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Two Out of Three Young Millennials Now Use an Ad Blocker
- throwawayReply 10y agoYoung Millenials? Are they different to "Young persons"? And what is an "Old Millenial"? Why not just describe the group of 18-24 year olds as "Young adults", which is what they are.
- Endy 10y agoBecause "those darn, entitled, millennials!" is a thing. It's a way to get a reaction.
- k_sh 10y agoAs a millennial, I almost always stop reading when someone unironically uses "millennial"
- Klathmon 10y agoBecause Millennials is the most catchy term for a generation in a while (compared to gen x/y anyway), and so they keep extending what it applies to. As someone born in 1991, I genuinely thought I was really close to the end of the "millennial" generation, but apparently i'm almost a "young millennial"...
- amyjess 10y agoThe Strauss & Howe definition is that Millennials were born 1982-2004. Generations typically last 20 years or so, so you're smack in the middle.
- dTal 10y agoBecause the author wishes to contextualize it as "sign of the times", rather than a property of their age (that they may grow out of).
- dice 10y ago>what is an "Old Millenial"? Someone currently in their early-to-mid 30s. End of Gen X, beginning of Millennials.
- zorked 10y agoWhat happened to Gen Y. Not catchy enough?
- thatfrenchguy 10y agoToo many people from Grn Y don't ask enough questions :/
- johnchristopher 10y agoDigital natives drove them to extinction.
- coldpie 10y agoCorrect.
- msbarnett 10y agoYeah. "Millennial" is the catchier brand name for what was at one point being called "Gen Y". It's essentially a born on or after 1980 catchall
- amyjess 10y agoOn the official forums for Strauss & Howe generational theory, the community uses "Gen Y" to refer to late-wave Gen X-ers and early-wave Millennials who have some of the social characteristics of both generations due to being on the cusp. The exact years are nebulously-defined (cusps typically are, since they're unofficial extensions of the theory), but I've seen it defined as wide as people born 1977-1988. Mid-80s are almost universally accepted as part of the cusp, but how early or how late it extends beyond that seems to vary.
- intopieces 10y agoMillenial is a marketing term and the story is about marketing.
- bbctol 10y agoNobody knows. Anyone born between 1980 and 2005 is at risk of the label. It just means "those dang kids with their computer boxes."
- makapuf 10y agoWell, I think anyone that refers to something to browse the Web as a box is clearly saved from that label. (I do)
- epalmer 10y agoI was born in 1953 and I have a label. I'm a baby boomer. I'd rather be called a old curmudgeon or an old bald headed guy.
- whamlastxmas 10y agoThat's probably only because you have the cognizance to be shameful of what other people your age have done and are doing to the world. Most baby boomers don't have this.
- roymurdock 10y agoBecause it got you to click
- rayiner 10y agoOld millennials are me I guess (born early-mid 1980s). Young enough not to have a land line or cable, but old enough to have a wife and kids.
- p0nce 10y ago"Millenials" is always used in combination with derogatory terms like "entitled, lazy, hopeless". Sometimes I wonder if boomers have _any_ idea of the frantic pace of today's workplace and how little power you can hope for, regardless of how much you work.
- crdoconnor 10y agoIt's used to try and drive a wedge between the elderly and the young so that the old will be apathetic about fighting against onerous student debt/shitty entry level jobs and the young will be apathetic about fighting the drive to destroy medicare, privatize social security, etc. Divide et Impera, etc. Unlike other propaganda attempts this one actually works pretty well.
- zeveb 10y ago> Sometimes I wonder if boomers have _any_ idea of the frantic pace of today's workplace and how little power you can hope for, regardless of how much you work. Millennials have as much or more power than the boomers did when they started working. The difference is that they expect more, because they spent their childhoods getting participation trophies and being waited on hand and foot by adults concerned for their comfort and 'safety.' In the real world, the reward for doing exactly what is expected of you isn't promotion: it's that you keep your job. In the real world, sometimes you're expected to sacrifice for your goals.
- whamlastxmas 10y ago> The difference is that they expect more, because they spent their childhoods getting participation trophies and being waited on hand and foot by adults concerned for their comfort and 'safety.' Bullshit. If millennials expect more, it's because they see the standard of living their parents and grandparents have and have had their entire life. They own homes that have gone up in value 5 fold. They owned homes at an early age. They got high paying jobs easily and costs of living were low. Youth and young adult unemployment rates are shit if you don't ignore the "discouraged workers". We have expectations for young adults to take on tremendous levels of debt like never before. Housing prices are higher than ever before. Healthcare is more expensive than ever before. Millennials are having to pay into a social security system they see their parents or grandparents benefiting from, knowing (or often not knowing) they'll never get those same benefits despite all the money paid in. The baby boomers are handing the millennials an entirely fucked up world. The environment is a disaster, politics are a disaster, the perpetual war and crony capitalism of the MIC is a disaster. Things will only get better once the boomers die off and we can rid ourselves of the "fuck you, got mine" generation.
- temp2016 10y agoMillennials Don't Exist! Adam Conover at Deep Shift - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-HFwok9SlQQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-HFwok9SlQQ
- TACIXAT 10y agoEveryone should install Millennials to Snake People. It's a great addon that makes the internet way better. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/millennials-to-snake-peop/jhkibealmjkbkafogihpeidfcgnigmlf?hl=en-US https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/millennials-to-sna...
- aqme28 10y agoI loved that add-on until they started adding a bunch of other filters that really aren't particularly funny (Great Recession -> Time of Shedding and Cold Rocks).
- MOARDONGZPLZ 10y agoThe Pure extension is a fork that ONLY does the one conversion. Much better: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/millennials-to-snake-peop/ekkcdmnckghgcbgkdfbafpgepbmkjhnd https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/millennials-to-sna...
- idlewords 10y agoIt's a wonderful plugin, and it also has some great easter eggs in it for terms like 'Great Recession'. It saved the Internet for me.
- cabbeer 10y agoI prefer the cloud to butt extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cloud-to-butt-xkcd-editio/ikihjpnkbmfljcadhgdkpnfabgdkpeng?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cloud-to-butt-xkcd...
- TACIXAT 10y agoI had that installed for a while and totally forgot about it. Then I was very confused for a few months about people putting the word Butt in their new product offerings. Then I realized it and uninstalled because I felt silly.
- guntars 10y ago
- pnathan 10y agoAn interesting point came through on Twitter yesterday: ads for/on TV are increasingly seen only by "the olds". This is going to be a fascinating turn of the worm as cord-based TV implodes further.
- officemonkey 10y agoI've cut the cord 10 years ago, and (because I don't watch any sports) I _seldom_ watch live TV (Oscars, New Year's Eve, Thanksgiving Day Parade are some notable exceptions.) My son (who never had broadcast TV) learned how to push the "skip ad" button on Youtube years before he could read.
- fatlasp 10y agoI temporarily disabled ghostery yesterday and ended up visiting the LA Times. Without an adblocker the loading / performance / experience was horrific! Long live the ad-free web!
- eistrati 10y agoWould you use LA Times if we'd convince them to implement the following user experience: https://demo.adtechmedia.io/atm-core/nytimes/www.nytimes.com/2016/07/04/technology/why-tech-support-is-purposely-unbearable.html https://demo.adtechmedia.io/atm-core/nytimes/www.nytimes.com... NOTE: Above article is from NY Times and is ONLY for demo purposes :)
- jzymbaluk 10y agoI thought when I first saw that page that it could be defeated with a simple inspect element, but it looks like when the atm-blurry is removed from the paragraph id's that the paragraphs themselves were all gibberish! I wonder if the text is randomly generated or if it's some kind of text-cypher. Either way, this type of paywall experience is significantly less annoying than a pop-up, but I personally would still be unlikely to pay for a subscription
- eistrati 10y agoCool feedback. Thank you! This approach doesn't get you to subscription (although technically it could), but rather allow you to read without unblocking or whitelisting adblockers, and without subscribing or sharing your personal data.
- j4_james 10y agoInterestingly the text is garbled after it's loaded. So if you view the page with JavaScript disabled, the original text is completely readable (no blur effect either). I assume this is an attempt to make the page accessible to robots but not to humans.
- buckbova 10y ago
- y_u_no_rust 10y agoAdBlockers are pretty much required to browse the internet, only a fool wouldn't use one
- jobu 10y agoAs the most technical person in my network of friends and family I'm often the one they go to for computer help. For years one of the first things I do if I touch their computers is install uBlock. Lately a couple of them have gotten new computers and mentioned that they think it came with a virus because there ads everywhere on the internet.
- Kiro 10y agoI hope you inform them before installing it. If someone installed something that's tampering with my browsing experience without telling me I would be pretty mad.
- ky738 10y agoyeah right! i don't know very much how to use a computer so i asked my cousin who is a professional hacker haha to set up the programs i use! i was blaffed to know that he installed a plug-in (that's how you spell it right?) that blocked all the ads that would appear in a website! how could i enjoy surfing the web without ads? real life has ads everywhere i go, so i called him immediately and ordered that he removed this "virus" that removed the ads!
- narrowrail 10y agoSince you appear to want to learn, I won't feel bad (or pedantic) in explaining that he installed an extension, which is a browser add-on. A plug-in is also a browser add-on, but is used to describe QuickTime, Flash, Java, etc. After I wrote the above, I double checked myself and, apparently, I am using Mozilla's definition. However, it seems Apple also differentiates among the terms add-on (the super-set), and extensions/ plug-ins (subsets).
- exergy 10y agoThere was an '/s' missing in his post.
- libraryatnight 10y ago
- saosebastiao 10y agoI'm not where my position is relative to the rest of my generation, but for me it's all about practicality. I have no vendetta against advertising and I don't think it is inherently evil. I don't think it makes for a good content publishing model, but that is the content publishers choice. What bothers me is how intrusive and obnoxious they are. Large ads that pop up or take up 3/4 of the screen, can't click out because the [x] button is too small, making me wait to watch an ad with no escape hatch, video with loud volume, popunders, etc. it just got out of hand, so I opted out completely.
- tdb7893 10y agoI don't have any moral problem with ads and companies need to make money so I don't have an adblocker and I just don't visit sites with obnoxious ads. 90% of the sites I visit (i.e. google, facebook, stackoverflow, reddit, hackernews, xkcd, netflix, etc...) don't have annoying ads. Oddly enough the only times I have really regretted turning off my ad blocker is when I'm watching videos where an unskippable ad longer than 10 seconds comes up or I go to some news site (which seems to 3/4 of the time have some full page popup or autoplaying video).
- coldpie 10y ago> I don't have any moral problem with ads and companies need to make money so I don't have an adblocker and I just don't visit sites with obnoxious ads. How do you keep track? What about drive-by exploits that could infect your computer on first visit? Or mobile ads that redirect to the app store?
- tdb7893 10y agoI know to just avoid most news site except for maybe 5 or 10 that don't have terrible ads (5-10 isn't that hard to just remember). Mobile ads that redirect to the store are annoying and there's no great way to deal with them but I don't seem to run into those much where I go (maybe happens to me twice a week). Other than those the only real concern is drive-by exploits from legitimate ad networks, which doesn't seem to happen very often in the wild.
- ryandvm 10y agoAd blocking is a textbook case of "prisoners' dilemma". And as someone that uses an ad blocker, I find the increasing popularity of ad blockers unnerving.
- stevesearer 10y agoThis is why I self-host my advertising and try to make them as high quality and relevant as possible (no animation, popups, etc). I have no idea if the concept could be replicated to other content verticals, but it has worked well for me.
- _rpd 10y agoThank you. I really hope that you set the trend.
- grive 10y agoThat's assuming losing the content creators serving ads would be a loss for internet users. Given that there exist people that hold this opinion, their own view about using an ad blocker is not at all in the same context than in the prisoners dilemma. Thus the dilemma is biased, to an extent directly proportional to the number of people holding this opinion. If it is biased, the standard game theory analysis does not apply directly. i.e. the best move might not be to suffer ads for no long term gain. More prosaically, I do not care in the slightest if people living in selling ads disappeared completely from internet. They are a cancer, ads are a cancer to the utopia that internet was for a short time. We need come back to this state. We will, actually, by empowering users.
- ryandvm 10y ago> More prosaically, I do not care in the slightest if people living in selling ads disappeared completely from internet. They are a cancer, ads are a cancer to the utopia that internet was for a short time. Excellent response, but on this particular point, I'd suggest you are being intellectually dishonest - or at least overly simplifying things. You use an ad blocker precisely because there is content you want to see. To claim that you don't care if the content you are trying to see disappears from the Internet is rather silly.
- _RPM 10y agoWhat's the sample size here?
- ahsvduabs 10y ago3
- douche 10y agoWho in that age cohort didn't experience the wild west days of shady Flash and Java applets, Punch the Monkey games, RealPlayer, Shockwave, Internet Explorer and all the other insecure crap we used to deal with. Raise your hand if you never got a virus and almost bricked the family computer doing something mostly innocuous... Ad-blocking may not be as essential to self-defense as it used to be, but old habits die hard.
- kaybe 10y agoOnly the things we defend again change, not the need for defense.
- Nadya 10y ago>Ad-blocking may not be as essential to self-defense as it used to be, but old habits die hard. Possibly even more relevant nowadays than it used to be with more drive-by malware, 0-day exploits, and more and more people using the internet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malvertising https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malvertising http://arstechnica.com/security/2016/03/big-name-sites-hit-by-rash-of-malicious-ads-spreading-crypto-ransomware/ http://arstechnica.com/security/2016/03/big-name-sites-hit-b...
- phhlho 10y agoNow if only there was a feature on ad blockers that blocked all the crummy youtube videos my daughter watches that are effectively 20 minute ads of people playing with toys.
- coldpie 10y agoYou are the ad blocker! But really don't worry, it's nothing new. The 80s and 90s were filled with advertisements-as-TV-shows.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- mars4rp 10y agoI hate Ads as much as next guy, but what will be the future of the internet without the Ads? where the revenue comes from? do we have to pay for every site that we use? I prefer a free content internet with reasonable amount of ads!!
- stevesearer 10y agoAs a publisher, even I find myself using ad blockers on certain websites that are totally unusable without them. One problem is that most sites seem to think of advertising as adding value for themselves and the advertiser. Advertising can and should actually add value for readers with a good example being the job listings here on HN. I think some % of publishers will have to try and adopt better advertising practices (plus maybe offer some additional paid features), and those that do will be able to survive.
- mitchty 10y agoSame as the past probably before Ads. I'm willing to pay for content, but honestly only up to how much a site would get from me for an ad impression. I am not going to do $N/mo/yr for X sites however. Once I found out the sum total of what my ad impressions for every site amounts to about $10/yr, I am really annoyed that the ad industry and content publishers aren't coming up with their own google contributor type deal. Free content isn't worth the cost in Ads. By this I mean the bandwidth, the cpu/energy use, and the cognitive cost. The monetary cost for people is insane. I'd pay $20/year to tell ad companies to go away and let companies replace my ad impression with a micro transaction equivalent. Until then, screw the whole industry, ad blockers it is. Give me a real choice or accept that reality.
- CaptSpify 10y agoWhat is your source for $10/year? That's quite interesting
- mitchty 10y agohttps://air.mozilla.org/subscribe2web/ https://air.mozilla.org/subscribe2web/ It was actually $6.20/year at that time. I've been generous with the $10/yr. I also consider $20/year a win for consumption companies as that would mean we could outbid ads for our own eyes. It seems stupid to have to say that but you'd be surprised how little money an individual makes on their own.
- awjr 10y agoI use an Ad Blocker, but happily unblock sites that ask if I see they are not running a large number of scripts. However the reason I installed the Ad Blocker in the first place is the way some local newspaper sites in the UK (run by http://www.localworld.co.uk/ http://www.localworld.co.uk/) will try and run 50+ scripts and make it almost impossible to read the article. It was a defence reaction to abusive web sites.
- unclenoriega 10y agoJust yesterday, I was about to turn off uBlock for a certain site, then I noticed it had blocked ~30 things on the page. No thanks.
- sliverstorm 10y agoIt's baffling how bad news websites can be, it almost seems intentional. Displaying text is one of the simplest jobs, and yet somehow your typical local news website is one of the most complicated, infuriating and burdensome websites out there.
- Altaer 10y agoI have a similar use case. I generally visit websites with adblock disabled, but will turn it on when I know I'm going to a website that has a lot of invasive ads. I would happily download an ad blocker that had a pre-populated white list of some sort.
- sofaofthedamned 10y agoLocal World are the worst offenders by far, their sites are unusable sometimes - full screen popups without a close button for example, especially on mobile. Add that to their removal of experienced staff and replacing them with 18 year olds that think news is what you find when you search Twitter for your home town, or 'is this Gloucestershire's largest chip?' deserving of 4 'stories', it's no wonder local newspapers in the UK are going down hard. Also, this deserves a mention: http://dniln.blogspot.co.uk/ http://dniln.blogspot.co.uk/
- kevindeasis 10y agoQuestion: How do companies that rely on ads plan to make money in the future?
- mrmondo 10y agoEven my grandfather (in his 80s) uses one and when I asked him where he got the idea for using it he said "I got sick of all the spam and thought I might get a virus so searched for ' block ads / pop ups and installed the first one I found, I guess it could be doing bad things itself but websites load so much faster now!" - pretty amazing invasive ads are now that they lead the elderly to a search engine for a fix! (Not an easy thing to do at the best of times!)
- macns 10y agoI really wonder in what % of the elder people your grandfather is and what does that mean evolution-wise e.g from an end user perspective, how much of that is google accountable for or, if you prefer, any other search engine.
- philipkglass 10y agoI browse most of the time without extensions other than a cookie editor, since I've encountered a number of weird bugs in my company's own product that turned out not to be bugs but weird interactions with browser extensions I was running. I also read a lot of news articles both on big sites like the WSJ and whatever regional news outlets turn up in my news searches. That is to say that ad networks should (presumably) have a great profile on me and be able to show super-relevant ads. But I still get Linode ads for weeks if I make the mistake of visiting Linode outside incognito mode (I've been a customer there for 5 years; I don't need another ad prompting me to sign up). I still get ads for things that I've just bought instead of complementary goods for the things I've just bought. I still see absolutely insulting garbage ads for One Weird Trick that $GROUP hates. It's the offensively stupid Taboola/Outbrain etc. bottom-of-the-barrel ads that repulse and puzzle me the most. My memory says -- and scanned newspaper archives confirm -- that back before online news was a thing, regional newspapers had plenty of advertising but it was advertising for normal goods and services: snow tires, a clothing sale, lawn care, oil changes, etc. Shortly after the turn of the millennium I thought that online advertising was going to be kind of scary due to the profiles advertisers could build up on me but also kind of nice because I'd always see ads that aligned with my interests, instead of e.g. randomly bombarding me with ads for baby diapers in hopes that I am a new parent. Ha, if only. The most noticeable difference between small news outlet ads now and 30 years ago isn't that the ads I see are now all eerily aligned with my interests; it's that worst of them are aggressively misaligned with my interests and with the interests of anyone who's not a total fucking rube. Who actually believes that they've won the iPhone giveaway contest or that they need a weird trick to clean the dangerous fluoride toxins from their tap water? I've never clicked on this trash but I appear doomed to encounter it forever.
- chadgeidel 10y agoI often joke that I'll believe "The machines are taking over" immediately after I get a relevant ad on Facebook. Of all places - they should know exactly what I like and what I would buy. They haven't got a clue.
- ojbyrne 10y ago
- fbreduc 10y agothere is a reason for this, and that reason is ABUSE. you know... one or two small well placed ads fine.. but what you get are situations where content is tiny, and really it's just about seeing who can spam you the most ads half of which serve malware.
- TheRealPomax 10y agoWhat's a "young" millenial? Isn't the term a derogatory for someone born in a specific decade already?
- ryandrake 10y agoIf you're in my house and got your IP address from my DHCP server, you're ad blocking without even having to lift a finger, thanks to dnsmasq and several volunteer-maintained ad blocking hosts files. Similar method to what Pi-hole [1] does. It doesn't get everything but it's a nice default starting point. 1: http://jacobsalmela.com/block-millions-ads-network-wide-with-a-raspberry-pi-hole-2-0/ http://jacobsalmela.com/block-millions-ads-network-wide-with...
- post_break 10y agoWhats the throughput? Can it handle speedy internet?
- ryandrake 10y agoIt operates at the DNS level, preventing known ad hosts from even resolving, so it should have no negative effect on your throughput. It could only speed things up since requests to those domains are never made.
- kazinator 10y agoNot so dumb after all! Blo-cker! Blo-cker! ... who o o uh-oh! G - E G - E A C D E-D (Repeat, ad nauseum).
- dionidium 10y agoThey make you do it. I just installed Adblock this morning, actually. I have been holding out this long. But some horrible -- I mean, truly horrible -- browsing experiences on a couple newspaper websites this morning pushed me over the line. One can only take so much.
- mkalv 10y agoI started using an adblocker in the aughts after a site I frequented served up a drive-by download from an infected ad network. Because of this, I never disable it even for sites I like.
- thecosas 10y agoThere needs to be a balance between wanting things "for free" and viewing ads (especially for news sites). It's gotten really aggressive the past few years, especially for local news, mostly because they were ill-prepared for the shift in advertising. Staff cuts (as ad revenue plummeted) surely included all of the "web people" with that work being outsourced. Many local news shops are hanging on by a thread; unfortunately that thread is reinforced by their website carpeted in advertising.
- Fordrus 10y agoOf COURSE we do, half of the websites you visit these days will crash the browser regularly if you don't use an ad-blocker! (half is probably an overstatement ;) Nevertheless, I was resolutely trying to be 'moral' and not use and ad blocker until my browser began to regularly crash and I traced the crashes to ads. That issue may be fixed now for all I know, but I can't really go back, though I still try to whitelist sites that I want to have a bit of support, and pay for others somehow, here or there. :) )
- anotherevan 10y agoI keep sayin', they're not ad blockers, they're HTML firewalls.
- deelowe 10y agoIt's about to get interesting. A lot of internet services depend on ads.