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Adblocking people and non-adblocking people experience a different web

imlefthanded.com

541–550 of 844 posts

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

#541

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Just curious, if you owned YouTube with an overhead of tens of millions of dollars per year, how would you monetize it without ads/commercials, just to even keep up with operational costs?

I don't think everything needs to be monetized. I wouldn't monetize it, I'd use a p2p protocol like peertube.

So, it would be a public service?

It was kind of like that when interest rates were near zero, affording endless deferral of income.

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

#542

Ads are such a strange cancer on the internet. So ugly, so without value, such a waste of time, such a sinkhole of precious attention. And yet -- would the modern internet even exist but for ads? I'm not so sure. It seems there is a bifurcation, even among those of us with the technical know-how and resources to live ad-free lives: those who tolerate ads, and those who do not. I count myself in the latter group. I wi…

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

#543
post #489

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"This is noticeable in many other consumer goods verticals, e.g. good luck researching decent home gym equipment that is durable and not overpriced with fat margins." I agree with you but there's a simple shortcut you can employ: purchase commercial/industrial models that you see being used in industry . Gym equipment is a good example: your local, serious weightlifting gym is probably using Hammer Strength plate-loa…

> TV: NEC P461 commercial display - I found the model number by climbing behind the arrivals/departures board at the airport. Huh. Trying to imagine someone doing that and not getting detained. "I just wanted to read the model number, officer, I swear!" Other than that, good advice. :)

Well, it was ASE. It's a pretty chill airport :)

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

#544
post #386

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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). Thi…

> on mobile (where adblocking isn't possible without modded APKs)

What's a modded APK?

Firefox and other browsers like Vivaldi have awesome adblocking nowadays. There are alternative frontends like invidious.

Newpipe is an oss app, perfect on Android. Vanced is very popular too but I never tried it.

But with nextdns I don't need any of those. Only newpipe because, besides the ads, having to keep the display on to listen to music while running is just stupid.

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

#545
post #538

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…

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

#546

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.

I have an ethical dilemma about YouTube. I hate ads, I hate Google, and I want to support the creators. For those reasons adblock is a must, and paying for YouTube Premium is not an option (I’m not going to voluntarily give a single penny of my money to Google) Sure, I’ve got CuriosityStream and Nebula subs, but not all content creators use those platforms. It is what it is.

To support the creators whose videos I'm watching on YT, I use a whitelist add-on that disable the adblocker on those channels. Though the add-on still allows me to skip the ad, which I'm doing when it's an ad I've already seen.

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

#547
post #94

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> 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…

The funny part is I remember a time when even on HN the majority defended ads for a myriad of reasons, and one of those reasons was that people actually liked ads and wanted them. This line of reasoning has completely disappeared from the mainstream. I think that's a problem for the ad companies. They have not yet lost the war, but it seems they have lost the argument.

Around 2011 or so this was me. I generally didn't ad block and thought that seeing a few ads was a reasonable price for the free content online. Ads became ridiculous though and lost any sense of balance, the web became borderline unusable without one.

I have sold on eBay for over a decade and at some point the desktop site became so slow as to be unusable with ad blocking. No idea who at eBay thinks getting in the way of sales to spam people with banner ads is a good idea.

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

#549

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Website owners no longer have a choice. Brave is incentivized to add ads to otherwise ad-free websites, and apparently does so as Matthew Butterick complains about; https://practicaltypography.com/the-cowardice-of-brave.html

We don't and never have put ads in publisher pages. It's not ethical without site consent and our users don't want ads in baseline Brave. If Brave users opt into Brave Rewards for private user ads in push notifications (which, contra Butterick, do not belong to any page they might be near or above; they belong to the user's inventory, same as new tabs and unrelated windows of all kinds), we still wouldn't put ads in…

Oh hello! I recently tried brave and was relatively impressed. BAT is also an interesting idea, and I want to see it succeed!

However, I also had negative opinions of it like many people here before I really dug into it. I think your marketing really needs some work. I don't exactly know what it is - it might not even be your fault. The negative view of crypto many have has been associated with it. I would remove all mentions of crypto from your website. If people really want to know how the tokens work, they can go into the documentation. Having the word crypto on your landing page does you no good.

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

#550
post #540

"People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the wo…

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