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 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.
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.
I’m sure there is, but tbh I don’t know how, since I don’t need it.
The way Consent-o-Matic works is that it accepts all, securely deletes all of it immediately before it can do anything. That way the site thinks you have all of it so it won’t ask again, but you actually get none of it.
All this plus removing the consent- and other pop-ups for you. A few of the nastier pop-ups might be on your screen for a tenth of a second or less as Consent-o-Matic gets rid of it for you, but otherwise it’s like they were never there to begin with!
I know some of family don’t because they mostly rely on mobile devices and devices like Chromecasts where installing ad blockers can be a challenge. They don’t use traditional computers.
They know apps like NewPipe exist but the effort to port things over or not get recommendations is too much for them.
I do use ad blockers and open source front ends/software/alternatives. Ex. AntennaPod instead of Spotify for podcasts and Linux instead of Windows because I didn’t like ads in the start menu (amongst numerous other things).
I’m so proud of my kids who will demand adblockers if something in their YouTube app or their browser is broken. Even though they like to see toy ads now and then. But when they get the amount a regular mortal receives it’s too much, even for them.
I get you. I like receiving honest real reviews for things rather than be advertised to. Let their quality speak for it. I also hate even minor spoilers for movies/TV shows/video game that you see in trailers.
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.
Yeah, that’s generally my take as well. Can’t exactly expect people to make, curate and host content without any kind of funding, and despite what people may claim, it’s a very low percentage of people who will actively pay for what they consume.
They block all ads like uBlock, but they make sure to click and view them first without you noticing. They’ll also send the wrong information about you to the advertisers.
The content creators will actually receive more money that way.
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.
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.
By default I’m using adblocker but when I notice I’m visiting a new site more frequently like wikis for games, I disable it and keep it off if the site is usable.
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 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.
Never said anyone is “obliged”. Content will go away anyway eventually, or more often I will go away before the end.
To say it all: usually I find content interesting as long as the creator is doing it out of passion. There is a very clear difference the moment he/she realizes it is possible to get money out of it: and that’s when I usually find another creator.
I haven’t bothered yet because I don’t really frequent the types of sites where the ads get in the way (although my occasional Youtube visits are starting to convince me to use one).
I do use a plugin made by the EFF that blocks certain tracking cookies though.
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.
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