Alright, it’s been a while, but I’m impassioned.
I was just watching one of my favorite Heroes Of The Storm streamers cast a tournament, and they were pushing Raid: Shadow Legends (RSL) in their chat.
I objected but was shut down, as is typical of any streamer who doesn’t like what you have to say, but it’s bigger than that and I didn’t have the room in the chat to provide a whole lesson on the subject, so I decided to do so here.
Let me just say, that I truly and honestly respect this streamer, and I understand that they need to do what they need to do in order to survive. Part of me hopes they’re only supporting RSL for the sake of their existence, but there’s no way to know.
So here’s where I have a problem with that…
Lets say that you watch 100 YouTube or Twitch videos/streams in a month. Three videos a day isn’t unreasonable. I don’t use YouTube much, but my friends that do are sending me videos and links so often I can only imagine how many videos they watch. If you see more than three videos on YouTube a day, then these numbers barely scratch the surface of how much time you’re throwing away.
You can skip most YouTube ads after 5 seconds, so lets assume you see “RAID: SHADOW LEGENDS” for only 5 seconds at a time, three times a day.
I’ve been alive for 26 years, and watching YouTube for probably about 15, so let’s just go with 10 years for the sake of easy math.
You watch three videos a day, and get all RSL ads. You lose 15 seconds a day, not a big deal right? Well that’s called attention bias, and that’s how they get you. Because it’s such a small, insignificant amount of time, your memory and brain don’t even register the amount of time, yet it’s spent all the same.
For every 10 years that you’ve been watching videos, each year, you spend an hour and a half (assuming you’re able to skip at 5 sec), watching nonsense. Being subjected to advertisements for games that don’t actually have any depth of gameplay or lore.
That’s only for THREE videos a day. If you watch longer videos that have more than one ad, or say five videos, with double ads, this time increases to 5 hours a year.
Over a lifetime, you’ll spend multiple DAYS watching advertisements. You’ll lose time spent in your life, because of these predatory practices.
Lets say you continue this habit for years, and because they’re designed to keep you watching and clicking, you end up with 10 videos a day, with 10 seconds worth of ads.
That works out to 10 hours of ads a year, and say you’ve been alive for 75 years. You’ve been ROBBED of over a month of your life, from advertisements. Sure, this is “small” over the course of your life, but think about how much damage losing one month could do to you. You lose your graduation, your moms funeral, your wedding, your child being born. I know it isn’t temporally applicable like that, but if, IF, by chance the time that you lost caused you to miss even one of these, you’d know something wasn’t okay.
I really wanted to watch the streamer, and the games, but I couldn’t. My moral compass prevents me from abusing and wasting the lives of my fellow human beings.
Advertisements are evil. They are predatory and are a waste of human life. People who support companies that do this, cannot be good.
I’m sorry, but I can’t support the waste of human life. It’s important. We need people to make effective change. Ads destroy these people.
