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Adblocking people and non-adblocking people experience a different web

imlefthanded.com

671–680 of 844 posts

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

#671

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No thanks for me. Advertisements if nothing else consume too much of my local compute resources for zero benefit to me. Why should I give them this free compute?

Why should I give them this free compute? Why should they give you free content?

They choose to. My user agent just doesn't connect to all of the domains that they ask it to.

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

#672

Quoted post unavailable.

> In exchange for being exposed to advertising at a restaurant, you get free pizza. Are you required to sign a contract for this exchange to happen? In that case, you would be breaching a contract, which is not the same as theft. If there's no contract, then I am free to go into a restaurant, plug in my earphones, keep my eyes glued to my laptop/phone and focus on whatever I want & ignore whatever else might be going…

You can twist and turn your way around arguments and convince yourself that you are not a thief. That's fine. Good for you. Enjoy.

Behind all of this there are businesses, which consist of people with jobs who have families and responsibilities. Just because you don't see the effects of your actions it does not mean there are no effects. You are stealing something that costs money to create and support and you have convinced yourself that you are entitled to that something.

Few people enjoy advertising. I don't. And yet I understand that most of what's on the internet is financed this way. If everyone ran ad blockers the internet would collapse overnight.

I have friends with small businesses who's families depend on being able to find customers through online advertising. Ad blockers have consequences for families just like theirs.

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

#673

No one likes ads, but the belief that you're owed content for free is absurd.

I don't think anyone feels they are "owed" anything. I do, however, feel I have the right to download whatever someone puts online, and not download and view the adjacent ads. Whether or not that keeps the lights on in that business is not really my problem. It becomes my problem if it's content I care about that disappears. Without ads, perhaps 90% of the free content of the web would disappear. Since I run an adblo…

I think that the idea that "people would largely stop making content for the web if that weren't ads" is a myth. Sure, the money seeking people wouldn't do it anymore and a lot less people would be able to make a living off of it. But think of all the web content makers that currently don't make a lot of money, which I believe is a lot of people since not everyone who has blog earns a living from it. I'm not saying we wouldn't lose anything but this idea the "90% of the web would disappear or be paywalled" is kinda insane and quite unlikely

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

#674
post #629

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. You are just a MKBHD fan. There's nothing more to it. Someone else who doesn't know who Marques is will see a talking head interrupting the relaxation video. For the restaurant owner, it means they cannot rely on YouTube to play requested video content as commanded. This proves the point even further, technology instead of being smarter in the case of YouTube here, has grown to become an annoying anti-consumer pr…

You haven't understood me. I found it ridiculous playing in a restaurant. It was muted anyway. However, if I was at home, opened YouTube just to entertain myself and opened one of the algorithm suggested videos, then – in that situation – an interesting video from a channel that is unknown to me, inserted as an ad could hook me and could lead to me subscribing to said channel.

I think I got what you narrated. The element of surprise is your response to recognizing MKBHD's content playing at an unexpected unusual venue.

Instead of that suggestive ad being inserted into the video. Why not use auto-play or recommended videos section? Suggested videos in the menu work great, better even, in your case scenario for content discovery.

I don't watch YouTube with ads and I don't subscribe to YouTube Premium but I pretty much doubt in-video content suggestions disguised as ads will do a better job of predicting what I'll watch next over menu video recommendations.

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

#675

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…

As Gabe Newell said, piracy is a service problem.

Why in the hell would I pay £60 a month and have to watch adverts when I can just get it for free?

Why do I have to subscribe to channels I have no interest in to get the handful I do want?

It's like a baker who pads his bread with sawdust throwing a tantrum when customers start going elsewhere.

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

#676

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Server side tracking is already happening. It's not new or yet to be developed.

Not implying at all that it isn't developed -- back in the early 00s this was the only way we could do tracking largely. But Google Analytics is completely blind when you block it, and that's a huge percentage of the market. For example, simply loading a 1px image (the old way of doing a lot of server-side tracking, and still the state-of-the-art way of doing email tracking) is insufficient when the client is hard bl…

> But Google Analytics is completely blind when you block it, and that's a huge percentage of the market.

Consumers of GA may be blind, I'm guessing (confidently) Google and other big players are far from blind today.

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

#677

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure where you've gotten that idea from? I don't think anyone is arguing that. They say they're burning it if it's sent to them, at which point it's their property.

> at which point it's their property This is a big part of why the implicit deal argument doesn't really make sense. If a website sends me information then the information is on my device just like a letter, so I should be able to do what I like with it. The framing of this as an agreement between the user/publisher that we accept or reject skips over the question of whether it is even possible or moral in the first…

I think you're exaggerating my point of view.

Do I think it's fine to walk away during an advert break on a US TV station or to mute? Yeah that's fine.

Can you cut up your magazine and reconstruct it with the advertising pages removed? Yeah fine.

Both are different from advert blocking because of the automation and the specific targeting of the workaround. I think that's where it crosses into not as morally reasonable.

I think it's also just a huge faff to run custom software in your browser just to avoid seeing some adverts.

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

#678
post #554

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The creators that are decently big (100k+) make enough money whether or not you ad-block. Don't worry about it.

They make enough money precisely because not everyone ad blocks. This seems like a fallacious argument.

A lot of big creators take sponsorship deals and have in-video ads. I know most of the ones I watch do, and I actually don't even mind them. They're personalized to the content creator's content, and are usually as entertaining as the video's contents because of it.

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

#679

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No thanks for me. Advertisements if nothing else consume too much of my local compute resources for zero benefit to me. Why should I give them this free compute?

Why should I give them this free compute? Why should they give you free content?

They transmitted it into my house. I didn't ask for it.

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

#680
post #584

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Nonetheless, if we want to think about it for arguments sake: there are no costs associated without capitalism, only necessary work and resources.

"Necessary work and resources" is exactly what is meant by costs. Scarcity is a property of the universe we live in. Capitalism doesn't prescribe or create scarcity, it just offers a framework for dealing with it. All other systems also have costs and operational expenses—they just aren't borne primarily by those making the decisions.

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