I posted this question because I once saw a tweet that said something like:
“If you use adblock, you don’t care about creator’s point blank”
What is your opinion on this? Do you agree with them?
Yes, because I don’t like subjecting myself to propaganda and having to hope I’m smart and strong enough to recognize it and avoid succumbing to it.
“People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you. You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity. Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head. You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.” - banksy
- I don’t like getting bombarded with ads.
- It hides scam ads.
- If the creator of something makes something I like I prefer to directly donate to them instead of giving up my privacy, and letting a company like google profit of it, and then they only give a small portion to the creator.
This “you don’t care about creators” is a sham argument designed to make you feel guilty. I hear this about piracy a lot. “You’re depriving all those blue collar people of a paycheck!” meanwhile the WGA has been on strike for weeks because big studios are screwing them over on pay. It’s the corporate executives that are screwing these people over not some individual who downloaded a torrent or installed an adblocker. One only needs to look at who is funneling all the money into their own pockets and it surely isn’t the general public.
Of course. And I’ll continue to do so as long as advertisement is detrimental to my online experience. If it wastes my time by forcing me to watch an ad before a video, if it distracts me from reading a text because of animations, if it tries to scam or shock me, I’m better off blocking it. I’m not against advertisement as communication that a useful product or service exists, I’m against advertisement abuse and greed.
I’ll happily pay for, donate to, or otherwise support services important to me that need and deserve it.
Adblockers are absolutely necessary because ads are a malware threat, never mind the scams and invasive popups. The cReAtOrS didn’t care enough to ensure advertisements were safe, legitimate, or not horribly obnoxious so they did it to themselves.
I used to allow ads for certain sites but after malware attempts and scam ads, I block them across the board. If that upsets anybody, go whine to the shady advertises who made this a necessity to browse the web safely.
As the de facto IT guy for my family, I block ads on all their computers just as a basic safety measure.
I can usually spot a fake download button and avoid scammy sites, but my parents and grandparents seem magnetically attracted to them
Plus there are ads now that give you plague just by loading them, which is uniquely horrifying to those of us who are informal tech support. D:
deleted by creator
I don’t do a thing without ad blockers. I decide what junk I open and what I watch. When a site has ad blocking detection, it’s not worth my time, ever. Ads are the cancer of the current society. When I have something, ads are useless, when I don’t have it, ads are equally useless, as I don’t want and need it.
When creators of content create good content, I pay, same for apps. Ad companies leaching of the creators content need to be banned. (Those companies earn a lot more then content creators on those ads)
When there is an adblocker that will trigger the payment without me having to watch the ad (or even pull it over the web) I’m fine with it, else, no ads revenue. I pay for my data subscription, I decide.
the argument feels like guilt tripping poor people for not making their masters richer. if you only care about getting paid, I do not give any fucks about your content because it’s probably garbage anyway. it seems the only “content” people like this produce are shitty hottakes of them ranting about something they don’t understand.
tl;Dr if your content is just a recording of yourself then it’s accurate to say I don’t give a shit about the content creator in that scenario.
Also, at least in my experience, the people who most have a problem with this and make statements like “adblockers are piracy” or “adblockers kill creators” tend also to be the people who put dick pill and crypto ads on their website. The people most in favour of ads tend to be the people using the least tolerable ads on their content.
yes because fuck ads
Counter point: Any creator blindly putting random ad networks on their site doesn’t care about their users. Every ad should be vetted and served by the creator, those kinda ads are impossible to mass-block. If an ad swindles a user, it should be the creators reputation thats at stake.
I stopped having a bad conscience for blocking when one blog who begged promised to not autoplay any audio. The very next day it of course showed a very loud ad, and the creator excused it with “he didn’t have any control over what the advertisement network showed”.
They’re creators alright, but what are they creating? The answer is a surveillance capitalist dystopia.
This is exactly what I was thinking. How many incredibly sketchy, scammy, or outright invasive ad scripts are we supposed to tolerate? For me the answer is “none” and I’m quite happy that way.
ublock origin and libredirect are basically a must for browsing the internet. Reddit, Fandom, and Medium are the most unusable websites, those websites are parasites so it gives me joy that I deprive them of revenue.
I’ll have to look at Ublock. I used AdGuard for a while but can’t get it to function with a VPN (except for the one they offer, which was terrible).
The internet’s practically unusable without it now. We’ll always be in this rat race with advertisers and such. If I have the technical ability to circumvent every advertisement, I’ll do it. Advertisers get plenty from the people without the tech know-how, and I directly support creators that I want to support. Maybe a bit of a “f you I got mine” position, but whatever. Zero guilt.
This is my issue. I don’t mind a couple of tasteful, well placed ads. But so many sites are entirely unusable because of auto playing video ads, pop overs, and half the content is covered by ads that don’t scroll with the screen.
On small sites with few ads I’ll happily support them by whitelisting. On any site that has a pile of ads, especially if it covers content, I block them. Period. And I try not to go there unless absolutely necessary.
If I had to use the internet without ublock then I think I would prefer to not use it at all. And I’m saying it as a person who makes some money off ads on a website. I would never put an ad-blocker-blocker on my website though. I just assume users don’t care about the ads if they don’t block them.
If you, as a creator, choose to use advertising to monetize your content you don’t respect the limited lifetime of the people consuming your content or their security or about the way the marketing and advertising industry is destroying our society, such as (not exhaustive, just off the top of my head right now)
- building a surveillance economy, destroying privacy in the process
- manipulating people into voting in certain ways that are harmful to them and others
- protecting harmful products from scrutiny (e.g. tobacco, alcohol, products with too much sugar or fat or low quality ingredients, the car and oil industries, corporate climate change denial,…)
- encouraging overconsumption both in terms of quantity and in terms of items or services they don’t really need
- destroying content platforms with their mantra “not advertiser friendly”, leading to dystopian self-censorship on e.g. Youtube
And then there is the way internet advertising can spread malware and compromise the security of websites in general.
If you do want to monetize content in other ways there are models such as subscriptions or Patreon-style that are a lot more respectful of the user.
Absolutely. I understand things aren’t for free, but if you make my experience subpar I’m blocking ads.
I wish more creators would make content available across more platforms.
Oh yeah, I completely forgot to mention the way the advertising industry has basically ignored every feedback from users for two decades or more by making ads ever more intrusive and obnoxious. They reap what they sow.
I’m not a hardcore capitalist. Also i can’t watch all the ads the corporations would like to feed me every day. So i’m fine with using an adblocker. Don’t give stuff out for free on the internet if you don’t like this. But since you ask: I really don’t like that strategy to commercialize everything, to finance everything by selling ads and user data…
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are you a capitalist tho? I mean, I consider myself a capitalist and let’s just say people don’t agree with me a lot here. anyways, how has this platform been treating you
lol. i watched way too much star trek when i was a kid. i would consider myself as someone who dislikes capitalism. but that’s my private thing. i like having money available to buy food, eat nice noodles or go on vacation every now and then. but i wouldn’t be sad if that somehow worked without the concept of money or some of the big companies.
i like this platform. i’m fine, thanks for asking.
