yea, I can't use the web on mobile, its insane how patient people are with exploitative tech
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Adblocking people and non-adblocking people experience a different web
381–390 of 844 posts
Re: Adblocking people and non-adblocking people experience a different web
#382Re: Adblocking people and non-adblocking people experience a different web
#383Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not OP, but I find your questions interesting. I find it intriguing that only in the digital age have we sort of decided that the creator of something doesn't get to dictate the terms of its use. >3. What if you truly need to access a website but it has too many ads At least for me, I assume that they created the necessary content and get to decide how it's made available. It seems like only in the digital age do we…
> I find it intriguing that only in the digital age have we sort of decided that the creator of something doesn't get to dictate the terms of its use. Nonsense. Broadcast TV and radio are the same. I use a TiVo for broadcast TV and use the skip ads function.
TiVo is very much a part of the digital age, it's literally called a "Digital Video Recorder".
Re: Adblocking people and non-adblocking people experience a different web
#384Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have complicated feelings on this — content creators need to be paid for their work but the ad networks have done a ton of collateral damage, too: I've had major sites like nytimes.com or youtube.com send me malware via Google's ad network, and ads make the web significantly slower and less reliable. I avoided using an ad blocker for years but installed Firefox Focus everywhere a while back after getting tired of a…
I'm not sure content creators need to be paid for their work. At least, not all. What internet surveillance does is motivate people to create awful content that nobody in the market would pay for in order to skim dollars from what is largely a privacy invading, fraudulent vacuum of an industry. People will pay for good content, they did for a long time before there was an internet or a surveillance industry. There we…
That sounds like an argument for better payment mechanisms but people still need to be paid.
Yes, people paid for content prior to the internet but there were also problems — many good things went unnoticed because not enough discovered them while plenty of garbage got tons of attention because the creator had some personal connection to publishers, reviewers, DJs, etc. One of the things I loved about the rise of the web was that it provided so many opportunities to find things which weren't going to run in my local newspaper, be stocked by the local book or music shops (if you weren't lucky enough to have good indie options), or the pile of mud a lot of the big radio stations were often playing (this got a lot worse in the 90s when Clear Channel started buying all of the radio stations so questions about what got mainstream coverage in many markets came down to what one guy in Texas wanted).
I don't want to lose that — whether it's counterpressure to the huge race-to-the-bottom advertising market for more selective sponsorship, something like Apple/Stripe Pay to make it super easy for people to get paid for their work, etc.
Re: Adblocking people and non-adblocking people experience a different web
#385Earlier 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…
I type "reddit" after the query and Reddit usually has good recommendations. Yes, advertisers can and do try to invade subreddits posing as "real" users to promote sham products. But I haven't seen this actually working: sometimes Redditors recommend products which are way too expensive (still good quality, but the extra price really isn't worth it), but if someone recommends a genuinely crappy product, they get down…
> Yes, advertisers can and do try to invade subreddits posing as "real" users to promote sham products. But I haven't seen this actually working
Would you know if it did?
Re: Adblocking people and non-adblocking people experience a different web
#386I wanted to show a video on YouTube to a friend. He passed me his cellphone. I searched and found the video and then something very strange happened: a completely unrelated something started playing. I said "Sorry I don't know what is this. This has nothing to do with what I wanted to show you." He then explained me that was just an advertisement and the video would play soon. People are used to abuse. My internet is…
One of the services I happily pay for is Youtube Premium, though I could do without also having to pay for Youtube Music at the same time. I have same experience as you, when I somehow not logged in to Youtube. It’s a surreal mess and it’s the same 5 - 10 ads, if it’s that many, on repeat. It’s unusable. Technically I don’t use and ad block, I just run DuckDuckGo’s privacy plugin. You can show me ads, but not track m…
I feel that there is a generational gap between Youtube users that correlates with whether they will pay for premium or not.
People in their late 20s and 30s who remember Youtube as a catch-all location for lo-fi homemmade videos with few ads may not feel that YT premium is worth it, particularly if they already use adblockers, and don't use it much on mobile (where adblocking isn't possible without modded APKs). This generation also remembers torrents and Limewire, before Spotify made everything super-convenient.
Those who are more familiar with 'modern Youtube' with multiple pre-roll ads, clickbait and and influencers everywhere may be more receptive to paying just to get rid of the constant ads.
Re: Adblocking people and non-adblocking people experience a different web
#387Earlier 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…
This is something I had to teach my dad. But he believed it thoroughly until he had a few high purchase items fail outside of warranty. My advice to him has been look for customer reviews and he suspicious of the positive ones and aware of all the negative ones. My other advise is buy from a reputable distributor like Costco who makes returning something incredibly easy.
Re: Adblocking people and non-adblocking people experience a different web
#388I swear the ad industry are in bed with cellular operators. Data usage from ads taps directly into peoples data plans, why would not there exist a kickback scheme for this?
Re: Adblocking people and non-adblocking people experience a different web
#389Yeah it is quite a jarring experience when Adblocking breaks for whatever reason.
Actually built a small internal api end point that checks whether filtering works every 60s and that goes onto status tracker (Kuma)
Re: Adblocking people and non-adblocking people experience a different web
#390In 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…
A few years ago I had to use my mom's laptop to order dinner or something, and I couldn't figure out why the page I was on looked so weird. I double checked another site I visit regularly, and that site looked weird, too: huge background images, videos everywhere, weird fonts, etc., etc. At first I thought her machine had a virus, then it dawned on me it was all ads! I installed an ad blocker, and the difference was night and day! The unfiltered pages were basically unreadable.