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Absolutely, I've been saying this for years. The line between advertisement and content is one that's been around for decades longer than the Web, and for good
by wutbrodo 11y ago
Absolutely, I've been saying this for years. The line between advertisement and content is one that's been around for decades longer than the Web, and for good reason. And yet for some reason, those who defend ad-blockers as 'good for the web' are either too ignorant or too apathetic to understand that if increasing adblocker usage makes it intractable to provide free content when ads are easily distinguishable from content, then the majority of content that survives will break down that barrier. The collateral damage of rendering adblockers useless is skewing every webpage towards the content that the interested party with the deepest pockets wants.
It's particularly ridiculous when you consider that there's easy analogies to this that even the most clueless of adblocker users should be able to understand: if Google stopped distinguishing between ads and organic results, there would (rightly) be a huge outcry. One would have to be a fool not to understand that pushing the entire Web in that direction would be correspondingly more devastating.
- adslingerssuck 11y agoCan you hear that? It's the sound of the ad-slingers crying into their breakfast. Can you hear that? It's the sound of users cheering for a faster, sleeker, less malware drived web experience. I would say go cry me a ad river, but it doesn't matter - my browser blocks it!
- wutbrodo 11y agoI'm assuming you're a bot, or at the very least some sort of reverse-Turing test performance art in which you send generic and irrelevant replies to comments that match certain substrings. That's very cute, but adults are trying to have a conversation here, so shoo.
- orkoden 11y agoMagazines and newspapers have been disguising advertisements as articles for as longs as they have existed. Why is this one restaurant, album, book reviewed and not the other? How are the list of cool and hot fashion articles curated?
- wutbrodo 11y agoJust because codes of ethics are sometimes violated doesn't make them not useful. Consider the outcry that happens whenever a serious publication has even a minor failure to disclose (Stephanopoulous, Olbermann, etc). Now consider what kind of deterrent that must have on journalists for taking cash for favorable news coverage.