661–670 of 844 posts
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…
I 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…
I find this pretty confusing. How is showing ads abuse?
You did not ask for your brain to be stimulated like this - what you did ask for is the content that comes after ad. That's the thing you consented to.
Ads abuse your desire to watch something that you want to watch, by cramming in something that you did not want, leeching your precious time and brain-processing energy, in order to sell you something that you did not want to have in the first place.
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> The belief that advertisers are owed my attention is absurd. You are trying to rationalize theft through self-righteous nonsense. If you don't want the ads, don't use the site/service/content. Simple as that. Anything else is you stealing it. You don't get to decide how a site pays for the cost of running their operation. They do. If they decide ads is the way and you don't like it, don't use their site. Stealing t…
When there's a law that makes adblocking illegal. I will gladly leave the web behind forever. But to equate adblocking to stealing is hyperbolic nonsense. And to out right call me a thief is insulting. Looks like I struck a nerve; or maybe this whole thread did. Maybe you're in ad tech? I hope you are. I hope you read through this entire thread and soak in just how rotten your industry is; so reviled even here on HN.
I 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…
For example, if you were making a transit app, a savvy iPhone 13 ProMax user with a top-tier data plan will see very different problems (or at least see different priorities) on their commute than your Uncle Sidney with his belt-holstered, used, Samsung Galaxy J2 running on Ting Mobile. They're both important, but in the tech world, you have to dig a lot deeper to get the Uncle Sidney perspective.
Open ended question, is there a solution? Inherently people trying to make money from their website either have to charge people directly with money for access or indirectly by having them see/hear ads. Advertisers inherently want their ads to be seen/heard, which means there is pressure to make their ads more intrusive. Yet the more intrusive the ads become, the more annoyed the person accessing the content becomes…
> Open ended question, is there a solution? Regulation. It's a harsh measure, but I doubt there is another one. The last 20 years people tried to find alternative solutions. We have pay-walls, we have crowdfounding, we have various subscription models, I fail to see a solution that hasn't been tried, but yet every single year we get exposed to more ads. It seems extremly unlikely that there is something that could re…
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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?
By building a profile of each user based on their viewing history and then when they use the search engine that I also own I would show them personalized results with sponsored links to products to buy. Plus I would be selling that information to third parties. And then I would of course also show some ads to all of the the normies that surf without an adblocker.
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Now the thing with websites is, there is no contract. You just ask them for some content and they give you the content + ads. I'm free to ignore the ads. A good parallel would be a local newspaper that gets send for free to everyone, but also includes ads. I'm completely free to ignore the ads in this case. I would also be allowed to build a sorting machine that sorts out the ads before I ever have a chance to look at them. That's obviously no theft, after all they gifted it to me!
And this is exactly what most websites are. They send me free content and include some ads, without any contractual obligation. If they don't want me to just see the content without looking at the ads, they can always set up a contract requiring me to look at the ads. Or only show me the content after I've seen the ads. Or do anything else, that isn't just sending me content and ads without any obligations.
But until they do that, it's definitely morally right and legal to sort out the ads, just like I do with my local newspaper.
And something that I want to touch on seperately because it really annoys me. It's completely ridiculous to speak about "theft". Theft always requires actively taking something. The taking part is really important when speaking about theft. But I'm not taking something from websites, I am asking for it and the website freely gifts it to me. On HN I'd really expect people to know how HTTP requests works. I'm not evading access controls, I'm not forcing them to give me the content, I'm not sneakily taking it away, I'm not hacking into their systems to take it.
I ask via the official way to ask for the content and they decide to send it to me. What I then do with the content on my local system is completely irrelevant and I have to right to modify it however I want, as long as I don't make it public or use it commercially obviously.
I have a list of adblockers I use, hope it helps other people here: Desktop: - Pi-Hole (network wide adblocking) - AdGuard (device wide adblocking) Web browsers: - uBlock Origin - uMatrix (not developed anymore but still works, can also use NoScript) - SponsorBlock (blocks in-video sponsor segments, intros, outros, filler tangents, etc in YouTube) Mobile: - Firefox for Android / Kiwi Browser (both have web extension…
If you subscribe to YT, the ads are gone, plus music.
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…
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People seem to invoke the word capitalism whenever things aren't a utopia for everyone involved. Still, even without capitalism, you'll have to contend with the issue of how to cover operational expenses. Say some, more centralized, agent decides YouTube is worthwhile - how would it get paid for? A state sponsorship made possible by a tax of some sort? Perhaps it would transition to be completely pay-to-play? The emp…
> Still, even without capitalism, you'll have to contend with the issue of how to cover operational expenses You're still thinking in the framework of capitalism. Let me be clear that I think that doing anything but capitalism is bound to fail while we're living in a resource restricted reality. Nonetheless, if we want to think about it for arguments sake: there are no costs associated without capitalism, only necess…
That's just redefining the term costs to not include work and resources. The term resources alone makes up nearly every operational cost possible: time, man power, CPU power, metals, environment, ...
Capitalism has nothing to with defining what something costs, it has everything to do with resource ownership and its distribution.