC for paid games are enshittification, but that's more like asking you to pay more to access a new episode of a show or a scene from a show you've already paid for. Not near the same as having ads to pay for the costs of delivering content (and I include producing the content in "delivering" it).
Now, if you instead make the argument that the amount of ads or the contents of ads are enshittificating services that let you consume content without directly paying for it yourself I can agree. But not that ads themselves are enshittification. Nor that avoiding to pay to consume content isn't piracy. I just think it's self-deception to claim that not paying by blocking ads isn't piracy. I have also made it clear that I think blocking ads is perfectly reasonable and what should be done. It may not be piracy in the legal sense, but circumventing systems meant to pay for something seems perfectly in line with the colloquial sense of the word.
Somewhat of a tangent
Now, do I think the internet would be better if there were no ads at all? Yes, of course. But do you think it would be better that people would have to directly pay to use services on the internet instead? That would mean poorer people would be barred from a lot of online services. Because it costs something to host services on the internet and that has to be paid somehow. And people generally congregate to a small subset of sites which thus get a lot of traffic and thus high costs that has to be paid somehow. Sure, you could have some sites being public forums made available by government and thus "free to use" because they payment is through taxes, but that's generally not how businesses operate.You either couldn't look past a couple of spelling errors or deliberately chose not to. My evidence? You commented on it and now we are talking about them. What was the point of mentioning it all if you were willing and able to ignore them.
You are a bad actor and you have shown what worth you are.
Go away.
Im done with you.
You have shown who you are and you arent just arent worth another thought
You're more of a bad actor with your tantrums and rage-downvoting.
I wish you a better future.
EDIT: also to add that I simply made a note of it, specifically in a spoiler, while you were the one to try to make it into a conversation and talk about it. It really shows more about you than about me.
I don't see why a free market can't take care of this problem. Let the suppliers run their ads and if it's not profitable then let them fold. None of this "please stop using ad blockers our business model sucks and we need you to accept worse overall service so we can stay in business".
This is the most important thing imo. Some people just don't care (not saying it's a bad thing). Others do so to each their own.
Sure, let everything require that you pay upfront for everything. Those too poor to afford to pay don't deserve to have access to it anyway, right?
I'm not saying that ads are good, but having an option for people to pay to access a service that isn't directly tied to money they have accessible seems better than barring them from that access. At the same time that option cannot be too intrusive or otherwise be too much of a negative before it becomes predatory. We can wish for the world to be perfect as much as we want, that doesn't make it so. We can work towards a future where people don't have to work to be able to live comfortably and where we have very different ways to compensate people for their time and effort on top of that. But we're not there.
I'm not quite sure what you meant by your last paragraph, though.
Those too poor to afford to pay get it for free, comrade.
I feel like a lot of people are wholly unaware of FOSS. But anyway my free market idea would require consent, for example a pop-up that says "would you like to pay $0.30 or watch an 8 second ad to view the content?" and then people could make their choice. If their choice is neither then they will go somewhere else for the information or entertainment. Consent is absent from the current model, aside from using an ad blocker to signal your refusal.
There are tons of videos (educational and otherwise) on youtube that have never paid out to their creators, either because they were from the era before youtube enshittified or because the algorithm decided that the content creator has earned nothing. It reminds me of the old argument that "you shouldn't pirate music because it's not fair to the artist" but man you've got to see those record contracts, especially those made to black or otherwise underprivileged artists. Being fair to the artist was never an imperative, but this argument still persists with people who identify themselves with their jailers, or who actually don't really care that much (not saying that in a bad way).
Humans by nature are creative and helpful. We will always make how-to videos, guides, music, stories, and art. We don't need megacorps to facilitate this, it's the megacorps that want in, and they're going to have to come up with a better business model.
Well yeah, of course we're consuming content without paying. But that is not piracy.
The creators are distributing the content freely, and we're consuming it, while ignoring the ads, because we have the ability to do it.
Is flipping the channel on legacy TV when switching to commercials piracy as well?