Until this very moment google has considered the wisest move to be trying to keep all potential users on their platform, and it's arguably part of why they have maintained such dominance. It has always depended on network effects and the nearly uncompensated efforts of creators.

They have been getting greedier and greedier under the relentless quarter over quarter pressure to grow. Now we have mandatory ads on all videos, including non-monetized ones, and creaters who made the mistake of trusting youtube are systemtically defrauded through arbitrary demonetization.

I certainly feel no obligation to pay tithes to google.

Paying for what you use isn’t tithing. It’s straight up capitalism – if you don’t like it, don’t take the deal. It’s completely optional and you’ll probably be better off for it given how many people describe their YouTube usage as an addiction.

Surely the corollary to this is users monetizing their data? Or is it just Youtube allowed to freely extract whatever value they feel like?

That’s what’s happening: YouTube offers things people want which cost money to produce and host, while users pay for those costs either directly (Premium) or by selling their attention and activity data to a middleman (Google).

Understanding that is key to understanding why ad blocker users complaining about being blocked is unreasonable. If you don’t like the terms of a deal, you can ethically walk away from it but not decide you don’t want to pay. If you prefer to mooch, sure, it’s not a huge crime but you don’t have any standing to complain, either.

Here’s another line of thought: YT could have straddled P2P tech and hosting directly (premium 4K offerings etc.). But Google wants all the content and all the control. The world’s video library is controlled by one corporation. They could farm the cost to peer tech but they won’t. So fuck them, I’ll circumnavigate my way into the library to watch some guy in his shed work on his hobby who isn’t begging for likes and subs.

And if I did pay? Google will still be logging my data. So fuck them once again.

Sure, nobody says you have to like them any more than you have to like every restaurant in town. The solution in both cases is not to give them your business – not complain when they refuse to give you freebies.

It's not even capitalism. Socialism definitely involves paying for services rendered. Exchanging something for something else is a basic building block of human society.

It's important to remember that piracy and theft are also capitalist practices. Companies routinely break the law and do unethical things, and consider it a sucess as long as money was made overall. Yet there is somehow this sense that individual consumers MUST play by the unfair rules often set up by these monopolies themselves. The incredible asymmetry in how copyright law is abused is an example. These companies deserve the same level of contempt they show their users.

Nobody is saying consumers MUST do anything. YouTube is not oxygen, if you don’t like it you can live a perfectly full and rich life without it.

Are healthy competition and multiple good options for consumers benefits of capitalism? If so, then this ain't capitalism.

What I mean is people often tout the merits of capitalism while ignoring that the merits aren't actually happening.

The definition of "customers" has shifted in the ad-supported tech world. There's nothing inherently wrong with that model when it's unobtrusive and useful ads; It's when they get overly aggressive with the advertising that it drives people to block, IMO.

Also there's a pattern in the industry of introducing ads (or "promotions" to get around legalese) to "ad-free" subscriptions once they have sufficient lock-in.

My point is simply that Google is providing something which costs money to produce. They offer two ways to pay for it but someone who rejects both of them has no reason to expect Google to subsidize their activity – it’s like whining that the concert hall closed the window you used to camp out at for free music.

Customer is generally whoever is giving you money. With YouTube ads it's advertiser with the viewer being a second customer as the viewer gives YouTube the attention/click through. That falls apart if the user refuses to engage in that transaction

I'm pretty sure that the ethics of interacting with the likes of Youtube or Google are a fair bit more complex than you're giving it credit for, but I'm also pretty sure that this isn't the platform for that debate. Suffice it to say that as others have pointed out the definition of "customer" in the world of data brokers and advertising has become a lot less meaningful.

It’s not complicated unless you’re trying to avoid honoring the terms of the deal. YouTube is a completely optional service – you can use it with ads or pay not to have ads, that’s it. If you don’t like it, don’t use the service – and that goes a thousand times over for privacy concerns since there’s no way to avoid giving Google your activity data unless you don’t use their service.

What deal? I didn't make a deal with Youtube.

You did when you used their service under the offered terms. You might not like them but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a legal relationship.

When someone wants to sell me apples, I can pay for them or choose not to buy them. That's capitalism.

But if someone hands me apples for free, they really can't force me to study the ads on the wrapping paper, can they? I have never signed anywhere that I agree to this 'deal'. That's not how capitalism works as far as I understand it.

And their terms aren't legally enforceable.

Where I live adblockers are legal. When I access YT with Firefox and uBlock Origin it's legal for me to filter YTs datastream how I want to.

If this was a capitalistic transaction of goods, I would have to login to use their service. I would have to agree to some kind of legally binding contract. I would first have to pay, and could then use their product or service. But all that isn't necessary to watch videos on YT.

There is no legally binding 'deal' between YT and me.

YouTube never handed you apples, you went there and asked for them because you didn’t want to pay for apples directly and they had a sign up saying “apples are free for ad watchers”.

> There is no legally binding 'deal' between YT and me.

It’s at the bottom of every page. Your continued use of their service is subject to their terms of service, and they are free to block you if you don’t follow the deal you accepted.

At a fundamental level the HTTP protocol is a negotiation, where the client asks (on behalf of the user) for a file from a server, and the server decides (on behalf of the site owner) if it sends the file. HTTP provides plenty of error codes to deny that request. 403 or 451 come to mind. The server sending the file implies that it is OK with my use of the file.

If the server sends a file that's on the server. A license agreement hosted on a server that needs to be accessed in order to read it doesn't change that. Reminds me of Hitchhiker's Guide:

>“But the plans were on display…”

>“On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.”

>“That’s the display department.”

>“With a flashlight.”

>“Ah, well, the lights had probably gone.”

>“So had the stairs.”

>“But look, you found the notice, didn’t you?”

>“Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.”

I suggest reading more carefully - I like Douglas Adams too but that’s irrelevant to the situation here. People are whining about Google’s servers not returning the content they want when they’re detected as using an ad blocker.