731–740 of 844 posts
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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?
Which means that by using an ad-blocker, people are removing themselves from the audience that has any vote in how content sites develop. You're miffed that sites are becoming dumber while ads are all over the place and uglier every day? You don't like video ads, modal calls-to-action and dark patterns? Well, the audience that actually brings in the money seems to have no problem with all of that, so ad-blocking people will proceed to take a hike right past the attention of site designers.
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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. Except that's not true. Mark Twain and Shakespeare cannot tell you you're interpreting their works incorrectly. JK Rowlings cannot stop you from making paper mache out of her books. I can timeshift and spaceshift content with tape recorders, VCRs, TiVo and more.
I guess the analog would be “Ms Rowlings, I think the price of your book is too high, so I am going to pay you whatever price I want to. You don’t get a choice”
Someone spent time and energy to create something, and decided that annoying ads are the price of their labor. People seem to think they now deserve the labor without the price that the creator has chosen.
In almost all your scenarios they are predicated on having compensated the author in some way. Blocking ads is consuming the content without compensating the author in any way.
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No need to twist and turn anything. No contract, no obligations whatsoever. It's literally as simple as that. The content provider is free to stop providing the content at any time
What happens when the content provider is treated to 100% ad blockage and a thousand people lose their jobs? Ad-blocking users think of sites as being completely devoid of any humanity. In most cases, nothing could be farther from the truth. You might have rationalized that you are not stealing anything. Yet, you are, you are stealing the work product of dozens to thousands or tens of thousands of people. Beyond that…
I'm not obligated to pay for cable when Netflix is cheaper and better. If your family depends on that Cable money to survive, well that's sad but not my problem. Make a better product, change your business model, do something.
Again, content providers are free to stop providing content at any time. There's not much else to say here. It's not my problem of they deliberately decide not to do that
These "please sir, have pity, think of the children" appeals are futile
I doubt very much the author experiences the web he claims to. There are many websites that requires ad blockers to be disabled, and unless you really don't care about a large part of the web (incidentally, the one he's talking about, the one with ads), there's no way to get that experience.
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I heavily disagree with your analogy. In your parallel you are obviously assuming that there is a contract in place. And by covering my ears and eyes I'd be obviously breaking the contract and would have to pay the pizza or get punished in an appropriate manner. If there isn't a contract and the pizza place would just give you a pizza and some ads, and you ignore the ads, that would be completely legal and in no way…
> 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. Of course you are. That's a very different scenario. I get junk mail all the time. It goes in the trash. Always. It is UNSOLICITED. > It's completely ridiculous to speak about "theft". Theft always requires actively taking something. Exactly! You are destroying y…
Who made the determination that visiting the site is "stealing"? Most sites don't forbid ad blockers in their terms of service, and even if they did, it probably wouldn't be legally enforceable.
Nobody is obligated to donate their time and attention to support people who work in the advertising industry or anyone else. It is the responsibility of the business to maintain a sustainable business model. Businesses are not entitled to success, nor do they have the inherent right to allocate the time and attention of their users and customers.
I call it a malware blocker, rather than an adblocker - here's my reasoning: One day I was on a classifieds site[1], browsing listings, when after a few pages, I was met with a page redirect to one of those scammy support center sites (taking over the browser), advising that my computer had been infected by a virus (obviously hadn't) and I needed to call in to "Apple's Support Center" immediately. This was on Safari…
I get what you're saying, but I think that's actually counter-productive. To present things like uBlock as malware blockers suggests that "any ad which is not malware is fine". I think it's perfectly justifiable to guard against non-malware ads _as well as_ malware (ads or otherwise).
I think following happens. Actual click through rate on online ads is low. People don't want to pay lots of money for ads that don't increase their revenue.
Only ones willing to pay for ads are shady business. We are talking unlicensed pills, scams, crypto etc.
Eventually those dry up so they go even lower, malware authors willing to use ads as malware vectors.
I browsed once without ad blocker on some webcomic and shit I had delivered was actually malware. As in Defender was activated.
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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.
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Money well spent, I'm sure. https://gizmodo.com/facebook-announces-its-fake-ad-numbers-a...
> It is nothing less than delusional to convince yourself that you are entitled to the entire web without paying for any of it.
I never said I'm entitled to the entire web for free. Don't try to make it seem like I'm brazenly pirating my way across the internet. There are plenty of services behind paywalls and subscriptions that I choose to support with my actual dollars.
> Do you know what happens at this end of the scale when your 100% ad-blocked utopia becomes reality? Do you have any clue?
Yes. Actually I do. I'm old enough to know what life was like before the internet. We all got along just fine back then. One could argue we were better off than we are now.
For a brief shining period the internet was a blank canvas, full of actual wonder and discovery. Seriously, it felt amazing to connect and just explore. But look at what it has become; a wasteland where 2 advertising giants waged a war of psychological manipulation.
> Along with the jobs and everything else it created.
Eyeballs for dollars. Its a grotesque machine. If it all burned down tomorrow, nothing of value would be lost. Not even the jobs you claim. (Except, of course, the ad networks, the PII data miners, the blog spammers, and the rest of the seedy by products that sprout from these networks...so, like I said, nothing of value lost.)
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I used to type “reddit” after my searches to look for genuine and real reviews, but even that is now being gamed. Advertisers and shady affiliate marketing schemes have caught on and nearly every search result I try is now filled with junk, upvote farmed nonsense with fake accounts using similar naming schemes.
This is 100% the case when I was looking for a VPN recommendation. So many of the Reddit threads were blatantly astroturfed.
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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?
If I owned YouTube with the goal of maximizing profits, and I did not have any self imposed ethical constrains, I would focus on controlling the market of hosting videos. The technology needed to operate a video hosting is widely available and been so for the last few decades, so the only way to prevent competition and keep a market dominance would be to make sure that competitors can't compete. Keep users on the pla…
This is kinda what's happening already. Most major websites stopped hosting their own and instead publish on YouTube and embed it
As such they're selling their users' tracking which I hate, but they love it for the extra income and exposure their videos get.
Hosting videos is not hard at all. But this is not the reason why nobody hosts their own anymore. YouTube's very dominance is what keeps it dominant.