Earlier quoted context omitted.
>My point is, I don't think a lot of you are being totally honest when you say you'd be willing to pay if the site removed advertising. Well why would I do it if I don't have to? I'm happy to pay for Netflix because there are no ads and it's just a better more convenient product than torrenting is.
> Well why would I do it if I don't have to? You absolutely don't. But if you say, "I would pay you to get rid of ads", and then I get rid of them and you don't pay, that makes you a bit of a hypocrite, no?
Pale Moon blocks AdNauseam extension
181–190 of 263 posts
Re: Pale Moon blocks AdNauseam extension
#182Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, I'm sticking with fraudulent. The intent is to defraud. Even if you say there is no specific agreement, there's the morality issue. Your morals may allow you to essentially vandalize, mine do not. The agreement may not be written down, but I think it's covered in the 'don't be an ass' part of the social contract.
It's not on me that clicks are considered meaningful—that's the site owner's problem.
And no, I don't have anything that is ad supported. I dislike the tracking and security implications, but not enough to alter my morality. This is morally similar to vandalism, in my opinion.
If your okay with that, don't let me tell you how to live. I just can't justify harming people for something I can just block or ignore.
Re: Pale Moon blocks AdNauseam extension
#183Re: Pale Moon blocks AdNauseam extension
#184Re: Pale Moon blocks AdNauseam extension
#185Can't people just compile their own version sans-censorship?
I don't know about Pale Moon, but at least Firefox was well-known back in the day for being extremely resource-intensive to compile ( https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Developer_g... ) - I vaguely remember somebody talking about how they had to cross-compile to obtain the Raspberry Pi build, for instance. Either way, per the developer's post, you can in fact just flip an about:config switch to disable…
If you want the extension without flipping the about:config entry. You can open up the extension in something that can handle zip files, edit install.rdf, and change the extension id to something else. Of course that will need to be done for every update of said extension.
Re: Pale Moon blocks AdNauseam extension
#186I hear a lot of people in here saying, "Yay for AdNauseum, they are fixing the broken ad system! If sites start charging instead of ads, I'll totally pay!" Let me add a little perspective. A long time ago at reddit we launched reddit gold. At the time, one of the biggest benefits was that if you had gold you could turn off ads. This was in direct response to people saying, "I would rather pay you then use adblock". Y…
I somehow strongly doubt that if the current paradigm of ad based revenue were to disappear overnight, that no one would figure out something to take it's place and that the internet would become a barren wasteland devoid of content. As it is now, there is zero incentive for content developers to look for any other solution because the status quo is so ingrained in people's minds that we have just accepted it as "the way things are". This is very clearly starting to change, and so yes, there will be collateral damage in the mean time. But the Web that emerges from this change will be better for everyone involved.
Re: Pale Moon blocks AdNauseam extension
#187I hear a lot of people in here saying, "Yay for AdNauseum, they are fixing the broken ad system! If sites start charging instead of ads, I'll totally pay!" Let me add a little perspective. A long time ago at reddit we launched reddit gold. At the time, one of the biggest benefits was that if you had gold you could turn off ads. This was in direct response to people saying, "I would rather pay you then use adblock". Y…
Ad networks don't follow the same laws which all advertisement companies have to follow in all other form of media, so why should people have to pay in order to get rid of them? This is the wild wild west, and paying the bandits to go away is always a bad idea. What would happen if reddit had to use a ad network that vetted every single advertisement they displayed and took legal responsibility that local advertiseme…
First off, it's the target who wears the majority of the costs. Extra bandwidth to serve the ad, extra cpu/battery resources to display it, extra exposure to trackers and malicious js - all on the target.
Then there's the tracking. You don't just get shown an ad, your browser receives a huge payload of javascript intended to track your behavior on and off the site where the ad was shown. This allows large ad networks like Google to track you virtually everywhere you go online - the ads shown are almost irrelevant compared to the value derived from this data.
And finally, as parent post mentions, there's a complete lack of checks and balances. Anyone can advertise anything, which is why a huge portion of ads are for scams, and most of the remaining portion are for products and services that one cannot legally advertise on traditional media.
Given all of the above, I don't think it's at all unreasonable for consumers to block and continue blocking digital ads as long as it remains technologically possible. There is no legal recourse here - visiting a website doesn't imply consent to downloading and displaying that website how the owner wants.
There's this persistent sentiment of 'oh but if users continue blocking ads then these websites will go out of business'. Yeah? Then so be it. If their business model is only sustainable through fucking their users in the ass, and they will go out of business if consumers don't bend over, then they shouldn't exist in the first place. The internet was just fine before it was taken over by corporate interests, and it will continue being just fine if most of them stop operating there because they're can't monetize it. It's an information sharing platform, there was never a promise of it being a profit platform.
Re: Pale Moon blocks AdNauseam extension
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If you don't like the rules, you are welcome to not participate. Playing your ads in my browser is "the rules" now? If you want to claim it's "the rules", you need a paywall. Oh, you're not putting up a paywall? Fancy that. Do you offer legally enforceable indemnity against people getting malware from ads you serve? If not, then you can't really tell them not to block the ads.
We're talking about people who install a program to defraud advertisers. The complaint was, "we're sticking it to people who censor and use social control." "The rules" in this case are that censorship and social control (presumably) exist on the platform. If you don't like that, don't participate. But don't say, "OMG censorship" and use that to justify defrauding advertisers while continuing to use the free site tha…
Re: Pale Moon blocks AdNauseam extension
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think I said as much above. That most people don't get the same value that the advertisers do.
So, how much ad money does each user actually bring you? 5€ doesn’t seem like a realistic price. According to https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/6pxyvy/traffic_pag... , about half of your users are mobile users of the official app, which does not support ad blocking, so at least half of your entire userbase either pays for gold, or has ads. Official statistics you’ve published put reddit at a reach of 6% of US…
The population of the U.S. is about 320 million, including children and non internet users, so how can 6% of US internet users equate to over 234 million users?
Re: Pale Moon blocks AdNauseam extension
#190I hear a lot of people in here saying, "Yay for AdNauseum, they are fixing the broken ad system! If sites start charging instead of ads, I'll totally pay!" Let me add a little perspective. A long time ago at reddit we launched reddit gold. At the time, one of the biggest benefits was that if you had gold you could turn off ads. This was in direct response to people saying, "I would rather pay you then use adblock". Y…
reddit gold _has_ to be one of the better "replace ads with subscription" offerings out there. It's $2.50/mo which is far more reasonable than NYTimes' $9.99/month. Not that running a news organization is inexpensive. But I'm extremely skeptical that any one site is making $9.99/month off of my ad impressions.