Wondering how much of the Lemmy user base wouldn’t use an adblocker. If you do use one what other blocking do you use to circumvent data collection, YouTube and reddit front ends and things alike?
My mom uses Edge, told me not to block Facebook ads and clicks on most of the clickbait articles on her MSN home page. It’s like she WANTS them to collect as much data to sell and spy on her as much as possible 🤦
That’s not necessarily an awful take, to be fair. That is arguably to the benefit of the consumer, that they can learn about products that are relevant to them.
I’m completely disconnected from what new movies and TV shows come out after years of blocking all ads. I can see wanting to change but ads have only gotten more annoying so I have no desire to change yet
Personally, I get actually relevant Instagram ads pretty frequently, particularly for various events that I'm interested in. I've seen more than a few shows specifically because I saw an Instagram ad.
I'd naturally prefer no ads, but when they are necessary - and someone does have to pay the costs of running large platforms - I would prefer them to be actually relevant. It's still ultimately my decision as to whether I buy something or not.
Ads are what have been keeping the internet largely free. They don’t really bother me anyways. Both the creator/site/company and the consumer benefit from this transaction. If the ads make the experience unbearable though, easy enough to simply disengage from it.
Internet is not free, and there was plenty of cool stuff online well before everyone decided to make money out of every single thing. So no, bad argument.
Edit: Let me correct myself: there was much more cool stuff before.
A lot of people. For many, it’s not even something they know exist. Even setting it up for them is a bother because of the occasional site it breaks, and the complete lack of technical awareness.
Lazy for what exactly? I pressed “install” years ago, and haven’t touched it since. It does its thing in the background when I browse. Never any intervention from me.
You then have to play a bit of a cat and mouse game with certain sites that put a lot of effort into detecting ad blockers, and that can be a bit actively annoying.
Not unaffected, I’m on Firefox with ublock on windows and it was pretty bad for a bit there, and now the videos are… Weird. Like they’ll suddenly stop playing and pretend they’re loading, but the buffer bar is far ahead, or the buffer bar will start stuttering and losing buffer multiple times a second, or the video will skip ahead by 5 seconds randomly, or the video will keep playing but in a frozen frame with audio continuing in the background.
It’s been super frustrating, and piped is slow and the UI is super clunky so I haven’t migrated to it, but the current YouTube experience is just something I’ll have to put up with alongside re-downloading filter lists every now and then. I have been working on a few UI tweaks for piped that hopefully get merged in, but it’s been a rough few weeks IRL and I haven’t gotten around to finishing.
Re: Your YouTube issues: are you based in America? I’m in the EU, might be something regarding that.
I hadn’t considered that, considering your regulations are light years ahead… I’m from Honduras.
Downloading filter lists? This is something people do? I’ve never done that.
Yep, I had never done it before YouTube started its war on adblockers. It’s a 5 second matter, but I do occasionally get blocked entirely for having an adblocker. On some occasions, filter lists hadn’t yet been updated to counter the new blocker, I had to go out and touch grass for a few.
Yeah gatekeeping. You all with your adblockers and your cookie biscuits. Always shaming those without. Just keep it to yourself.
Some of us like ads. I like guessing what the hell Wish is trying to sell me. I don’t watch much YouTubes. Ads really aren’t a thing that I think about a whole lot, so I don’t use adblockers.
I don’t use an adblocker. 90% of the sites I visit don’t abuse ads. When I was younger I used to go to sketchy sites to watch content for free, but now I’m in a position where I can pay for the content so I do. The last time I pirated something was an anime because no streaming service offered it, I had to buy blu rays.
Also, I like targeted ads. Most of the time you can ignore them, but every once in a while they show you something interesting that you do actually want. I’ve picked up a few board games that way. I didn’t buy it through the ad, but it did cause me to start researching it.
If you do use one what other blocking do you use to circumvent data collection, YouTube and reddit front ends and things alike?
Firefox on maximum security will get rid of all cookies when you close the window (ie exit from Firefox, not just close the tab). If there are sites that require cookies, you can use Firefox containers to stop it collecting data across other sites).
I do use adblockers but there are sites which deserve the revenue (and don’t bombard you with shite) so I try to remember to whitelist them. But I’m not as diligent about this as I should be. Someone does have to pay for it and we don’t have a decent system to do that without advertising (yet). I can’t subscribe to the eleventy million sites I visit so advertising is a necessary evil (atm). Obviously, denying bad sites the advertising revenue is a public service, so there’s that.
I have AdNauseum on with the “Hide Ads” button unchecked and “leave non-tracking ads alone” option enabled. Privacy Badger is on too to detect tracking scripts.
I can safely ignore ads generally but what I want is to discourage the practice of annoying placements to farm clicks. If they want clicks then they can have as many of my fake ones as they wish.
I don’t block anything. I work in accessibility, so it’s important to me to know what the experiences are like for my fellow users with disabilities. I also don’t want to recommend sites or apps that are riddled with inaccessible ads. I’d rather not give them traffic at all. Though even though I let them track me, I still get ads in a language I don’t speak for cars I can’t drive. What’re they doing with all that data?
Apparently! I don’t hide my data in any way, and constantly get ads in languages I don’t speak. Usually French, but sometimes Hindi or Chinese. And as a blind person myself, I’m not sure that my well paid full time job working in large enterprise and big tech accessibility is altruism deserving of thanks haha.
Nearly everyone uses at least some level of adblocking. Pretty much every major browser blocks pop-up ads by default, so the people who are too lazy or computer illiterate to do anything other than the default are still going to have some ad blocking.
Internet Explorer 6 added this feature in 2001, so even your grandpa still stubbornly running his end of life Windows XP probably has a popup blocker.
Stop telling people to use adblockers ffs… Obviously most ppl on lemmy are smart enough to know about addblockers but the only way we get to keep using them is if enough “normies” watch adds. Stop educating people about addblockers for the love of god.
Adblockers are basic internet security these days.
We don’t need “normies” to keep the internet full of ads. If everyone used an adblocker, companies would be forced to think of more respectable ways to sell their product. Because every way they can find to blast us with ads against our will, we can find a way to block them.
Adblockers are already a compromise, we can also just hack their servers and distribute through piracy if we felt it necessary.
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