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Adblocking people and non-adblocking people experience a different web

imlefthanded.com

131–140 of 844 posts

Re: Adblocking people and non-adblocking people experience a different web

#131
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In all fairness, if the rest of us didn't run adblockers, they probably wouldn't need to be so aggressive with the ads for those that currently don't.

You've put the cart ahead of the horse. Ad-blockers took off once they started throwing animated banners at us. Punch the monkey, win an ipod.

That's not really true. Youtube ads specifically were way way milder and rarer years ago when way less people used Adblock.

Re: Adblocking people and non-adblocking people experience a different web

#133
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Problem is once an ad blocker's in the loop, the ad architecture's dataflow is damaged and it'll have to run fallback content. So you'll get whatever's in the B-list of ads and that may be just two.

Yeah, google can circumvent the ad blocker's attempts to block the ad playback from beginning, but if the first thing the ad does is have double verify check if you're a bot, and double verify's domain is in your adblocker's list, then the ad is going to fail and Google will try load some other ad once it errors out.

> double verify check if you're a bot

I hate when they do this. I just leave and go somewhere else. I'm not submitting to Voight-Kampff just to see a LinkedIn profile.

Re: Adblocking people and non-adblocking people experience a different web

#134
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel zero guilt about ad blocking. There was some period of discussion on the subject back in like 2003 but the ad companies went to war against human civilization and there's been no going back. It corrupts and twists everything it touches into a constant hustle for eyeball-cash and an entire generation has now reached adulthood knowing nothing but that hustle touching every bit of media they ever interact with. W…

> I feel zero guilt about ad blocking. The amount of guilt I feel about ad blocking is equal to the amount of guilt advertisers feel about bothering me with their ads.

This is the way

Re: Adblocking people and non-adblocking people experience a different web

#135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect that since you're a paying user, a more valuable customer, they'd want to mine your data more thoroughly to derive more profits in other ways.

I would suspect the opposite, once you start paying you go from being a product to being a customer. If youtube was 90% premium members, it would likely be an unrecognizably better platform, since users instead of advertisers would be the core profit center.

In a normal world that would make sense but we're dealing with businesses and MBAs who need to incessantly increase their revenue. As a paying customer they could squeeze more, you're willing to pay. Non-paying customers are used as a product themselves but it's extremely hard to extract more.

Re: Adblocking people and non-adblocking people experience a different web

#136

In FireFox I have my ad blockers disabled in Private Mode so nothing is getting in the way if I'm testing or some site is being weird. Sometimes it's SHOCKINGLY different how a page looks with the blockers in place. I really can't believe anyone would user a browser without an ad blocker if they knew how things would look while using one. The web is a much better place with a blocker in place. (Yes, I know, we get a…

I feel zero guilt about ad blocking. There was some period of discussion on the subject back in like 2003 but the ad companies went to war against human civilization and there's been no going back. It corrupts and twists everything it touches into a constant hustle for eyeball-cash and an entire generation has now reached adulthood knowing nothing but that hustle touching every bit of media they ever interact with. W…

The problem I have with BAT is that it tries to give me power over the commercialization of something that I don't want commercialized. It's like someone launched a "Basic Sexual Favor Token" to empower me to take control over the sex work I'm expected to perform every day. I have a hard time being happy that they want to empower me, because I'm too busy being aghast at their assumption that this aspect of my life is for sale in the first place and that I would be ok with that.

Re: Adblocking people and non-adblocking people experience a different web

#137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you also read all the spam flyers and emails you get?

No? I'm not sure that's the gotcha you think it is - I also don't read random web pages that I'm not interested in, and I don't sit and 'read' adverts on pages I am reading.

I guess I assumed too much, then -- where's the dubious morality come from?

Re: Adblocking people and non-adblocking people experience a different web

#138
post #87
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In all fairness, if the rest of us didn't run adblockers, they probably wouldn't need to be so aggressive with the ads for those that currently don't.

This strikes me as wishful thinking, adblockers are such a small minority. They are just following the incentives they would always follow, adblockers or no.

From the article, 27% of users; this is higher than I thought, and not negligible anymore.

Note: I tried a few google search to find accurate data, but it goes all over the place; is there an accurate estimation somewhere?

Re: Adblocking people and non-adblocking people experience a different web

#139
The other thing they didn't get into here is that the quality of ads online is generally trash. In the old advertising world there was at least some thought and work put into ads. Now they are auto-generated nightmares. Check out this article from a few years ago if you want to see the worst of the worst: https://www.theawl.com/2015/06/a-complete-taxonomy-of-intern...

Re: Adblocking people and non-adblocking people experience a different web

#140
post #105

I stopped watching network TV in the 1990s when it reached about 25% ads (i.e. 7.5 minutes of ads in a 30 minute window. May have been only 7 minutes, memory is fuzzy now). The web was a relief. You could actually consume content and tune out the (then primitive, usually just a banner at the top) ads. The web, specifically un-adblocked Youtube, is now at about the same point as where I quit TV. Just not worth the agg…

We had a couple effective strategies to deal with ads on network TV when I was a kid. I've found they they still work today. 1. If I was watching alone I would have a book with me. When ads came on I'd read the book until the ad break ended. Nowadays instead of a book it is usually an iPad, and instead of reading during the break I might work on a crossword puzzle in the NYT Crossword app or do some chess puzzles at…

> If I was watching alone I would have a book with me

That's shifting from the narrative of the show/film you're watching to a different activity

> If I was watching with other kids we could talk about the show

It takes us about 1h20 to watch a c. 40 minute show with my wife, but that's because we pause throughout to discuss it. Haven't done linear TV since c. 2000, went through a couple of years in the early 00s with a mythtv box recording shows off air (with 30 second skip forwards/10 second skip back - If I remember commercial breaks almost entirely 6 or 8 skips forward), then sky plus, but nothing for the last 7 years other than streaming.

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