For me this is fighting over semantics. It doesn’t really matter if it’s legally piracy or not since nobody is gonna go after you for it either way. It’s about whether what you’re doing is moral or the intended way. You can use adblocker, but then you’re just freeloading. Fact of the matter is that nothing is free and everything needs compensation when at scale. You can rightfully claim that YouTube shoves too many ads and that it’s a monopoly so it abuses it’s position, but at the end of the day you’re using the service without compensating for it, so you’re stealing at least something.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
You’re right, it absolutely doesn’t, which is why it’s so weird to me that Linus makes a big deal about it.
Which is why I either donate to channels I like or buy their merch. They get way more than if I wasn’t blocking ads, and I don’t have to support a company that manipulates people with ads. So I guess at the end of the day I’m “stealing” from YouTube, and I guess I’m okay with that. If they offered good value for their premium service, I’d pay. But they don’t, so I just use an ad-blocker to get the thing I care about. I refuse to let them harvest my personal data, and that’s basically what their advertising is designed to do. I’d disable my ad-blocker if their ads were provably not tracking me, but I know that to not be true.
I’m not against paying for things. I pay for Nebula, my email (Tuta), and some other alternatives to Google products, I just refuse to pay for artificial limitations. YouTube Premium sucks for my intended use-case (download news to listen to on my commute, and occasionally listen to music while doing chores), and it’s not worth the $10 or whatever they charge for it. If they offered a lower tier (say, something based on watch-time), I might pay for it, more out of guilt than anything, but it needs to be a fair price. About half the channels I regularly watch are on Nebula or Odyssee, so I wouldn’t miss too much if they blocked my access to it.