With Chrome's crippling of adblockers via their Manifest V3 mandate, I wonder if Chrome users are in for a rude awakening of how hostile and repugnant the ad laden web has become.
I've switched to Brave, plus DNS level blocking with pihole.
Adblocking people and non-adblocking people experience a different web
211–220 of 844 posts
Re: Adblocking people and non-adblocking people experience a different web
#212Earlier 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…
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I can't speak for the GP, but here's my answer:
I don't feel I'm owed anything. I just refuse to consume ads. Sometimes that means I pay a subscription fee. Sometimes I read it with my blocker on and the creator goes without revenue to get their message out. And sometimes the creator won't serve up their content unless I disable my blocker, so I shrug and turn my attention elsewhere.
The problem for creators is that there's a glut of content online. It's just way more than anyone needs. The best creators can afford monetize directly, the good ones can do custom ads integrated into their content, and the rest have to churn out clickbait, top 11 lists, and ludicrously "optimized" content laden with ad-network garbage. It sucks to be mediocre, but I don't feel I owe anyone that revenue stream.
Re: Adblocking people and non-adblocking people experience a different web
#213I used to use adblockers but then certain websites stopped working and displayed banners saying to turn of my adblocker, so i did, and then it all seemed kind of pointless.
Re: Adblocking people and non-adblocking people experience a different web
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Finding out if someone is running an ad blocker is not easy. After all a good ad blocker tries to be stealthy about it.
(anti ad blocker leads to anti anti ad blocker)
Re: Adblocking people and non-adblocking people experience a different web
#215Earlier 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…
> 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…
I have a theory most ads (especially invasive ones) don't actually target most people, not just tech-savvy users but anyone. They target "dumb", very-manipulable people who see these crazy ads and actually spend loads of money on them, out of impulse or whatever reason.
I feel cruel saying this but I really think it's true. Just like how most games have microtransactions because a minority of people who will spend an incredible amount of money on them. Most people are caught in the crossfire and ads just annoy them and steer them away from the product, but mass advertising is an effective way to target the minority who ultimately spend enough on the product to offset the cost.
Re: Adblocking people and non-adblocking people experience a different web
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
Who is saying they expect free content? I'd pay a monthly fee for unmolested search results. I pay for Youtube Premium. I only watch ad-free content that I pay for. I don't want the content for free - the free stuff is usually worse in quality anyway. I just want to be left alone by advertisers. I don't need what they are selling and the reduce my ability to think. The sheer amount of noise they add to the world make…
> Who is saying they expect free content? Anyone using an adblocker is expecting free content.
I disagree. I use an adblocker because I refuse to be monetized via freemium tactics. I pay to support some sites that are of interest to me, on most other sites I'm never even given the option.
Advertisements directly lower the quality of any content I'm consuming and I am expecting high quality content.
Re: Adblocking people and non-adblocking people experience a different web
#217In 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…
Ad blocking these days is actually just a security measure. When sites like nytimes.com serve malware through third party ad networks they’ve put on their page, it’s silly to not use an ad blocker.
On sites that handles all their own ad sales and display directly, I still see their ads.
Re: Adblocking people and non-adblocking people experience a different web
#218Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why don't I get paid for my HN posts? Do I owe you for your reply? Do you owe me for this reply? You work out how we commoditize every interaction into tiny micropayments so MBAs are happy with our time allocations and let me know. Ads were tried, and it's been an absolute fucking disaster.
> Why don't I get paid for my HN posts? That's between you and HN and has nothing to do with my consumption of your comment. > Ads were tried, and it's been an absolute fucking disaster. No one likes ads, but expecting free content is silly.
I don’t expect free content, I expect that if your business can’t survive without ads it should disappear from the face of the earth.
Going without is better than ad funded. The goal of me running ad blockers is not just to make my life nicer but to make ad funded shit (i.e. most of the current internet) unviable.
Paywall away! If it’s good enough for the money, I’ll always pay for it.
Re: Adblocking people and non-adblocking people experience a different web
#219In 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…
Isn’t it fun how our years of combined nerd opposition toward surveillance of Internet infrastructure was a total waste of time when all it took was flashing some cash to make advertisers implement even more intrusive client-side surveillance in a distributed infinitely-scalable way instead?
Even our response to the Snowden releases was to get Google Analytics running over TLS and to make it even harder for a normal solo person to host a website that isn’t through one of the major silos.
Re: Adblocking people and non-adblocking people experience a different web
#220Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why don't I get paid for my HN posts? Do I owe you for your reply? Do you owe me for this reply? You work out how we commoditize every interaction into tiny micropayments so MBAs are happy with our time allocations and let me know. Ads were tried, and it's been an absolute fucking disaster.
This is maybe the one thing where Bitcoin or another blockchain-based payment network could have been a net benefit in theory (both as a measure to prevent spam and to reward content creators)... but in practice it turned out to be nothing more than a giant planetary heating system.
or any open micropaymemts type platform. I always expected the journalists to make such a thing-pay whatever $50 bucks a month and it is split between the content publishers you visit. Better than a few people like me subscribing to as many papers as i can and most people being the prey of the asveetisers and having terrible roadblocks to just learning the news.