I don’t think the facts match the claim, but I completely agree with the sentiment.

For years, the ‘legit’ consumer has had to deal with ad interruptions and bad UI and service disruptions and having media removed from their library. Something that pirates don’t even have to think about. The music revolution that Jobs and Apple created with iTunes, which allowed people to just buy music and just own it and just use it however they want (no DRM) with an ease that made piracy look difficult and seem too risky to bother, never came for TV or movies or books or any other media category.

And now the streaming revolution has all but undone that progress as well. You don’t own anything, a company decides when you have or lose access to something, and even if you pay money for access you are still advertised to and your data is still sold off.

Ads you say?

I'll have to take your word for it...

Advertising needs to become as socially acceptable as smoking.

It indiscriminately pollutes whatever environment it’s conducted within, and causes secondary harm to non-participants by incentivising hoarding of PII in the cheapest and least secure manner.

Depends on the piracy site. If you go to some of the pirate streaming sites or the blogs that host tons of pirated software with 30 rapidgator links that die after a month (instead of just using a torrent like a normal sensible person trying to share a 2-30+gb file that is begging to be taken down) without Adblock it’s absolutely comical how many ads there are. Even with Adblock those are the sites that manage to still have ads because they’re on the cutting edge of sketchy shit. It’s like seeing a late 90s to early 2000s website with how much random bullshit is pasted everywhere

Despite that I’m pretty sure that Amazon, google, etc do far more nefarious shit behind the scenes in terms of tracking/fingerprinting you and collecting data to sell

Once ads are allowed into a platform they will ultimately be what destroys it eventually.

Might take a week or a decade. But the lust of that easy ad money will ruin the thing they were put there to fund in the end.

ublock origin. I don't care if some website dies. Whole internet is turning to shit anyways, just let it all burn

Whats a piracy site? Theres zero ads in the search window on qbittorrent…

Much like the twenty minutes of unskippable ads on commercial DVDs, the media companies and social media will enshittify until the general public turns to piracy.

Essentially, the sooner we all come to terms with piracy being ~~acceptable~~ necessary, the sooner they let off on their enshittification efforts.

And yet I see 0 ads in either of those sites.

Ad revenue is like Crack to corporations. Once they get a taste for it, it's all downhill from there.

Mostly because it's the easiest money they'll ever make and it's more profitable than subscription models. Gotta see those numbers go up at all costs.

Corporations like google and amazon damage the market and the industry more than "piracy" does

I have legit never bought a single thing because I saw and ad for said product. I don’t know who is out here making these campaigns so profitable

Adblock my beloved

Not the way I use legit sites!

Jokes aside, I agree and I hate it

Besides streaming, i.e. the capability to watch the movies and series when you want and how much you want, and lowering the entry to produce videos for more people, they pretty much reinvented cable. Or did I miss something substantial?

You know I was just thinking this the other day, and they are just as intrusive as the ones that piracy sites have