271–280 of 844 posts
yea, I can't use the web on mobile, its insane how patient people are with exploitative tech
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
One market where this has always been a problem is tools. So almost 20 years ago we were told in shop class that the industry magazines and reviews were basically all paid for by manufacturers. The solution we learned was to always buy the cheapest option first. If it breaks or fails to meet your needs understand how and why and then move on to a more costly tool that you can demonstrate is better in the specific way…
I wish more people would do this.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I use Firefox with Ublock Origin, Ghostery, and the YouTube Enhancer plugin. I get zero adds on YouTube with this setup!
uBlock alone seems to do the trick for YouTube.
I could be totally wrong, but ublock-origin just keeps certain things that match a pattern from appearing in the html. It can't remove the annoying "in-video" ads, right?
I've started to think about it differently. I no longer use any ad blockers. I actually want to experience the web (and its decline) the way it is, to take it all in, feel the pain and strengthen my patience in the process. Also, when I visit a website that is truly obnoxious with its ads, I simply leave immediately and never go there. You build your own filter of bad actors, behaviors, and concrete sites. You don't…
This has to be the most unpopular opinion so far I have a few questions for you 1. How long have you been doing this ? 2. What do you think of other (not just monetization) ways ads are bad as in bloating the web, privacy and security issues ? 3. What if you truly need to access a website but it has too many ads ? You give up ? Use adblock ? Continue with ads ?
For a long time I told people "my brain is my ad blocker I just ignore it". But after a while I just couldn't stand the web without it anymore. Websites got so bad I couldn't find the content anymore. My CPU would spike to 100% on some web pages and my laptop fans would spin like crazy.
It makes me sad but now I install an ad blocker on every place I can.
My mom recently somehow managed to disable the ad-blocker I have setup on her computer and was blown away by how much advertising is on the internet.
People are used to abuse. My internet is very different from the internet most people use. I feel sorry for them.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
That's just normal business though, and my statement is intrinsically correcting for that. Netflix has the same MBAs and bean counters, but their product has no ads and orders of magnitude less clickbait. Its clear they make content geared for their users, not for their advertisers. Youtube is very heavy with advertiser friendly content, and both creators and users pay heavily for that (but its *quote* Free! *unquote…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> If something can be taken for free with no repercussion, most people will take it for free.
This is clearly not true. Netflix found massive success even though it was, and still is, incredibly easy to pirate everything you want to watch. Indie games with poor or non-existent DRM make money on Steam even though pirate copies exist.
Yes, of course there is a loss to piracy. Is that loss greater than what surveillance capitalism is pushing onto us? I doubt it, but you may think otherwise.