Submitted 7 months ago by floofloof@lemmy.ca to technology@lemmy.world
https://blog.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk/2015/10/why-its-ok-to-block-ads/
cross-posted from: lemmy.bestiver.se/post/560483
I used ad blocker but I cannot imagine a world without ads. What does discoverablity look like in a world without ads?
I think ads have the same issue as content recommendation algo, that being that they’re bad but useful.
@Auth @floofloof
IMHO: Advertisment is another word for recommendation. While advertisment is seen as bad a recomendation isn't.
So what advertisment never makde happen is making themself usefull to the consumer. Most consumer want maybe a !!! usefull recommendation !!! but not someone trying to force you to buy a certain product.
So what was the time before ads ... it never existet ... even before tv radio had advertisment. Even back in this day people hated the advertisment and did music recordings cutting the advertisment and talking out.
Some old people might remember press record ... press stop ... rewind a little bit ... and all of this.
The alternative was to pay alot of money for music ...
Word of mouth existed far before advertising, and as for algorithmic discoverability retailers do a fine job of that already.
Ads try to make useful recommendations thats why google puts so much effort into trying to figure out who you are. Companies today can suggest their products to exactly who they think would most want them. But this comes with the downsides of user privacy.
If we had no ads then companies would pretend to be real people and make product suggestions. We can never escape it.
Advertising needs to become as socially acceptable as smoking.
It arbitrary pollutes any environment it’s conducted in, and causes secondary harms to non-participants by incentivising insecure hoarding of private information with the intent to better target individuals.
I’d personally start with billboards but instead now the billboards are screens too, not adjusted for night time to avoid distracting or blinding drivers and zero consideration for neighbors that have their backyards illuminated.
“It’s my ccomputer” has already been mentioned, but it’s my bandwidth and my home network too. Ads can stay off it.
Ad-blocking is as legal as a lock on the door.
living adfree is so great. sometimes it’s jarring to hear an ad in the wild, but it’s a nice reminder of how much better I’m living
I do not understand how anyone uses mobile apps with ads. thats just so dystopian to mw
I was watching some TV with friend. Show on prime and on Hulu.
Both had ads. Granted they were far less than actual television is but I do not miss ads at all. They really spoil the experience. Especially for a paid service.
It would be much harder to block ads if they were more like newspapers and just a part of the page you were viewing, instead of imported from a different source.
But in order to do that the site themselves would be responsible for the ads they display instead of blaming their ad service, and they would lose out on all their tracking data.
So fuck em.
It’s my computer isn’t it? I can discard packets I don’t care to receive
Advertising should be illegal.
If you want people to find your product then we need to log that in a public database site. If you want to find a product go there, nobody ever wants to find a product while driving or watching movies or existing in public.
Advertising should be considered harassment.
I have a personal rule to never buy from brands that spam ads left and right in an annoying way.
I can’t believe people actually pay for branded clothing. I avoid branded clothing like the plague. If companies actually want someone to walk around plastered with their brand on them they should be paying them.
I agree, it’s just a net negative for the world.
If nobody advertised, the world would be better off
Here’s why it’s okay to block ads in pretty simple terms:
Ads can contain ransomware; that is to say, a seemingly innocent ad can deliver a payload which will run on your computer, lock your files, and demand you pay hundreds or even thousands of dollars anonymously.
Now if you go to the website that served the ad and tell them, “I allowed ads on your site because I support your right to monetise your content, and now I have to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars, will you help me pay that” or “will you pay that for me since your site served the ransomware,” you know what they will tell you, every single time, without fail? Whether they actually answer you, or more likely, just delete your email. They’re telling you that it’s your problem. That you should have secured your computer better.
So secure your computer better now. Block all the ads.
Getting a little more technical, use Firefox or a fork of it. Use Linux if you can. Use a Mac if you can’t. If you really must use Windows, know how to secure it. I use Windows 11 at work, I’d never use it at home, but I had a talk with the IT guy, and he let me do a few things to it. I know more than he does, but he’s the one with the job, so I told him what I’d do before I did it, I did exactly what I said I was going to do, nothing more nothing less, and I still think my home computer is more secure, but I’m a lot less worried about using the work machine. I think it’s wild that so many companies just use Windows. I’m not trying to hate on Windows. It’s good for gaming and it’s accessible. I’d love to see more companies roll their own *nix or just use Macs (which run macOS which is UNIX certified).
Here’s why it’s okay to block ads in even simpler terms: It’s my fucking computer.
They’re unnecessary, distracting, some try to track you and others can have malware. No thanks.
“some”. more like 99.9999999% of them
Accurate. I was trying to leave room so not to say all of them but I see you left just enough and that works too. :)
Isn’t ad blocking, as the industry magazine AdAge has called it, “robbery, plain and simple”?
Robbing corporations is based, though, actually.
Isn’t ad blocking, as the industry magazine AdAge has called it, “robbery, plain and simple”?
No. Find a way to make money that doesn’t require showing ads online if you have a problem with it.
Yeah. I don’t have a contract with the site, agreeing to pay them in any way, shape or form. They voluntarily show me seit content, but that does not obligate me to also accept their ads.
Because even US secret services (multiple of them) say so.
no ads in web 1.0 and the internet was perfectly fine
That’s before it got colonized by megacorporations.
LoL, that wasn't the original internet. That was years after the internet had been around. <joke here about these kids needing to get off my lawn>
there were so many fucking ads online in the late 90s
and you couldn’t block them because they were either served from the same domain or used the same plugin as the content and it was an all-or-nothing thing
all those goddamn blinking gifs with “click here” and “you’re our millionth visitor”, and the pop-ups, and the flash bars with “shoot the ducks”…
a lot of those came up in the late 90s early 2000s though. the early 90s were mostly just text based pages.
There were ads! But these were simple banner graphics of 468x60 pixels. In the worst case it was an animated GIF. But hosted on the same server as the page and without any tracking shenanigans.
I remember the add that made me install my first add blocker. It stated playing the sound of knocking on glass and a voice going “Hey You!”. With a looped videoof some guy waving at me.
Every so often one gets through my blocker and they have only gotten more annoying.
I think all ads should be blocked. If billions in funding is going to be put to use it should go towards offsetting environmental impact and developing products that are actually better, instead of just convincing people to settle for a cute jingle
It’s not like these ads have any respect.
The same reason why it is ok to not eat shit.
Right? These companies act like they are selling food and we are stealing it.
In reality, they put a big “free beer” sign up, we go and happily accept the beer, and then they act outraged that we refuse when they try to piss in the mug after handing it to us.
It’s my network. I control what does or does not go through it.
It has never even occurred to me that it might not be okay to block ads on connections or devices that I own – or even those that I don’t, for that matter.
Still true a decade later.
T156@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Maladvertising and scams just make that a surefire thing, especially since there’s a chance that just loading an ad could cause trouble.
And for less tech-savvy family members, it cuts down on the risk of them falling for scams or suchlike.