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?
I only recently started using uBlock but it’s not really because of ads (which I don’t mind too much as long as they don’t prevent me seeing the page content). I use it mainly to automate the rejection of cookie popups, which have become absolutely absurd.
I don’t use ad blockers on YouTube because the creators that I watch on YouTube are people who I actually care about. I watch content on YouTube from real people who I want to be able to profit off of me watching their video. Ad blockers are effectively piracy, your taking the content without the agreed upon price, in this case, the price of the content is the ads.
And I don’t make that comparison to convince anyone that they shouldn’t use an ad blocker, I just think the decision of where to use ad blockers should be made with the understanding that you are pirating any content that you consume while using an ad blocker. Are you willing to pirate something from some random mega corporation? I am. Are willing to pirate content from this niche 3D printing YouTube content creator that you enjoy? I’m not.
As a default, I do use an ad blocker, but I will disable the ad blocker for any website that I can trust enough to not have malicious ads, especially websites that i want to financially support. Because for me all it means is sacrificing a little bit of bandwidth to load the ad that I’m just going to ignore anyway.
We’re not talking about what holds power in a court, we’re talking about functional reality.
What you can get away with on a technicality in court is irrelevant to whether or not it’s piracy.
By a legal definition, no, ad blocking is probably not piracy. I’m no lawyer but I would wager that Piracy is probably more strictly defined than that. My point though is that it is functionally the exact same thing as piracy.
Ad supported content is distributed based on the advertising income paying for the distribution. If you are blocking that advertising in a way that prevents compensation to the content creator you are consuming that content without the creator getting paid the price that they set for the content.
The price was agreed upon in the same way that the price in the grocery store is agreed upon.
The content provider set the price, in this case, the price being consuming an advertisement.
To be totally clear, I absolutely advocate for piracy in some situations, I’m not going to get into the weeds and talk about the specifics when I do or do not advocate for it, but to extend upon the grocery store analogy, there are also some situations where I would absolutely advocate for someone to steal from the grocery store. And I’m not going to get into the weeds and talk about the specifics for when I do or do not advocate for that either. The point though is by calling ad blocking piracy I’m not making a moral judgment on whether or not it is right or wrong, I’m just pointing out that it is functionally the exact same thing.
You say you’ll disable the ad blocker for sites that don’t push malicious ads? I’ve reported half a dozen deepfake “investment” ads on YouTube in the last couple of months, and they have done nothing about it. The ads YouTube pushes are horrible!
People advertising shady things is not the same thing as a malicious ad, at least not in the context of the point I’m trying to make. By malicious ad I’m referring to those things that pretend to not be an ad at all, they pretend to be the download button or a notification of an unread message, or something along those lines.
I may not be using the terminology exactly right, but that’s the kind of thing I’m referring to. And YouTube does. A YouTube does a perfectly fine job at being transparent when something is an advertisement and when it’s organic content. They’re not maliciously being deceptive at what is an ad and what isn’t.
Are willing to pirate content from this niche 3D printing YouTube content creator that you enjoy? I’m not.
I cleanse my conscience by supporting many of them on Patreon.
Accidentally clicking on clickbait without an adblocker directly results in a spammer getting money, and that just makes me feel like crap. There’s so much spam out there that wouldn’t exist without ads, which makes it harder for quality creators to get attention and fair compensation. I feel I can only engage with the internet ethically by refusing to participate in the ad economy.
It sucks that alternative payment models like Brave’s “Basic Attention Token” (or a fairer alternative) never got popular. The idea was to track the creators of websites/videos/etc. you visit and automatically split your monthly donation between them. IIRC it was proportional to the number of ads blocked for each creator, but you could tweak creators’ multipliers to deny profit to spam and reward higher-quality creators. I’d also accept microtransactions for individual videos, news articles, etc. but no platforms for these exist because the big players in internet monetization are all so focused on ads.
I didn’t until recently. I wanted to give companies I valued credit, in some way. But, ads are completely out of control and it broke me so I started using ublock a few months ago. It’s so much better and I’m not looking back.
I don’t use one because I feel that the more people use ad blockers, the more intrusive and annoying the ads will be for people that aren’t using one, and less overall content will be available for free. The only ads that I can’t stand are video ads, and that’s why I have YouTube premium.
The more intrusive and annoying the ads become, the more people will retaliate. This is war. eventually we will smash out those annoying ads. somehow. There must be some other more civilized pleasant method for companies to make profit. This is getting out of hand.
well I remember in the late 1970s when cable TV became a thing, the concept was you pay for it so there are no ads.
Then guess what happened?
few years later we were still paying for cable TV and then they started including ads. We were outraged at first but then it became normal and we got used to it.
Now YouTube is doing it, including ads even though we’re paying for it
Amazon prime is doing it, including ads even though we’re paying for it
and other streaming services, I can’t name everything but pretty much every company is doing it. Even though people are paying for the service, there are still ads.
YouTube is not doing it, I use YT premium and I never get a single ad. Ever.
And I know that ad supported cheaper versions of a lot of streaming services are becoming more common, but, to my knowledge, all of them have an ad free option. It may be more expensive than their cheapest tier, but they do have an ad free option.
If you want to see the internet less dependent on ads, the only way to do that is to be willing to pay for it yourself. Because streaming video content online is actually extremely expensive to do. And someone has to pay for it. If you as the consumer aren’t paying for it then someone has to pay for it on your behalf. They’re only going to do that if they can get something out of the deal.
YouTube subscription does have traction… And like I said, every streaming service has an ad free option. Some of them have an ad supported cheaper option, but they all have some option that allows you to consume the content without ads. It seems like you’re kind of just talking out of your ass.
There’s an economics of everything at play here, broadcast television had ads, cable TV at first didn’t but it was also significantly more expensive. Cable TV wanted to lower prices to attract more customers, and in order to do that they started receiving more money from advertisers to make up the difference. Not all of the cable TV channels did this. However, even to this very day there are plenty of cable TV channels that don’t have ads. They are considered the premium channels that you have to pay extra for.
The same thing is going to continue to be true on the internet as well, You will always have options to avoid ads by paying for the content that you want.
Lady I used to sit next to at work didn’t use an ad blocker. She also would have like the “do you want to install this plugin?” thing open in her ide for weeks. I don’t know how she did it. She’s a software developer so she’s reasonably tech literate. It just didn’t bother her enough to think about doing something about it.
reminds me of one of my coworkers years ago, we all had cubicle desk computer jobs but oh Lord she had so many scribbled on post-it notes stuck all over her cubicle and all over the edge of her computer screen 🤦♀️ She was an older lady close to retirement age.
I asked a friend of mine about this recently and she told me it was because it helps her kids learn patience.
That got me thinking about it, I personally learned a rather large amount of patience because of ads when I was growing up so it made a lot of sense to me.
As long as she doesn’t buy anything they ask for that is coming from ads and tells them that the products advertised are probably the worst of their kind I would be okay with it.
No, they have a point. In hindsight, I definitely can see how the unskipable ads of cable TV resulted in a greater deal of patience. I’d be interested to see a more academic study of it, but anecdotally I definitely can see it.
Holy shit, this is worse than reddit lately. You read an anecdote about a lady, made up her whole life and got angry about what you just made up. Fucking hell.
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.
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.
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