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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   8100 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 19, 2026

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They are not technical people and don't understand this well.

When I block an annoying ad on twitter for Israeli hostage funding or something, it tells me that I can remove all ads by subscribing to premium. People don't get that?

They don't trust the company to be honest with them when they claim "this will get rid of the ads". The company can take it back at any time.

...And then I don't pay them the next month.

The company probably won't price the ad-free version in a way proportional to the difference in value. If they make 10 cents from you on ads, the price of the ad-free version may still be 20 dollars more, because they also like to do market segmentation and overcharge less price sensitive people.

What socialist powderpuff world do we live in where the profit a corporation makes has to be proportional to their costs rather than proportional to the value the customer puts on the service?

Of course this is a catch-22--if the customers don't buy the ad-free version you will claim the customers don't mind ads, but if they do buy it you will say that the market is obviously working and therefore there is no need to get rid of ads.

What catch-22? This is good price discrimination, every customer gets what they want at a price they can afford.

That's the newspaper industry breaking down, not the advertising model specifically.

"That's not the industry breaking down, just its entire revenue model. Surely the industry won't be impacted by the loss of the majority of its revenue!

In the 1950s the New York Times made 70-80% of its revenue from advertising, today it is just 20%. You think that has nothing to do with the decline of newspaper journalism?

So I am someone who hates ads, and I use adblock on my main browser. However, I like to watch YouTube on my TV, which means I get ads.

I despise these ads, and wish I could make them go away; however, I have a fundamental dislike of paying for people to unshittify their services. There are a few reasons why:

  1. I find it encourages people to keep making things shittier in exchange for more money (see Netflix adding an "ad-supported" tier). If I've already expressed that I'm willing to pay them to undo their damage, they can damage it in new and inventive ways in order to extract more money from me. Following that logic, most things with ads get gradually shittier over time as more of their revenue comes from said ads. I'm willing to see an ad on the sidebar when I read a news story; what I don't like is when they have an ad in the sidebar, an ad in the header, the content is broken up by ads, there's a giant video ad that takes over 40% of my screen, and when I go to click on something a random popup takes over my screen. Paying them to get rid of this rewards them for being garbage people. It doesn't help when I hate both parties in the transaction; some advertisements are so incredibly annoying that I want to inflict real violence against the person who made them (thinking of you, IE10).
  2. There are a lot of things I'll use once in a while, as opposed to every day; like, if I'm reading a wiki for a video game I'm playing, or I'm reading some news articles, that may be the only time I engage with that particular system. I'm not willing to pay $10.99 to remove that when I'm going to stop caring 3 days later (especially when it involves getting out my credit card, entering it into some shady payment system that may decide to make it impossible to cancel, etc.)

(I feel like I should include a #3 there, but oh well).

In addition, I find that advertising is very much a thing where more of it makes it shittier for everyone. Like, there are a lot of services where I'm price sensitive, but the quality of the thing is not going to matter much. Take Uber vs Lyft vs a taxi - if all 3 of them are going to cost me approximately the same, take the same amount of time to show up, then I don't really care which of the 3 I get. However, if Uber is aggressively advertising, they're going to show up first when I google "taxi (my city)", which means that Lyft and the taxi services are going to have to pay to advertise, which means all 3 of them have to raise their rates to pay for advertising.

I don't think it's realistic to ban them; however, I'd be in favour of having a national vote for the most annoying ad of the year, and the person who made it being forbidden from ever going on the internet again (/s, probably).

Edit: I think one of the reasons that I find advertising so annoying is that it is inflicted upon me in a way that a lot of other stuff just isn't. Paying to not experience something is fundamentally irritating - it feels a lot like someone decided to make my day worse, and is requiring money to stop doing so. Like, if Apple or whatever made a deal with spam callers so that the "Hang Up" button on my phone is disabled unless I listen to their whole spiel, or pay them $20, I think most people would rightly decry this as insane.

However, I like to watch YouTube on my TV, which means I get ads.

I despise these ads, and wish I could make them go away; however, I have a fundamental dislike of paying for people to unshittify their services.

How would you like for Youtube to pay for the infrastructure around getting those videos to you? Who do you think should be paying to host, manage, and operate the service?

I mean, given that I go out of my way to not buy anything I see advertised to me, and I use adblock as much as possible outside of that, I'd say it's not me either way.

More seriously, I don't think it should be regulated out of existence; I was just opining that a lot of advertising is annoying as shit and if I could make it all go away with a sweep of a magic wand, I would.

Yes yes, it's very fun being a free rider. Convenient that there are still enough rubes that we can get away with it for a while.

But you object to advertising and you object to paying for youtube, but you like watching youtube. How do you think youtube should be funded?

I mean, ideally I'd be able to pay the individual channels that I like watching money, based on my usage, and have YouTube take some percentage of that.

Given that my only option though is to pay $13.99 directly to YouTube, I think I'll pass.

Many (most?) youtube channels have patreons where you can actually do that. Usually with extra perks.

That doesn't get rid of the advertisements on the video.

???

Does it not?

Watching videos on Patreon definitely gets rid of youtube adds. And the only creators I've ever followed on Patreon have Patreon cuts without internal adds. I guess there could be someone who doesn't edit out the adds in the Patreon version of their videos? But that would be a bit shit and I certainly wouldn't give them my money.

Is there a specific creator you're thinking of that has a Patreon with adds?

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