I don’t feel like adressing every point seperately because I’m just slothing with my cat in my bed right now. I’ll just be rambling a bit.
Anyways. Yeah sure, Google is a bad company in many regards, I’m with you. Morals and ethics are about as subjective as it gets, so here’s my take on that. Just because some entity is morally in the wrong doesn’t justify my own actions, whatever they may be. What makes it fair to obtain goods and services from Google without paying the price? It’s quasi-stealing but I already brought that up before. If the Alphabet Corp. (Google and stuff) is so bad, then maybe you should avoid their products by principle.
I know in the grand scheme it doesn’t matter what I do. The odds of my actions actually doing anything at all are quite low. Where I’m from people used to say “somewhere a bag of rice tipped over”. It’s inconsequential. And I believe that’s true in everyday life but I also know it’s not true in the grand scheme. While I am an individual, I have to look at my actions as if they are not. It doesn’t matter if I burn through 100 gallons of petrol a day… but it does matter if we all do it.
So yes, I agree with you in each and every way. Except I somehow also don’t. It’s really hard to live by the same morals and ethics each and every day. Utilitarism sounds good… but not for everything, same goes for deontology. Many concepts in ethics are not compatible with eachother and I don’t think it’s “normal” to even strive to find your own morals.
Google may be bad, but their business model with YouTube specifically isn’t really all that evil. They maintain a well established, feature rich platform and people get to share their content on that site for free. A small percentage earns money or even gets to make a living through that. They also maintain said platform for advertisers with promises on how often their ads will be shown and how they will be placed, received and forced upon a user. In this instance it’s not entirely clear who the bad guy is. All of em, kind of.
I studied for a bit a few years back and we had a series of courses called “ethics for engineers”. It was mainly about figuring out what you get to do and what you have to do as an engineer of any kind in terms of ethics. Right now I’m wondering, would I really feel all that bad as a software engineer or whatnot at such a company? It really depends I guess. Sure, increasing the ad counter from 2 to 3 sucks for users. Yet they accept it in some way u know? If they didn’t accept, they wouldn’t stay on YouTube. Using YouTube is not something you are forced to, you could, at any time, just stop. So, if supplying more ads is really totally nessecary to have the platform be profitable (which, be honest, in some form or another, it must be), it’s morally sound. Would it really be better to let the platform die? I don’t belive so. I believe the platform kind of self regulates in a sense that it would just die off it they took any negative aspect too far.
I don’t know what they promise their content creators… this view might look completely different by the way.
So. Yeah. Dunno. I don’t think “cheating” YouTube by blocking ads or whatnot is all that fair. It’s still legal, though. Probably still better to stay away if you believe that they are such a bad company.