TechTakes

Seriously, I wanna know how much funds Google allocates to fight ad blockers just to come up with a working solution every odd month that then gets fixed by the uBlock community in hours.

To me the most baffling part is the devs. Like, someone has to be working on this? An honest-to-god software engineer is spending their life fighting windmills to harras more people with ads. This cannot be fulfilling work in any way, can it? Great, I'm putting a lot of work into circumventing uBlock and

1. if I win then people will be forced to watch ads, which quite directly makes our society worse to exist in,
2. I most likely won't win, and the month of work I put into this will be thwarted by some guy in a cellar pushing a small uBlock change 4h after my code goes live.

To be fine with that you have to be either a sociopath, or somehow completely compertmantilise the task and actively not think about the externalities... or be held at gunpoint. I mean, you're a fucking software developer, there are other jobs than Google! You could be doing literally anything else right now, up to and including herding goats, why the fuck would you willingly fight on the front of the Ad War on the side of the ads.

If I was working on YouTube and my boss told me that I had to figure out a way to thwart uBlock I'd just tell him no. If the choice was between doing that and quitting, I'd quit the same fucking day and get a job doing something real. I quite literally cannot imagine why you wouldn't do that, you got a job at GOOGLE, if you succeeded in their stupid recruitment process then you can find a job LITERALLY ANYWHERE ELSE the same fucking week you quit.

I've seen what effort goes into it at somewhere else, it's a lot

not sure I'd say it's unprofitable though, given just how goddamn much money google does make from its advertising monopoly. but I get what you meant with the conversion angle nonetheless