Youtube's Anti-adblock is illegal in the EU

ugjka@lemmy.world to Technology@lemmy.world – 2293 points –
eupolicy.social
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Fine. We all agree ads sucks. But I struggle to understand why you people keep fighting against a company while simultaneously being apparently so addicted to their products. Just do yourself a favor and stop using it altogether.

Because they have a monopoly.

You're confusing a monopoly with the network effect.

Quasi-monopoly.

There are alternatives. Daily motion is still quite big, for example.

Get real, dude. YouTube is all about mass broadcasting to the widest audience available, not reliable playback and a lack of advertisement, not that Dailymotion has either.

YouTube has lots of competitors in the field of video content: Netflix et al, Twitch, TikTok, DailyMotion, Vimeo, PeerTube etc.

But they have a monopoly on specific content. If you search for a tutorial on how to take apart your specific toaster model, you'll probably only find that on YouTube. Or if you've watched a specific video creator for years and they only upload to YouTube. Or even if your colleague sends you a link to some dumb YouTube video, then you're not going to ask them for the title, so you can throw it into SepiaSearch.

If you're part of a younger generation, it's just not really an option to not use YouTube...

The "products" are not entirely YouTube's. They are more like a giant mall than a store. You can't just stop going to the mall because you don't like a policy they have because everyone else has set up shop in that mall. Unlike stores, if a mall didn't exist, most of the stores in the mall would just exist elsewhere. YouTube is not the product, they are the gatekeepers.

yeah but if the giant mall didn't exist than lots of those shops simply wouldn't have the foot traffic to keep open or exist in the first place.

lots of content creators are also uploading their stuff to paid services like Floatplane, Patreon, CuriosityStream or whatever, do you pay for those?

if not why don't we just stop pretending what this is about and be honest that you want a service of millions of videos for free and without ads and someone will pay for it? I guess?

I didn't really care about blocking ads until I started seeing midroll and unskippable ads. If that mall didn't exist, another one could've popped up with less aggressive policies. Sure, there are other malls now, but all my favorite stores are in this one.

and my favorite Ice-cream is ben and jerry's but only one store carries it now in my town, Guess I will have to go to that store to get it if I really want it, or just not get it, because you know, I am not exactly entitled to have ben and jerry's ice cream.

The entire point of this post is that Google felt entitled to violate your privacy by detecting your ad blocker. It's an arms race. If they are free to dictate their terms of service, we are free to dictate what gets displayed on our own computers.

I didn't say you aren't free to do that, but let's just stop pretending it's not pure entitlement that you do that, that you want youtube to be both free and ad-free.

Just do yourself a favor and stop using it altogether.

I would, if the people that make the videos would fucking move to another platform. Problem is Youtube has a monopoly, 99% of the viewerbase is on that website, it's borderline impossible to get any real traction outside of it.

We're not on YouTube because of the companie or its service, but for the people who create content on that platform. The problem is there isn't a viable alternative for either creator or consumer, which basically makes YouTube a monopoly.

What i mean that there a lot of interesting alternative on the internet, not necessarily in video format (which is often very time consuming/inefficient with respect to the actual content/time ratio).

Floatplane, CuriosityStream or Nebula or whaever, lots of channels have the same videos on their Patreon. why don't you use those?

oh right because they are paid services and you don't want that

I actually do use some of those. Having said that, it's not jus the consumers who have to use the alternatives, but also the creators. Like I said people are on YouTube for the content creators, not for YouTube itself. And the consumerbase on those alternatives is just too small to make them a VIABLE alternative. Hence why you see so many creators on nebula also on YouTube.

As much as I disagree with idea people are entitled to use youtube without compensation, you're strawmanning them. This isn't productive.

It's kind of like saying "if your country sucks so much, just leave"

Platforms aren't like gas stations, even if you get off a platform, the hostile choices a platform makes ripple through society

Watching a Youtube video here and there is not an addiction. Google has a monopoly in the area. I've switched from Chrome to Firefox, and use both Google and Yandex search, but I can't really switch away from Gmail, and if I want to watch e.g. a music video or some educational clip or interview, etc. etc. 99.9% of the time Youtube is the only place where I can do that.

I guess where you're coming from is the annoyance with the endless complaining about Twitter and reddit. But those two, while definitely unhealthily large and living off an addicted userbase, are still not in a position as monopolistic and as unavoidable as Youtube's.

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