And to do all that, they need control.

Their stock price and shareholders are nobody's problem but theirs, none of that justifies in any way what they are doing. It's simply not acceptable to me that these people think they can decide what my computer does and doesn't display, much less what goes into my mind. Every single ad they send me gets deleted. I won't even see them because they will get filtered by uBlock Origin. They are not entitled to my attention, it is not for sale and it most definitely is not the payment for whatever content they're sending me for free. They sent me the content hoping I would look at ads but that hope failed, they need to accept that and move on, not try to destroy open source projects and own my machine so that it becomes impossible to not look at ads.

It does justify what they are doing for their shareholders, which they’re legally beholden to.

I’m not debating wether it’s moral or ethical, but if you were in their shoes trying to juice revenue to increase the value of your equity, you’d either charge a monthly fee for users to remove ads or fight like hell against people who are trying to download videos without ads.

That’s exactly what YouTube is doing.

FWIW, I can’t stand ads and I think it’s complete bullshit that they’re suing to take down youtube-dl, but they’re acting complete rational for the incentives they’re optimizing for. The problem is that optimization is at odds with users like ourselves.

This is just a conjecture, but I suspect that the number of people using YouTube DL is a tiny fraction of those using YouTube proper. Like less than 1%. The potential for revenue recovery here is tiny. And the corporate execs are surely aware that most people who use YouTube DL are likely running adblock. So I disagree that this is about revenue and support the notion that this is about control and sending a message.

This is about whether it's moral and ethical though. You can maximize revenue selling drugs, it's a quite effective method I might add. Nobody considers that acceptable.

I think copyright, advertising and surveillance capitalism are completely unacceptable practices that ought to be banned straight up. They are directly and indirectly responsible for everything that's ruining computer and internet freedom today. If we can't ban them, we should all be aiming to minimize their revenue so that they cease and desist on their own. I'd rather have the entire copyright and advertising industries implode than cede control of my computer to them.

That's what's at stake here. Computing freedom. They need to own our computers in order to stop us from doing basic things like copying and deleting data. If we don't stop them, we will lose something I think is far more valuable than a bunch of industries. We will lose computing freedom.

I don’t see a lot of ads these days, but I do find it intriguing where this technology-economy disconnects go. It feels like the triad of freemium, ad-support revenue model and adblock is slowly causing obsolescence of currency-quantized measurement of value.

Maybe this is just me getting old, maybe this is just I finally realizing the obvious that is that currency was always proof of stake and never were value representations of goods. But kind of interesting and worrying.

It's not just about ads, it's also about marketing data and privacy: if people are able to watch a local copy whenever they want, they don't even know how often it's viewed, or by whom. (Unless they're watching on a TV that has automatic content recognition turned on.)

> they can't inject ads.

They totally can, just not at a moments notice. Putting a car ad into a car video-> works. Shoutout to sponsor -> works. Putting the scam ad of the day -> doesn't work (or needs some effort).

> Putting a car ad into a car video-> works. Shoutout to sponsor -> works.

If SponsorBlock is integrated into youtube-dl, then it no longer does.

I draw the line before SponsorBlock though. While they are repetitive and irritating after a while (if I was going to join skillshare I'd have done so some time ago, kindly bugger off, etc.):

* They do directly pay the people making the content

* That income can't be taken off them by the medium (youtube usually) deciding to demonetize the content

* YT isn't even taking a cut, in fact

* Those ad placements aren't trying to stalk me around the Internet and storing every tiny bit of information about me they can glean

* Sponsorship bit are usually there because they have at least some tentative relevance to the content and the people consuming it, without the need to stalk us as we travel around the Internet

At least until such time as the video carries like youtube start inserting ads directly into video streams, then I'll reconsider. I don't block ads to block ads: I block adds as a side effect of blocking stalking behaviours, wasted bandwidth from auto-playing video, 3rd party code on otherwise half-reputable sites trying to access my camera & mic, slowing my devices via poorly optimised animations, pop-ups that may interrupt other app use away from the browser, pop-unders too, battery drain from CPU use when mobile, being forced to interact because I can't just look around or scroll past as the ad is over the content, ... If the stalky inserts start to happen then I'll react by using sponsorblock or similar.

The good fork already has it. <https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp#sponsorblock-options>

I didn't know about that! This is awesome!