It's even worse than that, first Google will bug you to use Chrome, then bug you to login, then after your search the browser will pop up "Google would like to use your current location". And then the first half-page of results are ads. And half of the actual results are AI slop and a helpful AI summary of the slop. And that's before you even get to the page.
There is a whole lot more to this than just whether content creators or publishes should get paid, and whether there should be ad blockers (and whether they get paid). There are people who have been fed up by this because they remembered how the web was like in the late 90s, before social media pushes became the dominant experience. People have formulated ideas around the Small Web ( https://benhoyt.com/writings/the-…
I get that, but I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about people whose job content is, and who may have had the same job in the 90s, e.g. newspaper journalists. So I'm asking those who don't want to pay for a subscription, but want to use an ad blocker: How does it work? As said, I opted for paying the creator directly, because I hate the ad ecosystem. Seems like a lot of people want to do neither, but still expe…
The only folks expecting the content to "magically continue to exist" are folks who lack information. But folks who do have information may also be totally fine with neither paying for content nor seeing ads; for a lot of us, the content that we watch is pretty transitive and if it went away tomorrow because no one watched any ads, we'd go do something else.
What I always don't understand is: So you don't want to pay for online content, but you also want to use an ad blocker. In summary, you don't want the author or creator to get paid? Personally, I hate ads, so I pay. I have digital subscriptions to the newspapers I read. I have YouTube Premium (because I spend an ungodly amount of time on that site). But for people who want to do neither... what's your idea?
It’s not about having ads, it’s about how they are served, completely ruining the experience.
I don’t get why more people don’t use Brave. It literally blocks all of these annoying things (not only ads) on mobile and desktop and it’s very easy to disable all the crap they add to make money (although I do feel bad and actually writing this made me think to donate if that is an option). Brave search is 80% as good as Google’s too.
I don’t get why more people don’t use Brave. It literally blocks all of these annoying things (not only ads) on mobile and desktop and it’s very easy to disable all the crap they add to make money (although I do feel bad and actually writing this made me think to donate if that is an option). Brave search is 80% as good as Google’s too.
Some have lost trust in Brave given various reports of them selling users data, which conflicts with their messaging as being the "privacy safe browser".
This is glorious, and made me think; is there a reverse-adblock addon that would “click” on all ads it finds on a page and would load them silently in the background..?
There’s https://adnauseam.io/ (posted to HN a few times https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37230898 )
Too bad it fetches the pages via XHR and doesn't attempt to render them, so it's trivially detectable and filtered out.
Lots of us don’t want to pay a dime because it’s like negotiating with terrorists. Do you really expect the people that ruined the web to act nice after the first round of extortion goes well for them? Many paid services still have ads and dark patterns. Those that don’t are waiting for a position of strength (whether that is a market monopoly or just user sunk-cost fallacy to kick in) and then the enshittification w…
> Lots of us don’t want to pay a dime because it’s like negotiating with terrorists. For a concrete example of the implacable amorality of advertising, consider how cable-TV once offered the promise of subscribing to end the ads, but still ended up showing you ads and demanding a subscription fee anyway. Then the same pattern happened again with online streaming services and Youtube: Every would-be savior keeps getti…
Or consider the commuter that is obliged to pay hundreds a week for gas, and is assaulted by ads at obnoxious volumes while they fill up. Or the jet passenger that endures ads on what should be the PA that is reserved for emergency communications, after they’ve been gouged on ticket prices, because hey, why not monetize a captive audience for all they are worth? Does a first class ticket buy the right to avoid harassment? Everything points to “not for long”..
