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You don't have to have ads at all. The best option is an adblocker, and a non-Chrome-based browser.
by JoshTriplett 6y ago
You don't have to have ads at all. The best option is an adblocker, and a non-Chrome-based browser.
- judge2020 6y agoI'd also like to support websites I visit, though, if I don't have the money to directly donate to them and if I am going to purchase a product anyways (think visiting an amazon product page, leaving it for a day, then clicking an ad for it to give x% to the website). Many websites today wouldn't exist without ads since a lot of their traffic is people who don't go out of their way to donate to websites they find useful. If I can do this without giving up privacy I'll turn off my ad blocker (and I already do for websites I find useful).
- londons_explore 6y agoUsing an adblocker is like stealing candy from the store... They can handle some theft, but if literally everyone stole their candy, the store would close down and nobody can have candy.
- goalieca 6y agoIt’s been said many times, but if the business model is advertising then you’re the product.. not the quality journalism or content. They’ll focus on generating content to increase engagement instead of perfecting what you think it is they are supposed to deliver. Perhaps it is time for an advertising model to die out as the default.
- cortesoft 6y agoOk, then don’t patronize sites supported by ads.
- Nursie 6y agoThis is why I’m more than happy when sites say “adblocker detected, please disable or leave”. I will not render your ads. I’d be happy to put that in the first http request to your site. If that means no site for me, then quite honestly 90% of my browsing is a waste of time anyway.
- simias 6y agoOr they'll move on to a more sustainable business model that doesn't involve selling their user's privacy?
- jshen 6y agoA business model that will exclude the poor.
- jay_kyburz 6y agoLets not pretend that ads help people with less money. Ads are designed to manipulate people into buying things they don't need. They encourage people to believe their self worth is linked to the things they own. That a persons status in society is somehow associated with how much money they have to spend.
- rewq4321 6y ago> Lets not pretend that ads help people with less money. Who's pretending? Ads naturally and quite effectively price-discriminate, and so they do make internet content cheaper for people with less money. You may have problems with excessive consumption, but many people in developing countries do not. They desperately need the free content (educational, informative, and otherwise) that the current internet model provides them.
- jay_kyburz 6y agoThere are much better options to provide people with educational, informative and entertaining content. Well funded public broadcasters like Australia ABC provide news and entertainment content free. (both text and video) Well funded public libraries can provide a wide range of alternate content.
- google234123 6y agoYeah, let's pretend libraries have equivalent content to the free internet!
- rapnie 6y agoI still watch traditional TV. Whenever commercials start I zap to another channel immediately. Would I mind if these commercial channels disappeared? Probably not.
- HeckFeck 6y agoI'm not stealing anything by instructing my computer not to run code against my consent. No one is entitled to my CPU time. Least of all are advertisers. Also, the store isn't freakishly stalking me and noting down all my habits whilst sharing what it has collected with its friends, or indeed anyone who will buy the data. Besides, candy is impossible to replicate in the same way that data is. Theft of physical objects is a materially different act from advert blocking and avoidance. I'm not obligated to view adverts in every public space because they fund the local government. I'm not denied access to the cinema because I arrive 10 minutes after the start time to avoid the adverts. Or back in the day when I taped TV shows and fast-forwarded the adverts, had I a responsibility to view them? They're useless noise that contribute no value to anyone beyond whoever pays for them, and therefore I find it a moral responsibility to limit my exposure to them and restrain the harm they do to others. And curiously, I am much more content and much less impulsive in my spending habits since I installed uBlock.
- nitrogen 6y agoAlso, the store isn't freakishly stalking me and noting down all my habits whilst sharing what it has collected with its friends, or indeed anyone who will buy the data. Many retail stores do, actually, through wireless tracking, cameras, and/or purchase history. They will buy and sell consumer data through the likes of Acxiom. It would be great to have a ublock equivalent for the physical world.
- leephillips 6y agoThere is: paying with cash, not using loyalty cards, and refusing to supply zip codes, phone numbers, and whatever else they rudely ask for get you 92% of the way there. For the rest, you can wear a Groucho mask while in the store. But that only works if Groucho masks become popular.
- jeffgreco 6y agoI would respect the Adblock crowd more if they didn’t run around describing their actions as brave or “morally responsible.” It’s ok to admit that you’re taking something without return!
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- colonwqbang 6y agoUsing an ablocker is more like going to church wearing earplugs.
- hhvn 6y agoUsing an adblocker is more like walking down the street with earplugs that block out a preacher you didn't want to listen to.
- google234123 6y agoA privately owned and maintained street.
- darepublic 6y agoYeah you're just there for the dating not for the sermonizing
- sennight 6y agoLook up the legal definition of "theft". In your analogy the candy would be the user's privacy and attention, which the adblocker denies the store use of. It is only theft if the store owns the user's privacy and attention. Are you so owned?
- 13415 6y agoOn the contrary, the websites who display ads steal screen space on my machine without paying me for it, some of them even steal computing time by running unauthorized scripts.
- lxgr 6y agoBy the same argument you are stealing the website‘s bandwidth by visiting it without clicking on the ads. These reductionist approaches don‘t really help with understanding ads (and communication in general).
- 13415 6y agoI was kidding, of course. Neither running an ad blocker nor running a website that runs script is stealing anything. However, I do run an ad blocker and I'm completely fine if every company that relies on ads for income goes out of business. In fact, I'd appreciate it.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- argvargc 6y agoNo. If advertising became impossible, vendors seeking to compete would be forced to make products good enough to be enthusiastically-shared, word-of-mouth, and everything in the world would be significantly better than it is.
- stjohnswarts 6y agoWell then stop tracking me around the internet and then we'll talk. Ads used to just be 1 direction. Give up the feedback path and I'll be fine as long as I don't get 5 pop ups blocking the article I'm trying to read and THEN fingerprint me and follow me to the next website.
- betterunix2 6y agoThat is a pretty poor argument. There has never been any guarantee that ads will be rendered, and users rapidly learn to ignore areas of the screen where ads typically appear (I have seen user studies to this effect). "Reader mode" will basically prevent ads from being rendered, unless the ads are purely text and are inlined with the main text of the page. Calling ad blockers "theft" is as ridiculous as calling ads themselves "theft" -- after all, the ad companies are using a large fraction of the bandwidth users paid for, and the CPU cycles and electricity on their computers, without having been asked to do so and without having asked permission. If websites really find that ad blockers are killing their revenue, they will switch to a paywall model, and maybe micropayments will finally happen (or perhaps a service that allows users to subscribe to large numbers of websites at a time). Whether or not that is a good thing depends on who you ask.
- gsich 6y agoNo.
- ocdtrekkie 6y agoI used to hold this view, and I argued that exchanging ad impressions for web content was some sort of social contract. I think this would be defensible if not for the massive privacy violations, and the fact that Google and Facebook continually alter the deal, and pay politicians to ensure we have no seat at the table to negotiate.
- HeckFeck 6y agoPreach. I don't consent to tracking. I don't want my browser helping anyone track me in any way. I don't want to be pressured and manipulated into buying things I don't need. Advertising is not moral and I owe nothing to anyone who tries to manipulate me. Websites can move to more efficient and lighter methods of delivery to cover the absence of advertising revenue. Anyone skilled who works in the advertising industry is freed to offer his skills to better human endeavours. Everyone wins.
- somethingAlex 6y agoWhat do you mean by "more efficient and lighter methods of delivery?"
- HeckFeck 6y agoPlainer HTML and very little Javascript which will reduce development and running costs. As witness, this very website. It supplies all that is necessary and no more. It is very successful. With harmful incentives removed, this would encourage websites to focus on good writing and less on being 'content farms' to drive up engagement for the advertisers. All I want from most sites is the text. Not adverts, trackers and those damnable autoplaying videos that jump out and follow me down the page. I use the reader mode in most cases. Why is it necessary to use reader mode if not to cut the useless cruft? Why can't the web just be like that?
- calvinmorrison 6y agoMost cost is producing content, not hosting.
- throwaway3699 6y ago> Anyone skilled who works in the advertising industry is freed to offer his skills to better human endeavours. I don't want to be rude, but won't they just end up losing their livelihoods? If the advertising industry goes, most programmers will see their salaries drop hugely. Even those not working in advertising will see a drop due to the flood of supply.
- dathinab 6y agoHonestly I have no problems with ad's as long as it doesn't involve any tracking (or lets call it what it is spying). If blog or similar can finance part of their cost with Ad's, why not. Sure on slow internet it's a somewhat different matter. Anyway Ad's okay, but tracking for me is spying and should be treated like that, i.e. it should be illegal. There are ways to have personalized ads without it, like local learning which then selects to get an add for a specific topic, with that a side could still track which ads you got, but it would be much less useful as FLoC, and then you add additional steps to even further decrees any chance of tracking. Companies still get implicit feedback by what adds get selected more then others. People can explicitly blacklist annoying (or offensive) adds making sure they don't see them ever again and if enough do so in turn making that app not seen much more at all etc. etc. But the FLoC cohorts are WAY to small/identifiying to not allow you to be tracked fairly easy with it. Just combine it with other identifying aspects of browsers (there are a lot) and I wouldn't be surprised if it's often allows a 100% unique identification. And given that you likely wont be able to "ad-block" FLoC this makes it way worse then the status quo.
- Ntrails 6y agoIf you could give me a world in which ads were always static images with a link behind them and nothing more. Where they never move, never pop, never animate, never play sounds or video, never run scripts etc etc... Yeah, in that world, ads would be ok with me. Sure they're pointless because I won't click on them - but not really worse than having a blank spot in the page because of an ad blocker.
- tremon 6y agoHonestly I have no problems with ad's While I have no problem with the concept itself of advertising, I do have a problem with modern implementations of ads. Almost invariably, they are loud (vocally and visually), intrusive, obnoxious and almost coercive in their use of language. They are intended to dumb down the target audience, rather than enrich their targets' lives. I do have a problem with everything that attacks my ability to think freely.
- admax88q 6y ago