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Adblocking people and non-adblocking people experience a different web

imlefthanded.com

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

#141

Post by discardedrefuse »

TheIronMark wrote: post #46

No one likes ads, but the belief that you're owed content for free is absurd.

The belief that advertisers are owed my attention is absurd.

Since forever, you could opt of viewing ads. Ad in a magazine? Next page. TV commercial? Great time for a bathroom break. But now advertisers have decided that you MUST watch their ad. There's a countdown timer for. If the browser loses focus, the timer stops. How long before they're tracking eyeballs for enforcement? Oh wait, not long at all.

https://futurism.com/moviepass-eye-tracking-ads

https://www.techspot.com/news/93055-meta-patents-hint-metave...

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

#142

Post by loudtieblahblah »

iso1631 wrote: post #122
MarkusWandel wrote: post #50

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…

The youtube app on a phone has reached that level, and pihole doesn't help, so I only watch youtube on a browser with adblock now

YouTube Vanced.

You're welcome.

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

#143

Post by contravariant »

Macha wrote: post #77
knaik94 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thankfully, with android, firefox still has addon support so ublock origin can still be used regardless of price point.

I wish it had full addon support though, rather than just Mozilla's curated selection of 20 or so. I have to install an app to do twitter -> nitter redirection when it could just be a browser extension.

It is possible to use your own list of addons, but it's needlessly difficult [1]. I hope they will support a slightly less insane workaround eventually.

[1]: https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2020/09/29/expanded-extensio...

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

#144

Post by judge2020 »

xyst wrote: post #110
zuminator wrote: post #7

I've had YouTube Premium since its inception. Whenever I'm around someone else who puts on a free-tier version of YouTube its rather shocking how frequent and intrusive the commercial ads are.

instead of paying for premium and all of that money going to a megacorp. I spent some money on a simple browser plugin that forces YT to use the HTML5 video player. Although every now and then an ad happens to pre-load before the video starts but I just refresh the video page and the ad goes away.

Premium views help a lot more than ad-supported views for creators, on the scale of 10-20x the payout per-view[0,1] (and it pays out regardless of the advertiser friendliness rating).

This has been a hot topic lately[2,3], but at what point is you watching YouTube for years without ads, without paying for Premium, ethically stealing or "piracy"? YouTube was buying petabytes of Hard Drive storage a day in 2012 to keep up with the demand[4], i'm sure it's nearly an Exabyte a day or more right now, so it doesn't cost $0 for YouTube to run the service, they just happen to have enough people on Mobile watching and clicking ads to make a profit[5] and subsidize the rest of us.

0: https://www.dailydot.com/upstream/totalbiscuit-youtube-red-p...

1: https://twitter.com/LinusTech/status/1486935690315112455?s=2...

2: https://youtu.be/-znPFc-0VS8?t=149

3: https://youtu.be/6jUxOnoWsFU

4: https://sumanrs.wordpress.com/2012/04/14/youtube-yearly-cost...

5: https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/3/21121207/youtube-google-al...

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

#145

Post by [deleted] »

TheIronMark wrote: post #51
reincarnate0x14 wrote: post #17

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…

Quoted post unavailable.

[deleted]

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

#146

Post by the_snooze »

patrickk wrote: post #126
skummetmaelk wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It corrupts and twists everything it touches into a constant hustle for eyeball-cash This cannot be overstated. Everything today is a battle for eye-balls and ad money. The corruption is insane. You can't even buy appliances designed perform their function well. Instead you can buy cheap junk for less than cogs because they make money selling your data to ad companies instead of making money by making products that…

> You can't even buy appliances designed perform their function well You can't research good appliances either online, because the SERPs are stuffed with SEO-ed blogs and sometimes industry magazines, monetized with Amazon affiliates or other networks, with titles like "5 best dishwashers in 2022". Unless you know someone in the industry or offline with knowledge you don't know what to buy. This is noticeable in many…

I feel like "scale" on the Internet has gone completely off the rails and has become just worthless "noise." Sure, anyone can post and sell whatever they want, but you lose all notions of reputation and trust. It all becomes a shouting match among those who can ad-spam and SEO their way to the top. Those shitty fly-by-night randomly-named Chinese brands on Amazon come to mind.

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

#147

Post by Tenoke »

ravar wrote: post #87
Tenoke wrote: 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.

Adblockers are at 27% just in the US looking at statista and other random sources, and the number is much higher if you look at the more relevant younger demographic.

0. https://www.statista.com/statistics/804008/ad-blocking-reach...

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

#148

Post by Workaccount2 »

skummetmaelk wrote: post #72
TheIronMark wrote: post #46

No one likes ads, but the belief that you're owed content for free is absurd.

How about making content that people actually feel like they obtain value in their lives from. They'd pay for that. Instead we have the majority of content creators engaged in an arms race to hijack your attention and produce the most outrageous, rather than best, content possible because more outrage = more eyeballs = more ads.

No, they wouldn't pay for that. This is a dumb myth that people use to brush off their guilt. If something can be taken for free with no repercussion, most people will take it for free.

We're in a feedback loop where content is being pulled towards the lowest common denominator of people who don't ad-block, which is a terrible uninformed click-bait hellhole.

You can ad block, I do myself (with a pretty big whitelist), but understand that if you are not contributuing (money or ad views) your opinion of the internet is irrelevant. Start paying, then complain as a paying customer.

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

#149

Post by lolinder »

TheIronMark wrote: post #51
reincarnate0x14 wrote: post #17

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…

Quoted post unavailable.

I'm not owed free content. What I am owed is the right to determine for myself what code runs on my computer. Ads are visually oppressive, violate privacy, and are frequently vectors for malware. I am in no way obligated to allow any website to run them on my computer.

When a website wants to make viewing their ads mandatory for viewing their content, that is their prerogative. Most don't, and I'm not obligated to volunteer my CPU for their ads.

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

#150

Post by throwaway744678 »

aukhfauwhf wrote: post #101
Apreche wrote: post #48

To answer the question posed by the site. How can they afford 261MB page load instead of 5MB? Because the largest expense of delivering video, the bandwidth, is still very cheap. We're talking less than one cent per gigabyte. Even if ad rates are really low, they're bringing in more than 1 cent per ad play.

> the bandwidth, is still very cheap. This is yet another example of US/BayArea Privilege blindness. It is NOT cheap in most places to the User. Including in the unprivileged-USA. The user pays a lot for that bandwidth. Specially now that everyone will unknowingly move to predatory 5G home services but let me try to stay on topic. People out of the Empire Center will pay both bandwidth and processing power. Where do…

The article and your parent are talking of the cost for the producer, not the user.
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