> It's crazy how far people will go to justify taking food off other people's plate.

We don't have to justify it. We simply don't want to see ads. That's the end of it. The second they insist on showing us ads despite our preferences, their software becomes malware and will be blocked.

And nobody is "taking" anything off anyone's plate. They're the ones sending us free stuff bundled with ads. We're just deleting the noise. Just like ripping ads out of magazines and throwing them away.

If you don’t watch the videos, then you won’t see the ads, no?

Yeah, but I'll watch the videos anyway. Because they're free, I'm not obligated to pay attention to ads and uBlock Origin gets rid of them.

Nothing is “free”

Sure it is. At no point does YouTube charge me any money before streaming any of their videos. They send it to my browser absolutely free of charge.

They do so hoping that I'm gonna look at the ads. I'm not obligated to make it happen.

> We don't have to justify it. We simply don't want to see ads. That's the end of it.

Replace "see ads" with "pay money." Pirates are thieves and content theft is piracy.

Exactly. Because you know what's better than paid shit ? Free shit. Especially if it contributes to me not showing ads _and_ costing Google. I am happy to steal your precious, endlessly reproducible bytes.

Nope. "Piracy" is just copyright infringement. It is literally just copying bits, no theft of any kind is occurring. The only loss here is the corporation's artificial monopoly rights which shouldn't even exist anyway.

I am genuinely concerned that you feel bad. But do you know how much money poor people pay to watch ads + all the scam ads they get (and unfortunately lose money). Seriously, test it. (I used to live in 3rd world and now use adblock)...

> Completely screw over small businesses and screw the content creators. On a venture capitalist forum

Then please try to screw VCs (not innocent people in developing world that want to see something for 1GB data per month and they lose so much money for ads). Sure please bill the VCs.

Yes, the hypocrisy is unreal.

Am I taking food off other people's plate when I manually skip ads in podcasts I'm listening to? Do people who change channels on TV when ads start steal? Is it theft to toss ad inserts from a newspaper straight into trash?

It's because modern advertising's purpose isn't to tell people about a product they already wanted but didn't know existed (which would be fine), it's to cause people to feel a sense of fear/loss/inadequacy that they previously didn't and then present the product as a solution, or associate a product with something people love in a manipulative way, because those types of ads are worlds more effective at driving sales. That's cancer capitalism and a lot of people with principles rightly refuse to be a part of it.

> modern advertising's purpose isn't to tell people about a product they already wanted but didn't know existed

Yes.

> it's to cause people to feel a sense of fear/loss/inadequacy that they previously didn't and then present the product as a solution

Maybe a bit.

But, these days I think the real reason is the corrupctive influence ad money buys. Major media platforms censor at the whim of their advertisers. Content providers also do so.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QAkQlZgnbUQ

Completely agree. I've seen websites delete whole pages and heavily censor remaining ones because somebody complained to Google that their sensibilities were offended. Advertisers should not have this power.