Is using adblock the same as piracy?

[Stasi]

Just watching the Louis Rossman video and he's trying to give examples and starts mentioning limewire, kazaa and usenet love this fucking boomer, 90% of the viewers probably have no idea what he's talking about

 

[Maude Snew]

Feels so good to have people come around on Linus I've been saying he's a fucking idiot shill for years. I was done with his shit after two of his way early videos, one where he mounted some network infrastructure in hard to reach places without even testing them first then bitched about how hard it was to fix his entirely preventable mistake, the other one where he got a dozen or so back then super expensive SSD and made a video of putting those in RAID0 because that's a useful application that lots of people will actually do and use for real since cost is not a factor for anybody.

And it's not like any of his videos are every useful it's always dumb shit done in a dumb way, he's not a Rossmann who has legit good information and when I look something up it's never a Linus video, it's some small hundred subscriber channel that has the legit good info and will tell me how to get shit done. Not to mention I had to tell Youtube like ten times not to show me this pissbaby's content anymore for it to stick.

Seriously, fuck this guy even though he's just a symptom of an industry that's more cancer than healthy tissue at this point.

 

[Slav Power]

Just watching the Louis Rossman video and he's trying to give examples and starts mentioning limewire, kazaa and usenet love this fucking boomer, 90% of the viewers probably have no idea what he's talking about

The ones I remember my sister using back in the day are BearShare and Ares. Some time later in 2013 I've learned how to torrent stuff, and the rest is history.

 

[Fomo Hoire]

Maybe I misunderstand how ad blockers work then, I thought they didn't get income from ad blocker users?

I use ad blockers btw, I just don't really care

If you're big enough, you can monetize even viewers who use adblock, but it happens at the native advertising and sponsored content levels instead of the adsense level. For those deals, what matters is the content virws/impressions instead of the number of adrolls you get.

That's why shitty blog journalists make huge networks, so they can pool their views together and say they have an astounding number of aggregate views in their network. Appearently there's some dubious stuff where random unknown blogs sell the rights to claim their views to the main networks, so advertisers really have no idea what they're paying for.

If you really want to deprive someone of their income, archive pages without visiting them yourself and only share those archives.

One kind of interesting thing is that MSM will claim that ad blockers are piracy and archives are piracy, but usually archives will preserve the ads too. I guess you're pirating the ad, because they don't get paid, even if you still have to see it. lol.

 

[Equivocal_Iki]

If you're big enough, you can monetize even viewers who use adblock, but it happens at the native advertising and sponsored content levels instead of the adsense level. For those deals, what matters is the content virws/impressions instead of the number of adrolls you get.

Sponsorblock says hi.

 

[Fomo Hoire]

Sponsorblock says hi.

I got it already, but I'm mostly aware of the phenomena for articles which sadly needs regular old archive.fo.

For YouTube specifically I'm actually a little curious... I think the YouTuber can see metrics for when people usually exit out of their video. I wonder if sponsors can demand and use that data to get actual view counts including the sponsorblock effect. I'd love it if it could actually fuck with videos more than regular archives affect articles.

Such a shame that making off-site archives puts those skipped segments back.

 

[Equivocal_Iki]

Such a shame that making off-site archives puts those skipped segments back.

I heard youtube-dl has a sponsorblock mod but I never used it.

 

[Seasoned News Reporter]

I heard youtube-dl has a sponsorblock mod but I never used it.

That would be the fork of youtube dl known as yt-dlp. Regular youtube dl is slow as hit now & doesn't have sponsor block.

 

[Pee Cola]

This sums up all out of touch Youtube "stars". Fuck this guy and his annoying content that the minions are spamming everywhere.[/ATTACH]

LTT is the reason I installed BlockTube. For some reason, YT kept ignoring my "Don't recommend channel" links for LTT videos. Whilst they were no longer on my front page, his shitty videos started polluting the suggestions that come up on the right hand side whilst watching videos.

And this is the greatest anti-piracy measure. Don't make it so that pirates cannot get your shit for free, make it so that they don't need to, because you offer a much better deal.

Whilst I haven't completely abandoned music piracy, Spotify has greatly reduced my need to do so. These days, the only music I pirate is the stuff that's not carried by Spotify. That said, the behaviour of some artists/labels doesn't fill me with confidence. Not so much stuff like Neil Young pulling his tracks because he's butthurt about Joe Rogan, but the tendency for the occasional track here and there to disappear without notice.

 

[Retink]

Here's my hot retarded take, ad block is a form of piracy because businesses set up their content to be monetized by means of advertising and subverting that advertisement while still taking the content is similar enough to piracy. That being said, you shouldn't sperg out and demand people disable that pesky ad block or whatever, rather you should ask yourself why so much of your community uses it and how you can better adapt your business monetization plan if it's really hurting your bottom line. Bitching about using ad block is also somewhat like record companies trying to sue teenagers for millions for using Napster instead of figuring out how to build your own itunes or whatever record companies do now to make money.

You should also consider how advertisement is one of the most vulnerable means of monetization, not only because of ad blocking, but also because you're completely beholden to the whims of those advertising as many youtubers found out during the multiple adpocalypses.

 

[Hijaboholic]

The answer is one word: No. By that logic disabling java script to bypass online news paywalls is piracy, which you should always do to give sites that do that the finger.

 

[Pissmaster]

Feels so good to have people come around on Linus I've been saying he's a fucking idiot shill for years. I was done with his shit after two of his way early videos, one where he mounted some network infrastructure in hard to reach places without even testing them first then bitched about how hard it was to fix his entirely preventable mistake, the other one where he got a dozen or so back then super expensive SSD and made a video of putting those in RAID0 because that's a useful application that lots of people will actually do and use for real since cost is not a factor for anybody.

And it's not like any of his videos are every useful it's always dumb shit done in a dumb way, he's not a Rossmann who has legit good information and when I look something up it's never a Linus video, it's some small hundred subscriber channel that has the legit good info and will tell me how to get shit done. Not to mention I had to tell Youtube like ten times not to show me this pissbaby's content anymore for it to stick.

Seriously, fuck this guy even though he's just a symptom of an industry that's more cancer than healthy tissue at this point.

I'll admit, I've had a soft spot for Linus for a long time, as he was one of the few guys who discussed tech that didn't go all Trump Derangement Syndrome back in '16. But if all of that shit happened right now, I'm sure we'd never hear the end of it. He's noticeably going downhill.

Though I did unsub from him a long time ago now, from just getting sick of seeing closeups of his screaming face in almost every thumbnail. I'll still listen to the WAN show occasionally, where he's as mellow as he ever gets, but there's still plenty of goofy random shit to clip throughout.

 

[Useful_Mistake]

Ads contribute to his income and behave as the fee for otherwise free content.

Do whatever you want, but I can't understand how people don't view this as piracy.

He puts out a free video, on a platform of his choosing. You watch that free video, without downloads or any illegal actions, on his chosen platform for free. He created a free product, and then complained that people used his free product. That's not piracy. Had he paywalled his content and you bypassed that, then yeah, that would be piracy.

 

[Pee Cola]

You should also consider how advertisement is one of the most vulnerable means of monetization, not only because of ad blocking, but also because you're completely beholden to the whims of those advertising as many youtubers found out during the multiple adpocalypses.

The thing is that Linus has plenty of other revenue streams. All LTT and LTT-adjacent content I've seen has some sort of ad integration, he makes money from Floatplane, he gets all this free shit from companies wanting him to shill their stuff and I'm pretty sure he does merch. About the only thing he doesn't have is a Patreon. He's obviously done OK from it, if the photo of him standing in front of his Ferrari parked out the front of his house is anything to go by.

For Linus of all people to cry poor over ad blocking says a lot about what Linus and the LTT network is really about.

He puts out a free video, on a platform of his choosing. You watch that free video, without downloads or any illegal actions, on his chosen platform for free. He created a free product, and then complained that people used his free product. That's not piracy. Had he paywalled his content and you bypassed that, then yeah, that would be piracy.

100% agree. For example, if someone took DankPods' patron-only after show and uploaded it to YouTube, that would be piracy. It would also be a colossal dick move on behalf of the uploader considering DankPods only asks $1 a month from his patrons.

 

[Seasoned News Reporter]

Ads contribute to his income and behave as the fee for otherwise free content.

Do whatever you want, but I can't understand how people don't view this as piracy.

Who gives a fuck about linus income. He has plenty of other income streams besides ads. He probably gets to keep half the free shit companies send him to shill which if he really wanted to he could sell that shit. It's also not piracy considering that youtube is a free platform, the content was never paywalled in any capacity to begin with & he willingly uploaded it himself. If he was so hard up about it he would make all his shit youtube red exclusive but he knows nobody is gonna watch it so this is all he can do is bitch. It's a youtube video by a shitty person who knows fuck all about technology, not new anime episodes.

For anybody who doesn't want to read the wall of autistic text the tl:dr to all of this is
"Nigga You Stupid"

 

[hooboy]

He puts out a free video, on a platform of his choosing. You watch that free video, without downloads or any illegal actions, on his chosen platform for free. He created a free product, and then complained that people used his free product. That's not piracy. Had he paywalled his content and you bypassed that, then yeah, that would be piracy.

The ads are the paywall though, it's free with the caveat that you watch the ads.

I don't really watch Linus, and I'm definitely not turning Ad Block off for him lol. Bitching and moaning about it is gay and retarded on his end, but it is effectively a mild form of piracy (even if it's not literally piracy)

Who gives a fuck about linus income.

not me tee hee

 

[Fomo Hoire]

100% agree. For example, if someone took DankPods' patron-only after show and uploaded it to YouTube, that would be piracy. It would also be a colossal dick move on behalf of the uploader considering DankPods only asks $1 a month from his patrons.

Dank's cool, he mentioned once that people tell him that his videos can be "pirated" because they're in public play lists, but he refuses to fix it because that's the easiest way to set things up for his supporters plus he feels like it would be hypocritical of him to be strict about it considering how poor he was when he started off. He also refuses to turn on ads so people will stick around for the Frank content.

That's not to say that people should go pirate his stuff just because he's chill. More like if you pirate from him when you have options, you're the asshole because he's actively trying to make the viewing experience pleasant for us.

His $1/month patrecon even comes with explicit permission to binge and cancel. He's really not asking for much.

 

[Useful_Mistake]

The ads are the paywall though, it's free with the caveat that you watch the ads.

Nope. I get access to the video for free. It's my choice to watch the video or not, or just to watch parts of it. There is no obligation, legaly or othervise, that makes me watch the ads. If he wants me to pay, put a paywall. He chose to make it free, and chose to put it on a platform where you can easily skip ads and sponsored segments. That's on him.

Question, how does this caveat work if Youtube just decides to not give you an ad to watch? That happens. Is Youtube forcing you to pirate then?

but it is effectively a mild form of piracy.

Not at all, not even morally.

 

[Sperghetti]

Adblocking occupies the same space as piracy for me in that they’re both things I simply do not care about the morality of, and trying to guilt trip people about it only makes me do it more, out of spite.

 

[Pee Cola]

Dank's cool, he mentioned once that people tell him that his videos can be "pirated" because they're in public play lists, but he refuses to fix it because that's the easiest way to set things up for his supporters plus he feels like it would be hypocritical of him to be strict about it considering how poor he was when he started off. He also refuses to turn on ads so people will stick around for the Frank content.

True, he's good people. So is Frank.

I don't even mind that his drum streams are on Floatplane, mainly because I didn't really watch them in the first place (no offense to the bloke, I just kept forgetting they were on). He has no other option ever since Twitch decided to be just as pozzed as YouTube wrt content matching and despite all my kvetching about Linus he's still significantly less bad than Jeff Bezos.