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?
deleted by creator
Supposedly this is about YouTube ad blocking but this applies everywhere.
Anyone who thinks you ought to unblock ads for the creator’s sake is propagandized to hell and back by advertisers who exploit creators by monetizing their content.
Oh! Milord is so good! He lets me paint in his shed but only if I paint 5 paintings a day with my own paint and he’ll even let me keep a penny a week from his sales of my paintings!
I usually run my adblocker because there have been too many instances of malicious ads and just overly annoying advertisements. I will support creators directly when possible, and in other cases will disable the adblocker for specific sites that I trust and find value in. The advertising industry did this to themselves, I don’t feel bad for using the blocker.
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 you use adblock, you don’t care about creator’s point blank
If you put ads on your website, you don’t care about users point blank.
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…
undefined> capitalist
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.
I stopped caring about the ethics of ad—blocking, I got sick of seeing scams, gambling ads, and shitty mobile games, crappy services that no one actually benefits from, and malware. I have ZERO tolerance for these sorts of ads. If an app has ads, I immediately uninstall it; if a website blocks adblockers, I stop using it.
The type of ads I might be willing to accept would be contextual ads (rather than personalised ones), and they should be individually vetted by either the content creators, or their community. If I visit a Linux forum, stuff like Linode or Tuxedo Computers would be effective, if I visit a Kendo forum, ads for shinai and other kendo supplies make sense, since we are the target audience, and there is no need to violate people’s privacy for this ad model. These ads would need to be non-intrusive, and not take too much space as well, and not over content, and certainly not staying on the screen as I am scrolling.
This is why when watching YouTube videos, I block ads, but I don’t block sponsors.
Advertising is a form of hostile content. Advertisers mean us harm. They might have some tenuous moral right to try to expose me to their manipulation, but I am not obliged to co-operate and my moral right to protect myself is much stronger. This is implicit in every form of advertising. You are not doing anything immoral by buying a magazine and then not reading any of the ads it contains.
Arguments against ad blockers require that there are not alternate ways of exploiting content production, or any reasons to produce content other than financial gain.
Anybody not using Firefox + DuckDuckGo + uBlock in 2023 is asking for Spyware.
I prefer startpage as a search engine.
I remember the dark old days when I did not use adblock and then Brave came along and introduced me to the idea and everything was so simple, so much better. I block cookies and scripts on news sites and everything has been far better than what it was a few years ago.
I use Firefox + Ublock now and it has blocked a few million ads for me!
I use unlock origin because it blocks ads and other annoying web features like cookies and newsletters popins.
uBlock origin on my PC, AdGuard on my Google Pixel
I do want people to make their money but not to the point I get malware from a single click.
yes of course i use adblock it is like the condom of internet at this point.
the money that the creators earn from ads per user is such a low amount that my time and attention are not worth it, like for youtube we are talking $0.001-0.002 per video view for an average creator. it is beneficial for both parties if you simply donate and use adblock.
i also find the data hoarding personalised ad model predatory and privacy invasive
Wow, there are a lot of comments describing how neccessary it must be to use adblock. I don’t think I can actually change anyone’s mind here, but I’m going to share my perspective anyway:
While I don’t agree with the statement quoted in the original post, I do think that ads are neccessary for most websites I visit to function. Not because of the content creators, but because of the companies running the platforms.
I know, ads can be problematic. But to outright block all ads is no solution. Privacy and data protection are very important to me, so I’m against every form of targeted ads. But just generic or maybe contextual ads? I don’t see any harm in that. Malware is mentioned often in other comments. I disable JavaScript whenever I can. That’s absolutely enough for blocking all ads to not make any real difference in terms of security. Although I have to admit that blocking scripts also blocks some ads.
But still, I see all ads on YouTube and search engines for example. And I’m happy to see them. It’s incredible that such platforms, providing so many people with access to so much content from so many other people can actually exist. There are a lot of resources needed for this.
And if I still don’t want to see ads simply because I don’t want to? Then I don’t have to, even without any adblockers. If I don’t think a website is worth the ads it thinks it needs to show me, then I don’t have to use it. I can just leave. If it is easy to provide the same service without ads then there must be countless alternatives already.
Yes this works for websites with a large user base, me and my friends made a better wiki than existing one for an old game we all play, we tried using ads but we barely made pennies, we switched to using a “support us” tab in menu and we earned about $3 a month, more than unregulated ads that had a lot of sexual content.
We didn’t hope to profit, heck one of us was actually running it on their own server, but the money was enough to pay for domain name and anything else was given to main programmer.
Have you ever heard of a website that went down because they didn’t get enough ad revenue? I do get your point, but I also feel like a huge majority of websites (and all that I use) do just fine even If I use Adblock. I just personally feel like using Adblock is doing very little harm but has so many benefits.
No, I don’t have heard of such a website. (Although the comment made by Shady_Shiroe comes funnily close to it.) But that is probably because all ad supported sites I visit have more than enough users without adblock to support themselves.
From a pure, real and practical standpoint you are right. For you and me and most users here it won’t do any harm to use adblock. But that only works because there are so many people who don’t. If everyone were to use adblock now, then the websites would start to either find ways to circumvent the adblock or they would not be available anymore, either because they went down or got paywalled. I’m fine with paying for some websites. But there are too many things I think are useful on the internet to be able to pay for each and every thing I see individually or via subscription.
What I want to say is that I don’t think it would be good if a big portion of users would start to use adblock so I don’t think it could be right for any individual person to do so, even if you can’t tell how many more adblock users it would take to make a negative impact.
Yes, always have and always will. The internet is just plain hostile without one. Watching others browse the web without one is fascinating to watch. I don’t really care much for the “moral” side of things.
Just for fun, I checked my self hosted AdGuard DNS and 60% of queries were blocked! That’s insane. That’s just DNS level blocking.
