this post was submitted on 30 Dec 2025
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[stands on soap box]
Advertisment is theft.
It is theft of my time and attention, the neurons that have to fire for my brain to process the message and then mentally bin the thought. I value the messages of people trying to sell me things so little, I would request they pay me to sit through their drivil. I have only so many hours on the moist spinning mud ball we call earth that I wish 0% of it being told to buy things.
Back in the day, when the internet was wild and free, advertisment online was a means of allowing hosts and websites to keep the lights on becore e-commerce had its sea legs, and that was the social agreement. Your site hosts ads, I get access to the site, captialism still happened, but it was simple. Then ads loaded by third party sources were not vetted by the trusted site you were visiting and became a vector for malware.
Now, you had ad and ad-free tiers of paid services, you pay your cable bill to watch 22 min. of content every block, 26% of the content on cable is not the content your paying for. Its sick, and now its infested the digital social spaces where people just make the infomericals at home in exchange for free stuff further poisioning the well of trust for interacting online.
[/Gets down from soapbox]
Sorry, I hate ads, moreso that most, but on the level amongst this crowd. To quote the great Miracle Max from the Princess Bride (RIP Rob Reiner) "Life is pain highness. Anyone who says otherwise is selling something"
Are you yourself a thief for using things like YouTube videos for free?
What do you think it is now...?
I mean, obviously, corporate greed turns all of this up to 11, because if it doesn't the shareholders are sad and the CEO gets sacked, but ultimately, it's the exact same social agreement - you get to watch or read content without paying for it, and in exchange, you get to watch ads.
NOTE: I don't do cable TV, so don't know anything about that. I'm talking specifically about the Internet.
To the previous poster's point, internet ads have evolved away from 'paying the bills' and more towards 'harvesting and selling your data'. It's made to be as invasive as possible now because they want your data, whereas before it was much easier to ignore or filter out. And it's everywhere, from websites to mobile apps.
To your example, the amount of money youtube(well, google) has spent on trying to beat adblockers could make the service free for everyone and keep the lights on...but it makes more money to sell your data instead, so they try to shove more ads in. That's also not counting the amount of paid research that goes into 'what advertising is effective', or 'how many ads is too many', stuff like that. Not nearly as much thought was put into them in the early days.