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Advertising is devastating to my well-being

briancarper.net

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Re: Advertising is devastating to my well-being

#81

Post by doron »

briancarper wrote: post #55
petercooper wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I looked at the ads on Ars briefly, both animated Flash ads, one for razor blades and the other I couldn't even tell what it was selling. I admit to being very emotional about this !?? Is this April 1st or will you next claim that the letters "g" and "x" upset you too? What about the number 283?

I am emotional about advertising in general, not those ads in particular. I am not frothing at the mouth over a single ad, no. Are you OK with a bunch of marketing guys sitting in an office thinking "How can we manipulate people's sex drives to maximize profit this week?" Razor commercials: Hunky guy shaves; heavily-airbrushed, scantily-clad woman looks on longingly. Implication: Buy our razors, get laid. Flashing li…

I share this sentiment completely, I like to have the freedom of being treated like an animal when I choose so alone.

Re: Advertising is devastating to my well-being

#82

Post by metamemetics »

natrius wrote: post #30
metamemetics wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

3rd party javascript ads hosted on ad servers should be blocked. The majority of them disrespect web site viewers, so it is a rational decision for web site viewers to block them. If a site is running ads that they don't mind being associated with and are worthy of reader's attention, they shouldnt mind hosting them directly from their webserver as content.

Inform sites which you enjoy of this opinion. If you don't, you're just reducing the probability of sites you like existing in the future, which is stupid.

I won't need to, technology will naturally evolve this way.

Sites will just make a simple technology switch and host ads from their own domain rather than from 3rd party ad servers in the same manner as they host content.

-The sites will make more money as there is no way to block the ads.

-The sites will make more money as they will not allow low click through spam.

-The viewers will have a more pleasant experience. The site will be less likely to host malicious ads, scams, and annoying attention grabbers on their own servers.

In conclusion, AdBlockers are a disruptive technology that are actually making the web a better place.

Re: Advertising is devastating to my well-being

#83

Post by barrkel »

kevinh wrote: post #2

As naive as this may make me sound, I think this attitude is hurting society. The idea that everyone is and should be trying to screw everyone else out of as much pleasure and profit as legal is, in my opinion, detrimental to society. When we stop doing things that don't negatively affect us much and help others, we've lost the benefits of altruism that helped our species evolve beyond the rest.

As many people love to point out, it's companies' fiduciary duty to screw people, impersonally, as much as possible. The distance and amenability to machine automation that technology adds makes it easier for customers to treat companies in a similar way.

What if the technology wasn't visible, wasn't in browsers, but instead was in our heads? What if we had a perfect ability to selectively filter out what we see and not let it affect us consciously, subconsciously or unconsciously? What if our awarenesses were so under our control that advertising could be scientifically proven to be useless?

Would this ability to focus our minds, free ourselves from distractions and pay deliberate attention only to what we willed, be morally or ethically wrong?

Re: Advertising is devastating to my well-being

#84

Post by jwhite »

njharman wrote: post #35
kevinh wrote: post #2

As naive as this may make me sound, I think this attitude is hurting society. The idea that everyone is and should be trying to screw everyone else out of as much pleasure and profit as legal is, in my opinion, detrimental to society. When we stop doing things that don't negatively affect us much and help others, we've lost the benefits of altruism that helped our species evolve beyond the rest.

Realize that that idea is capitalism* or at least the inevitable side-effect of capitalism . And that the altrusim idea is socialism . * as practiced in real life not some wanker's theoretical definition. PS it was probably selfishness and greed (combined with tribal "us vs them" so that (generally) you'll steal from the fuckers in next valley over but not your children) that helped our species destroy and/or exceed…

I highly recommend "The Red Queen" by Matt Ridley for a really interesting look at what might have caused our species to develop this way. It is not as simple as one might think.

Re: Advertising is devastating to my well-being

#85

Post by ShardPhoenix »

This discussion reminds me that the only site where I haven't minded the ads so much (and I think I might have even bought something from an ad there once), is Penny Arcade. The reason is that they carefully choose ad campaigns to be tasteful and only advertise stuff that they themselves consider worthy of purchase. I still don't like them enough to turn off adblock specifically for that site though, so I guess that counts as collateral damage.

Re: Advertising is devastating to my well-being

#86

Post by greghines »

doron wrote: post #80
Tichy wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I would feel differently about circumventing their block than about blocking ads. If they want to block me, I would accept it. Maybe there would always be people who "steal", but are they really so many that it would hurt?

I would consider subscribing to Ars technica if the offer me an ad free experience as well as their pdf formatting etc...

That's exactly what you get when you subscribe to Ars Technica:

http://arstechnica.com/subscriptions/

You also get full-text RSS feeds and the occasional bit of content exclusive to subscribers, as well as some other (less noteworthy) perks.

(Disclosure: I'm under contract with Ars Technica, working on a projected unrelated to any of this.)

Re: Advertising is devastating to my well-being

#87

Post by Groxx »

Tichy wrote: post #71
Groxx wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, any CSS `display: none` trick does this. I've been using it for years in my own minor-tweaks, because hiding via CSS with a user stylesheet is easy compared to hacking something like AdBlock.

Not so sure, I guess browsers have become smarter. I don't think they generally load images that are invisible. At least I seem to remember having experienced that, don't remember the exact circumstances, though.

Looking at webkit's inspector, at least, they are still downloaded. At least with my use, but I've only ever hidden entire divs.

Re: Advertising is devastating to my well-being

#88

Post by jwhite »

briancarper wrote: post #55
petercooper wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I looked at the ads on Ars briefly, both animated Flash ads, one for razor blades and the other I couldn't even tell what it was selling. I admit to being very emotional about this !?? Is this April 1st or will you next claim that the letters "g" and "x" upset you too? What about the number 283?

I am emotional about advertising in general, not those ads in particular. I am not frothing at the mouth over a single ad, no. Are you OK with a bunch of marketing guys sitting in an office thinking "How can we manipulate people's sex drives to maximize profit this week?" Razor commercials: Hunky guy shaves; heavily-airbrushed, scantily-clad woman looks on longingly. Implication: Buy our razors, get laid. Flashing li…

I agree with your sentiments about advertising. I haven't had a TV in my house for five years, mainly for that reason. When I go to my parents' house and watch TV ads there, I find them ridiculous and wonder how anyone could take them seriously. Then I realize that most people watching them don't even notice, so their brains must be somehow conditioned by watching them. That's the part that disturbs me the most.

I don't agree with everything in your blog post, though it was an interesting read, thank you. Specifically, I don't run an adblocker, but for most sites I don't seem to even notice the ads. I'm not sure if that's because I'm conditioned to see them as normal, or because I'm just not seeing them. I would hazard a guess that their impact is much less than TV ads though.

Regardless, I do sympathize with people who run websites that offer useful information or services, but don't have a viable revenue model that doesn't involve ads. I get a lot of value from these sorts of sites (for instance, the sites of open source software projects), but there are too many of them for me to want to pay a subscription to all of them. (Perhaps there's an opportunity there?) However, most of these sites that I get the most value out of are not about screwing money out of people, just paying for their hosting costs.

To compare this with TV, I generally don't want what's on TV, even if I can download it for free, but I do want the content on many of the sites supported by advertising. For the moment, I see it as a fair trade.

EDIT: Clarify last sentence of third paragraph.

Re: Advertising is devastating to my well-being

#89

Post by sp332 »

Tichy wrote: post #75
Groxx wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ars just did this, apparently. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1171927 Some people whitelisted, some subscribed, some boycotted. Besides, at best , you can only make it hard to hide ads / content. If data is transferred, data can be manipulated, and data can be ignored. I'd suppose the end-state of adblockers is something that does a rendered-page analysis to detect content, rather than looking at code / origin o…

Personally I would feel differently about circumventing their block than about blocking ads. If they want to block me, I would accept it. Maybe there would always be people who "steal", but are they really so many that it would hurt?

You know how easy it is to install and use Adblock for Firefox? That's how easy it would be for most people to use the anti-anti-Adblock extension that someone would write within a week.

Re: Advertising is devastating to my well-being

#90

Post by bobbyi »

dandelany wrote: post #43
Tichy wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a little bit silly. By not watching ads, I am screwing somebody? How about by watching ads I screw the people who paid for the ads, as there is no way those ads would affect me in a positive way? I don't see how one is worse than the other. If a web site asks people who hate ads to watch ads, they are screwing the people who pay for the ads. They should be thankful for ad blockers, because at least they preve…

> This is a little bit silly. By not watching ads, I am screwing somebody? Yes. As Ars said explicitly in their post, every time you choose to block the rendering of an ad on their page, their ad provider does not count the impression, and they do not get paid anything. So yes, you're directly screwing Ars by costing them money, denying them revenue, and nullifying their business model. > If a web site asks people wh…

Am I screwing PBS if I watch one of their programs and don't give a donation?
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