Re:Vanced: YouTube adblocker for Android
by kelnos on Wednesday February 23, 2022 @02:56PM
(#30445557)
I believe all advertising is emotional and mental manipulation, and I feel it is unethical to subject people to that.
Targeted ads are a) that same manipulation but on steroids, and b) the result of privacy-damaging, pervasive, surveillance capitalism. I am against these things as a matter of principle.
For the record, I do pay for YouTube Premium, as well as the ad-free Hulu plan (rather than the ad-supported plan), etc. If I am given the option to pay to remove ads, for a price I consider reasonable based on the value I get, I will pay it. Most websites, however, either do not present this option at all, or require something ridiculous like a $20/mo subscription when the perceived value I get from it is an order of magnitude lower.
I recently clicked a link to an article at The Guardian, and, in their bid for donations, told me that this was the 18th article I've read in the past year. I wish more sites would do this, but I believe that my consumption of any particular news source is similar to that. I am certainly not going to pay for a double-digit monthly subscription for any site where I read just 2 (or even 5 or 10) articles per month; that does not feel like a fair exchange to me. I would be fine paying for articles a la carte (say, 5 or 10 cents each), but of course micropayments seems to be a dead concept these days (for reasons I understand and sympathize with).
Targeted ads are a) that same manipulation but on steroids, and b) the result of privacy-damaging, pervasive, surveillance capitalism. I am against these things as a matter of principle.
For the record, I do pay for YouTube Premium, as well as the ad-free Hulu plan (rather than the ad-supported plan), etc. If I am given the option to pay to remove ads, for a price I consider reasonable based on the value I get, I will pay it. Most websites, however, either do not present this option at all, or require something ridiculous like a $20/mo subscription when the perceived value I get from it is an order of magnitude lower.
I recently clicked a link to an article at The Guardian, and, in their bid for donations, told me that this was the 18th article I've read in the past year. I wish more sites would do this, but I believe that my consumption of any particular news source is similar to that. I am certainly not going to pay for a double-digit monthly subscription for any site where I read just 2 (or even 5 or 10) articles per month; that does not feel like a fair exchange to me. I would be fine paying for articles a la carte (say, 5 or 10 cents each), but of course micropayments seems to be a dead concept these days (for reasons I understand and sympathize with).