Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

If you can't see past someone's spelling mistakes then your credibility is the one I think is in question. Just ask me to fix it if the meaning is unclear or ambiguous instead of attacking my credibility(pot kettle black). Perhaps I did make some spelling mistakes, but do you know if english is even my first or third language?

It's interesting that you both tell me not to connect one issue and also its downstream effects, but then turn around and say that my argument lacks nuance(if that's a fair summary of your response, as I take it to be)

I'm saying that calling adblocking piracy has downstream effects that complicate the larger issue of the enshitification of the internet in general, and you want to boil things down to a simple binary of circumvention, i assume. But I reject the statement that adblockers are piracy without explanation.

So please, explain it so that the basis for this opinion can be understood instead of simply repeating it. What is it that makes adblocking equate to piracy in your opinion?

I'm passionate about this. I see it very much like a repeat of introducing micro transactions in the form of DLC into gaming which ruined gaming for me and many other people. Enshitification seems rampant these day. I believe that ive seen it in action before and that im seeing it again with this idea that adblocking is piracy.

Those too poor to afford to pay don't deserve to have access to it anyway, right?

Those too poor to afford to pay get it for free, comrade.

I feel like a lot of people are wholly unaware of FOSS. But anyway my free market idea would require consent, for example a pop-up that says "would you like to pay $0.30 or watch an 8 second ad to view the content?" and then people could make their choice. If their choice is neither then they will go somewhere else for the information or entertainment. Consent is absent from the current model, aside from using an ad blocker to signal your refusal.

There are tons of videos (educational and otherwise) on youtube that have never paid out to their creators, either because they were from the era before youtube enshittified or because the algorithm decided that the content creator has earned nothing. It reminds me of the old argument that "you shouldn't pirate music because it's not fair to the artist" but man you've got to see those record contracts, especially those made to black or otherwise underprivileged artists. Being fair to the artist was never an imperative, but this argument still persists with people who identify themselves with their jailers, or who actually don't really care that much (not saying that in a bad way).

Humans by nature are creative and helpful. We will always make how-to videos, guides, music, stories, and art. We don't need megacorps to facilitate this, it's the megacorps that want in, and they're going to have to come up with a better business model.

No. Making a claim that adblocking is a form of piracy does not in any way say that either piracy nor adblocking is immoral. Only if they actually make a claim that piracy is immoral can it be transferred like that.

You also seem to make the claim that anyone equating adblocking and piracy are speaking against them. Why are you making such a claim?

Also *it's, *didn't. It's not that hard.

I didn't even think of the ads when writing that, but damn that's probably the worst part of it all! Thank you for adding that major detail, clearly my very minimal usage of most of those launchers was showing lol

Is piracy not inclusive of subverting the means for a producer to profit off of a product when using that product?

Not really. Most people who "pirate" games or media wouldn't have paid for them anyway.

As Gabe Newell said (and demonstrated with Steam), "piracy" is a service problem.

Give people an affordable and more convenient way of accessing said games or media (Steam, Spotify before it got enshittified, Netflix before it got enshittified and the market got fragmented beyond any reasonable usability), and we'll happily stop "pirating".

If anything, "piracy" increases profits. Neil Gaiman compared it to word of mouth, or sharing your copy of a book with a friend: people in markets his books had trouble reaching (again, a service problem) "pirated" his books, liked them, and shared them with others... increasing his sales in said markets (people liked his work enough to try to find the books and buy them, and many who would have never heard of him became paying fans).

"Piracy" is free marketing (of course, this doesn't work if your product isn't worth its price, but bad products not earning money is a good way to improve overall quality), not theft. And without all the inconveniences of paid marketing. And often it's a symptom that the way you're selling your content is too inconvenient or overpriced for at least a fraction of your potential consumers, and thus needs to be fixed or improved (either voluntarily or through regulation).

It's gotten to such an extreme that some websites are nothing more than ad delivery mechanisms under the concept that "ads allow us to provide you quality content for free", which, under the hood, is just a shitty business model that doesn't work for consumers. I've seen websites that literally copy paste the content 2 or 3 times to extend the word count and have nonsensicle, out of order sentences that don't contain any information. There are also websites that have incorrect information, which are also published with the sole purpose of serving ads to generate revenue, which imo is worse. Just another way that capitalism is making our world more shitty.