It’s excellent that alternatives and ad blockers do exist but we need regulatory action to hold companies accountable for things that are designed to worsen user experience to pressure people into paying. It’s also a serious accessibility issue, to increasingly have everything be bright and loud and motion filled and unpausable all the time. This trend goes beyond YouTube and it sucks, we need to regulate this nonsense.
It’s pretty stupid to introduce ads on the pause screen. Usually I would pause something because I am either:
A) Being interrupted and need to focus on something else like a phone call or a family member talking to me, and wouldn’t be paying attention to the screen anyways.
B) Need to leave to go somewhere else like the fridge for a snack and wouldn’t be paying attention to the screen anyways.
Or
C) Just want to take a break and want to do something else which involves opening another window or program and wouldn’t be paying attention to the window with YouTube open.
In every scenario where I pause YouTube and add playing would not provide any value to the entity paying YouTube to play the ad.
And in every scenario, if an ad began playing when I pause youtube it would cause me to mute my sound and/or turn off my monitor and just cause me to get super annoyed at YouTube or at whatever product is being advertised and how to never buy it ever.
governments will not do anything that upsets the big companies like Google. Adblockers are are only defence against Google and others.
Actually, good news, they have! Google just lost its search monopoly trial with the US government, and they seem to be about to lose their advertising monopoly trial too. The US FTC also just released a report (not a legal action) concluding that all the big companies have abused data collection and recommended that the government do something to make those practices unprofitable for companies. I know the EU has also been doing some significant stuff, both against apple specifically and big gatekeeper companies generally. You can certainly argue it’s not enough, and I would agree with you - but it’s given me some optimism that more action and real enforcement might be in the near future in many countries.
What a weird downslope of a take that will obviously result in authoritarian government power expansion and futher censorship.
Just stop using it and support alternatives that dont do it. Have some self control.
People always say shit like this as if people don’t have a multitude of different life circumstances that affect and coerce how they interact with technology. That’s just how capitalism works. It’s not a matter of willpower. Privacy Bootstraps Theory is unhelpful. Being able to completely opt out of entrenched tech monopolies is a privilege. It’s great that you can do that, not everybody can.
