121–130 of 147 posts
Say what you say but EU/Europeans are overregulating everything with UK trying to end privacy. Regulations like USB C on all electronics is nice but these are not.
Who could possibly be in favor of this? Like sure industry lobbying is strong but could any politician really argue they're acting in the interest of their constituents with this?
The big picture includes:
• A large majority of the politician's constituents each regularly use several large websites that cost a lot of money to run, and the constituents would be upset if those sites went away. Someone has to pay for those sites. Ads are the most common way that is currently done.
• Almost nobody likes ads other than in some exceptional cases [1].
• Most people dislike paid subscriptions. This dislike grows exponentially as the number of subscriptions they need to cover the content they want goes up.
• Many people think they would like micropayments but would likely change their mind once that actually became an options. If people have to pay money they tend to greatly prefer predictable monthly costs. It's not necessarily rational, but for many people if they see they spent $1.26 on YouTube videos in one month and $2.76 in the next month they are going to be annoyed even though they watched a lot more videos that second month.
• Some sort of Spotify or Netflix for the Web type thing might work, but as with subscriptions if you have to use more than one of these types of service people will be annoyed.
• Another approach would be to make the web version of the site limited, and require using an app for full functionality. A social media site for example might only allow reading on the web, so if you want to post or comment you need to use the app where they have much more control than they do on the web.
If ad blocking becomes widespread enough and effective enough that sites do have to switch to some other revenue source it is quite possible that a majority of a politician's constituents will in retrospect find that they preferred the ad supported model.
Good politicians should be trying to figure out what would make their constituents happiest in the long run and find ways to encourage things to end up that way.
In the long run what would probably make most people happy (or rather make them the least unhappy) would be ad supported sites with restrictions on the ads to limit intrusiveness and tracking.
[1] For example many people like the ads that run during the Super Bowl in the US. A lot of people with no interest in the football game watch just to see the ads.
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I'm totally with you on this one. And I was an early tech adopter, using a dialup modem (long distance!) to get access to Usenet news. If a site has ads, and I can't block them, I'm not using that site.
The person I replied to didn't say they'll boycott a website, but rather "world wide web", as in the internet. If you take a quick look at their activity on HN, you can see they are a prolific submitter/commenter. I find it a bit amusing that someone's whos active than 99% of the people who frequent HN can just simply quit internet (and not an ad-ridden website).
A friend raised what I consider a very valid point, that ad blockers are assistive technology for people with ADHD. They prevent the web from being an unusable mess of shiny distraction. And as such, in America, blocking ad blockers is a violation of the ADA. I’m being completely serious here and so is he. I can barely use the web without ad blockers. They make it possible for me to participate in online life. Remove…
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While I am a huge fan of ad blockers, and as some one with ADHD I am very sympathetic to the argument, I suspect that your friend is not a lawyer, and/or is not very familiar with the limitations of the ADA.
He is not, nor am I, but I don’t see a reason you and I shouldn’t get the same legal protections as other groups. What about blind people who pipe the output of a screen through text-to-speech? Or people with epilepsy who can’t use flashy screens? Or someone who needs to enlarge print or change its contrast? There are plenty of medical reasons to need to alter their browser presentations.
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screen readers / text based browsers / etc.
I don’t want to use a “separate but equal” Internet. Screen readers support very specific situations that don’t apply to me. I see using them as the equivalent of tweaking my knee and having to sit in a wheelchair so that I can just use wheelchair accommodations and call it a day. Nah. I don’t want to use a wheelchair or a screen reader because those devices weren’t made for my own needs and don’t suit me.
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He is not, nor am I, but I don’t see a reason you and I shouldn’t get the same legal protections as other groups. What about blind people who pipe the output of a screen through text-to-speech? Or people with epilepsy who can’t use flashy screens? Or someone who needs to enlarge print or change its contrast? There are plenty of medical reasons to need to alter their browser presentations.
If I wanted to, I could use reader mode for every page. I could try and find and/or generate an RSS feed for every page, but I would do most of the generating. It's just easier and faster to use an ad blocker on top of my browser, and screen reader.
(Nor do I want to have to run malware in my browser, but I think that's a separate argument from the accessibility one.)