Comment on youtube getting more agressive
Dyskolos@lemmy.zip 1 year agoJa der Sack Reis :-)
I get you, yes. And I get your argument. Purely logically, ethics shouldn’t matter whether being applying to big evil corpo or to tiny mom&pops. That’s why it’s ethics and not whatever-i-just-fell-like-now. But to me it does matter. And it’s not really about blocking ads so google will starve. What I do doesn’t matter in the slightest in the grand scheme of things, just like you said. It’s just about being able to look in the mirror not spitting at the reflection because I’m true to my values. It’s about what google (alphabet, whatever) has become I so despise. I grew up with the net growing up, and I witnessed every single step downwards and it’s mostly thanks to google. I must admit i’m a horrible hippocrite, because I only use Pixel-phones. Which is ironic in itself, but they’re the only phones you could easily DE-google. All others will throw layer of layer of “protection” in your way, so you’ll never really own your own phone. And I hate myself for doing it, but I see no alternative.
Besides that. Yes. I simply don’t use ANY google product. Not even youtube. Never cared, never will. Only thing I ocassionaly watch there are music-videos (which I’ll then download and never use youtube for that again). If I HAD to see an ad, I would simply close the tab and be done with it.
I couldn’t work for such a company. No matter the pay, I would always feel bad. I once worked for a great charity in Krautland (which you’ll most likely know) which cares about cancer. As an Admin, so kinda like a software-engineer, but for hardware :-) I thought it was a dream working for a charity! Boy how wrong I was. As an admin, I could see everything (of course). And what I saw was horrible. The only reason for this charity is 0,1% help for cancer, 50% pay for the CEOs and their expensive cars and daily “buisness trips” and 49,9% upkeep. Which includes a complete floor of people who’s job it was to extort old people for their inheritance. The cellar full of millions of assets in paintings and whatnot. Simply rotting around. Money’s being brokered from shell-charity to trust-fun and whatnot. I quit withing the first 6 months. Disgusted. And it was a good pay and essentially an un-fire-able job (they never do, no matter what you do, just because you could talk bad and ruin their image). And guess what, nobody understood how I could value my “silly morals” over a great job.
Long story short: it’s a complex topic for a tiny comment and I don’t even know where to cut off or what to include :)
So in a re-phrase: What if I do not block ads, but am totally immune of the effects of ads? Isn’t that even more cheating? I can’t be influenced by those things. Except maybe having a preference then for NOT choosing the advertised product simply because its ad annoyed me. Wouldn’t it be more fair to just block it and accidentially buy that product I never saw an ad of?
MucherBucher@feddit.de 1 year ago
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”