It's immoral that you cannot turn off videos in a browser and/or that this isn't the default option on phones.
> cannot turn off videos in a browser
But ublock, VPN and DNS blockers are available on mobile
Ads chew through half of mobile data
161–170 of 256 posts
Re: Ads chew through half of mobile data
#162Maybe the ISP should start charging the ad network instead of the user for ad traffic. Then they can start blocking the ads of people who don't pay. The user, who pays for the service, is getting no value out of the ads and the advertiser is freeloading the ISP's technical infrastructure and userbase.
The internet as you know it is the value you get out of ads. You may hate ads, we all do, but at least recognize the hand that feeds you. The alternative is subscriptions for everything, and as far as I can tell that is far less popular than the ad model we have.
I have zero ads on my blog and instead I ask my readers to buy my books on my e-shop.
Works well, last year I sold 5000 books this way.
Re: Ads chew through half of mobile data
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
The internet as you know it is the value you get out of ads. You may hate ads, we all do, but at least recognize the hand that feeds you. The alternative is subscriptions for everything, and as far as I can tell that is far less popular than the ad model we have.
The valuable parts of the internet are, with few exceptions, ad-free. Forums like HN, personal blogs and sites, paid services—these are the places where real value is to be found on the internet. The ad-funded content and services are almost universally low quality and designed exclusively to hack brains to keep them scrolling, not provide real value. What few exceptions there are to this rule are not worth the enorm…
Is this really true? Virtually all news sites, regardless what side you agree with, have ads. Basically all entertainment has ads (or subscriptions). Productivity stuff is either full of sales or upsells, aka ads, or alternatively sell your data (for future ads).
Those are all valuable things. The ad free ones are the exceptions. More over they only exist ad free because the money comes from elsewhere.
Re: Ads chew through half of mobile data
#164Surprising they don't mention what I imagine has to be the obvious culprit: video ads. It's not even about advertising for me -- static ads don't bother me that much. But whenever there's autoplaying video in the corner of a page, I hate it so much. Whether it's an ad, or a news site that inexplicably thinks I want to multitask and watch their news channel at the same time I read their article. It's genuinely hard to…
Firefox has an option to turn autoplay (sound and video) off for those ads that get past ublock origin.
Ads work around lack of autoplay by loading massive image filmstrips containing video frames (often split across hundreds of image files), and animating that in JS or CSS. This has all the annoyance of autoplay, with even worse bandwidth and memory usage.
Re: Ads chew through half of mobile data
#165Maybe the ISP should start charging the ad network instead of the user for ad traffic. Then they can start blocking the ads of people who don't pay. The user, who pays for the service, is getting no value out of the ads and the advertiser is freeloading the ISP's technical infrastructure and userbase.
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Re: Ads chew through half of mobile data
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
The internet as you know it is the value you get out of ads. You may hate ads, we all do, but at least recognize the hand that feeds you. The alternative is subscriptions for everything, and as far as I can tell that is far less popular than the ad model we have.
They could serve non-targeted text ads. Those are very cheap to deliver and seem to work fine.
If the ads were just text-based and related to the content I visit at the time rather than "me" I would have much less hate towards them.
If I visit a webpage about CPUs I am probably interested in CPUs, maybe I am building a PC, send me ads about that which I may actually find useful. Why would you send me irrelevant ads about gardening just because I am into that also? If I am looking to buy a CPU I am not gonna click on something irrelevant like that.
Re: Ads chew through half of mobile data
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
The internet as you know it is the value you get out of ads. You may hate ads, we all do, but at least recognize the hand that feeds you. The alternative is subscriptions for everything, and as far as I can tell that is far less popular than the ad model we have.
I do not get this argument at all. We all eventually bear the cost of ads by them adding cost to the products being advertised that we buy. Nothing is free.
There’s value ad with ads targeting. Otherwise we go back to the Television days when everyone watched the same ads
Re: Ads chew through half of mobile data
#168(Video portals aside) The text you want to read: a few kilobytes. The (oeconomical, an economical) cost of the ads surrounding it: several dozen to a hundred megabytes. You cannot convince me that this _isn't_ unsustainable quackery that got out of hands really, really bad.
Unsustainable for who? The websites use CDNs for dirt cheap bandwidth, mobile providers love that 20gb doesn’t go as far as it used to. It inevitably creates a synergy, between stuff like news websites and local telcos, and YouTube love it too. hell, it’s not like all bandwidth cost the same, especially when major orgs will cache + colocate or peer to your isps. If you’re a consumer you might be right, but your opini…
>Unsustainable for who?
Bandwidth is never free from environmental impact, and given the same server/CDN/whatever the environmental impact will increase monotonously with increasing bandwidth use.
Besides the FBI recommending it for security, running a good adblocker is one of the most "green" ways to reduce your footprint from internet usage.
Regardless of how efficient the CDN, it still has a lower footprint to not connect to it at all.
>hell, it’s not like all bandwidth cost the same
Re: Ads chew through half of mobile data
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
The valuable parts of the internet are, with few exceptions, ad-free. Forums like HN, personal blogs and sites, paid services—these are the places where real value is to be found on the internet. The ad-funded content and services are almost universally low quality and designed exclusively to hack brains to keep them scrolling, not provide real value. What few exceptions there are to this rule are not worth the enorm…
Is this really true? Virtually all news sites, regardless what side you agree with, have ads. Basically all entertainment has ads (or subscriptions). Productivity stuff is either full of sales or upsells, aka ads, or alternatively sell your data (for future ads). Those are all valuable things. The ad free ones are the exceptions. More over they only exist ad free because the money comes from elsewhere.
> Virtually all news sites, regardless what side you agree with, have ads.
Virtually all news sites, regardless of what side you agree with, are composed mostly of garbage designed to draw your attention, not inform you about things that really matter. They may provide some value in addition to that, but the advertising model ensures that they must hack your attention as their primary goal.
> Basically all entertainment has ads (or subscriptions).
Similarly, our entertainment options were better before they had to be designed to keep you on a specific streaming platform for a certain length of time.
> Productivity stuff is either full of sales or upsells, aka ads, or alternatively sell your data (for future ads).
Depends on who you're buying productivity stuff from. My Fastmail account does just fine with no ads and no data sales, and covers basically everything I need. Most other "productivity" tools I've tried have felt palpably exploitative.
> More over they only exist ad free because the money comes from elsewhere.
Ad-funded products are a civilization-wide trap like credit card rewards. They create an illusion that things are coming for free, but companies don't do this out of charity—they pay for ads because they have good data that strongly suggests that the people who see them will, on average, pay them back and more.
I'd rather make the cost of a service explicit than hide it behind hard-to-quantify behavioral hacks.
Re: Ads chew through half of mobile data
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
A solution for you and some other tech savvy individuals; not a great solution for the rest of my family. Plus, it ignores the systemic problem in exchange for personal one-off bandaids.
Many homes can run whole their route. Im curious how much time or money you’d be willing to invest and spend monthly to have this solved simply?
Homes, sure - what about mobile devices? What about the rest of my family who's not at home? What about the sysadmin work I'll have to put in to support this?