I literally haven’t seen anyone even mention it anywhere on the internet as if it never existed, when it comes to Ad blockers I always see uBO recommended with absolutely no mention whatsoever of ABP why? What makes it better than ABP? What happened to it? or maybe I’m wrong and ABP is not as well known as I think it is.
I have been using ABP for many years until someday don’t remember when I switched to uBO because I read that it is “the best ad blocker”.
I maybe need a history lesson as everything on the matter seems so vague to me and the whole situation is super weird
You’ve got yourself mixed up. They’re not entitled to my compute, or my eyeballs. They handed my browser a pile of HTML, and I’ll do what I want with it.
Did you cut all the advertisements out of magazines and newspapers before reading them?
What about the billboards on the side of the road?
You are not entitled to their hosting or their content. They provide them to you in exchange for ad revenue they receive from showing them to you. You’re refusing to engage in the exchange.
Am I obligated to look at every billboard by the road or can I not get up and leave or at least mute commercials on TV? Why should I have my computer use my bandwidth against my data cap so that a company paying someone other than me can show me an ad?
The way I see it is that the host is getting paid for giving the opportunity to show an ad. The exchange is between the company hosting the content and the company advertising the product, not the end user.
Just as easily as you can scroll past an ad on a page
Why should someone have to pay for your ability to access that data? Your isp isn’t sending that site money for you to be able to access it. Someone has to cover costs.
Frankly data caps are bullshit but that doesn’t help the current situation.
Except you are denying them that opportunity.
So an advertiser should pay for functionally nothing?
Let’s go on a hypothetical journey. Tomorrow a switch is flipped and everyone in the world is blocking ads the same as you. How are the web designers and content creators getting paid now? Ad revenue dries up because it’s pointless to pay for a thing you’ll never get. Those employees are not going to continue to get paychecks because the site is just an expense now. This should not be difficult to understand.
The main difference is that my computer takes an active roll in the process of showing me an ad. Traditional advertising is there whether I look at it or not. Websites not making money on their content is their problem not mine. If they can’t make money on traditional advertising then they’ll go bankrupt or find a new way to generate income. I didn’t sign a contract to agree to be served ads and have no obligation to not block them.
In the same way your TV does, sure.
It becomes your problem when the thing you want to see is not available because it shut down.
Whether or not they can make money on traditional advertising is a complex thing when I’m not sure what you mean by traditional advertising. Can a website offer traditional advertising? If so how do you think the existence of ad blockers has contributed to its decline? I remember when TiVo was a big thing we started seeing banners at the bottom of shows advertising other shows. Seems like a pretty clear correlation to me.
And they didn’t sign a contract and are under no obligation to serve you content. That road goes both ways. Is a contractual obligation the only way you deal with something you don’t like to get to something you do?
People absolutely block ads on TVs, DVRs have been around for ages and auto ad skipping has been a feature since at least 2002. Well before then people were fast forwarding through commercials or simply muting them. Of course with live TV you can’t skip because the content is timed to commercial breaks but you don’t have to consume the commercials shown in the breaks.
What I would consider traditional advertising would be any clearly separate banner, pop up, intermediate page etc placed around the main content, think commercials on TV as opposed to the conspicuous coke being drunk in the movie. There’s a limitless number of ways to monetize content, many of which an ad blocker is useless against. I can block a banner ad, it’s way harder to block a paid review.
As far as I am concerned content online is easily replaceable, the only site that I think I would genuinely miss if it went away would be wikipedia and I do donate to them. No matter what you or I do, web content will survive and the market will evolve new ways to separate us from our money.
As a question, how do you feel about data mining and tracking? Selling identifiable user data is one of the most common ways to monetize a website and is generally unintrusive to a user’s experience while using the site. Would it be amoral for a user to try to eliminate or at least reduce the data they allow a website to collect? What about providing deliberately false data?
And do you recall when the obnoxious banners and pop ups during shows started to happen with regularity?
Given the above, what factors would you figure contributed to the decline of that type of ad?
Precisely
I bet the people who hunted animals to extinction thought the same. At some point it stops being worth the effort to make another.
See my previous statement about animal extinction
And another like you will complain about it, block it, and the cycle continues while the masses complain about how it wasn’t this bad before without an ounce of consideration to their own part in the whole thing. Wanna guess how I know?
This whole paragraph looks like it’s supposed to be some kind of gotcha. It’s not. I’ve made it very clear from the start what I’m against is blocking all ads. By all means block the ones that are legitimately malicious. But I remember when the blocker in the post announced they’d be allowing non-malicious ads, which met certain published criteria, to go through the blocking. Ublock was the new darling pretty much overnight.
I do block various ads and trackers. I do not blanket block everything that could be considered an ad.
You’re missing the point, but your example is perfect. If I have a magazine or newspaper, I’ll cut the advertisements out of them if I damn well please, and they can’t stop me. Sure, I’m not entitled to their hosting or their content, but that’s what paywalls or logins are for. When you hand off a document to someone, expect that they’ll do what they want with it, because that’s the way the world works, and also the way it should work.
Also, fuck billboards. They should be banned, like several states already do.
Right. How do you cut the ads out? Do you just snip around blindly and hope for the best?
And how do you react to those when you encounter them? More often than not the people I see blocking everything flip out.
The analogy would be that I get a robot to identify the ads in the magazine and cut them out before I have to see them. That’s what ad blockers do, but on a computer instead of IRL.
I don’t know why I’d flip out when encountering a paywall or login. It works out great, and as a society we don’t have to end up with ads enshittifying everything they touch.
Go take a look at nearly any conversation about streaming services, for example. It won’t take long to find someone upset about how “it’s as expensive as cable now”. Then extend that same logic to the entirety of the Internet and how do you think it would go over.
My issue is that blocking all ads indescriminantly is costing someone and the rich won’t allow it to be them.
The analogy would still break down because the robot would need parts or maintenance. There would still be a cost and someone would still be getting their money. Instead you’ve just got a lot of people proud of themselves for sneaking their hand into someone else’s pocket.