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Adblocking people and non-adblocking people experience a different web

imlefthanded.com

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

#791

Post by foxfluff »

cartesius13 wrote: post #673
alkonaut wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

Based on how many trash sites show up in search (even after search engines' algorithms try hard to downrank garbage), I wouldn't be surprised if more than 90% of the web is there only to make a quick buck with ads. According to Wikipedia, 90% of all email traffic in 2014 was spam, despite hosting providers and ISPs blocking ports and taking a hard stance on spam. I have no reason to believe the web is much better, especially given that spinning up a trash site is not going to start alerts and get IP blocks banned the same way that sending email spam does.

I think removing ads' profitability and the incentive to create more trash would be good for the web.

But you're right that with all the trash gone, there's would still be millions and millions of useful sites. The entire web isn't motivated by ad impressions and there are good reasons to run sites with no ads whatsoever.

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

#792

Post by dredmorbius »

Geee wrote: post #129

Youtube, especially, turns into a whole different experience. Ad in front of every video makes it impossible to quickly browse and sort through videos. I might watch just a few seconds and then go to the next one. When ads are enabled, the experience is so painful that I'm not likely to use Youtube this way any more. I have to watch an ad before I've made the decision if I want to watch the video.

Browsing in incognito mode and behind an ad-blocking DNS server, YouTube runs pre-roll ads perhaps on 1 in 4 videos.

I've found that refreshing the page seems to always remove the ads.

Though I'm increasingly taking to searching through Invidious. (YouTube is somewhat more convenient thanks to the !yt DDG bang search.)

I also often play audio through mpv.

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

#793

Post by iso1631 »

npteljes wrote: post #685
iso1631 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The youtube app on a phone has reached that level, and pihole doesn't help, so I only watch youtube on a browser with adblock now

So, you know, pay for it a little bit? It's there, it makes the ads go away, and it's cheap.

Does it get rid of the inline sponsors too?

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

#794

Post by no1lives4ever »

Scoundreller wrote: post #750
hsbauauvhabzb wrote: post #647

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please share your knowledge, if you don’t expect to have 1000 subscribers surely you wouldn’t expect revenue anyway. Maybe a better approach would be to encourage ‘buy me a coffee’ donations. Either way, you’re punishing society for google being an asshole.

I don’t expect (and didn’t get) subscribers because I just solve the problem. I’m not entertaining enough for you to continue watching the next video on a thing you probably don’t own. Most likely outcome will be me posting videos on some alternative video platform. Looking at rumble.com (I wish Amazon got into hosting videos like this, being at the place to buy seems the best place if you fail to fix).

IMO youtube is the primary platform where those looking for videos will search first up. Thing is that if you have a large number of videos, you never know when one of them will get you a large number of views and subscribers. Or maybe in future google will have different goalposts for monetization. Overall, it is always good to have videos on youtube even if you are not monetizing them.

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

#795

Post by ratww »

bobsmooth wrote: post #557
junaru wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> YouTube Vanced I get why they want to stay anonymous but that website is no different from any other malware site - no source, no authors just some affiliate links. Putting your google credentials in an app like that is not something people should be comfortable with.

https://github.com/YTVanced

This doesn't seem to contain the source code for the app itself.

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

#796

Post by account42 »

deergomoo wrote: post #652
WA wrote: post #567

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, you can buy YouTube premium and have no ads.

I happily pay for YouTube Premium because I watch tons of niche stuff that creators are able to make a living off. YouTube has a lot of problems, and the ads for non-Premium users are probably going too far, but I find a lot of value in consuming and supporting a wealth of high quality content on obscure topics.

I do support some creators (as directly as possible) but honestly I prefer content where money was never an incentive. Ultimately it's up to creators to find ways of funding their passions and just because ads are the easiest way to do that right now does not mean that we have to support that. I also don't think I'd get bored if all ad-supported content just vanished and even if I did it would be worth it to force creators to find less manipulative funding sources. Or we could do away with all of that and make sure everyone has enough to live no matter what they do - but people would rather pay megacorporations than pay higher taxes that can be redistributed to creators.

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

#797

Post by diffeomorphism »

lolinder wrote: post #240
diffeomorphism wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is supposed to be shady about it? Their definition of "acceptable" seems straightforward and paying for certification seems like a pretty standard business model. If they were to bend their definition for money, that woukd be shady. Do they?

The last time I used AdBlock Plus, I was horrified to discover that they considered Taboola (the clickbait network that, at least at the time, used shocking images to draw attention) to be "acceptable". I was browsing the web with AdBlock Plus and found myself assaulted by an image of someone's fungus-infected toenail or something similarly nauseating. I went to report it as a mistake on their forums only to find the…

> The only way I can imagine ads like that made it onto their list was by paying really good money.

So it is just your imagination. Their definition of "acceptable" is here:

https://adblockplus.org/acceptable-ads#criteria

> Whatever definition of "acceptable" they were using, I wanted no part of it.

You did not even read it, but just immediately jumped to "shady"/bribery....

> I wanted no part of it.

Me neither, but you spreading misinformation is not okay.

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

#798

Post by account42 »

Ygg2 wrote: post #737
scubbo wrote: post #579

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Situation is that dire. 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 blocke…

> [...] was actually malware. As in Defender was activated.

I don't doubt that plenty of ads are malware but let's not pretend that Defender does not have tons of false positives or that MS cares about preventing them.

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

#799

Post by account42 »

recursive wrote: post #644
sebastien_b wrote: post #374

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…

If it's not detecting malware, then it's not a malware blocker. As far as I know, ad blockers work based on host name and css selectors. If there was an actual anti-malware that was so trivially bypass-able, it would be laughed out of the room. uBO blocks hosts of advertisers. AFAIK they don't distinguish between malware and non-malware, nor do they detect malware from other sources.

The people embedding the ads or even delivering them are not neccessarily malicious (in the malware sense at least). Also, as long as most people don't block ads they don't have as much incentive to counteract ad blockers. So at least for now ad blocking remains effective for both malicious and benign ad payloads.

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

#800

Post by Fiahil »

dredmorbius wrote: post #790
Fiahil wrote: post #789

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do I block Youtube ads on LG web OS ? Pihole doesn't work, they serve the ads on the same domain as the video content.

Invidious. https://invidious.snopyta.org/feed/popular

I would be happy to try it, if it was available on the LG content store...
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