Seriously this was very surprising. I’ve been experimenting with GrayJay since it was announced and I largely think it’s a pretty sweet app. I know there are concerns over how it isn’t “true open source” but it’s a hell of a lot more open than ReVanced. Plus, I like the general design and philosophy of the app.
I updated the YouTube backend recently and to my surprise and delight they had added support for SponsorBlock. However, when I went to enable it, it warned me “turning this on harms creators” and made me click a box before I could continue.
Bruh, you’re literally an ad-blocking YouTube frontend. What kind of mental gymnastics does it take to be facilitating ad-blocking and then at the same time shame the end-user for using an extension which simply automates seeking ahead in videos. Are you seriously gonna tell me that even without Sponsorblock, if I skip ahead past the sponsored ad read in a video, that I’m “harming the creator”?
Why do they have to prove that? You backed up the assertion that sponsorblock hurts creators with the mere unlikely possibility that sponsors might be able to see metrics, how does their single anecdotal bit of evidence that people using sponsorblock are the kinds of people that won’t click ads anyway not pass the same muster?
Admittedly they’re both bad evidence, so why are we treating yours as better?
I mean, sure, you can say I made a bad argument, I don’t entirely disagree given the context was originally about grayjay, but at this point I’m not even making my argument anymore I’m just trying to figure out why it seems to be a shared view. I want to understand, y’know?
And I don’t really think it’s fair to say my assertion was only backed up by that unlikely possibility, but I don’t fully stand behind my original argument in this context anymore anyway
People who use sponsorblock or other kinds of adblock are the kinds of people who get annoyed by watching ads. I suppose it’s possible some of those are short because the ads are working and they keep spending money, but in my experience and the experiences I’ve seen discussed elsewhere, it seems to generally be that they are annoyed because they’re not interested in what the ads are selling and wouldn’t be sold on them anyway.