• pachrist@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      I get that ads pay for a free internet. But that doesn’t mean that 60% of my screen needs to be malware to read a local news article.

      Until advertisers act in good faith, I block as much as possible.

      • Zikeji@programming.dev
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        8 months ago

        Or those scummy click bait ads disguised as related articles? They make my blood boil with how they prey on the vulnerable.

        • 7U5K3N@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          8 months ago

          That’s all Google discover is on my phone… Ai generated articles that are just click bait.

          is a new episode of RandomShow airing tonight?

          Star Trek 31 confirmed to feature major tng character (from today)

          blah.

          • datavoid@lemmy.ml
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            8 months ago

            Google is so bad for this, plus the fact that they were the ones who started rewarding clickbait articles.

            In my mind though, MSN will never be dethroned from having the shittiest content.

            • SnipingNinja@slrpnk.net
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              8 months ago

              It can’t, just check the windows thing which appears as a left sidebar in windows 11 or the edge default homepage

      • Drusenija@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        I’ve been seeing clips from Ready Player One recently and this reminded me of the main bad guy’s philosophy on advertising in the OASIS.

        we estimate we can sell up to 80% of an individual’s visual field before inducing seizures

        Can’t help but feeling there’s some parallels there.

        • skyspydude1@lemmy.world
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          8 months ago

          Seems unrealistic. In reality, they’d be asking how often the seizures occur and would figure out if the increased ad revenue from going to 90% would offset any potential lawsuits.

      • BlemboTheThird@lemmy.ca
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        8 months ago

        Used to be if I found the site of a newspaper I thought I liked, I’d turn off my ad blocker to see how it goes.

        I don’t even try any more. Again and again and again, every time I turn it off the page gets so cluttered that following the article becomes a chore and takes up so many resources that even scrolling slows to a crawl. Ludicrous nonsense.

        • damndotcommie@lemmy.basedcount.com
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          8 months ago

          The cluttered pages with “videos” running all over the place is what frustrates me the most. I go in and disable javascript and see how it goes. Javascript seems to be the herpes of the internet as far as I am concerned.

        • AA5B@lemmy.world
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          8 months ago

          I recently noticed a feature on iOS to open all new sites in Reader mode. It’s definitely more readable but mixed results when not everything is there

          There’s got to be some sort of Accessibility violation here: where’s the EU when you need someone to stand up for consumers rights

      • Starkstruck@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        Fr. I legitimately wouldn’t mind just a few banner ads to pay for things, but as per usual, the corpos got too damn greedy. So congrats, now you get no ad viewage from me.

    • FenrirIII@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      Don’t forget those annoying floating ads and the tiny X that doesn’t actually close the ad

      • mrgreyeyes@feddit.nl
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        8 months ago

        And the fucking videos that auto play in the bottom corner with audio. I think the old people that recently found out about internet are trying to turn it into regular TV.

    • lanolinoil@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      Plus they made the whole industry weird and obfuscated like bulk produce or something even though it didn’t need weird distribution models and dark unseen players in every corner of every ad bought and seen. Why is it this way? I honestly don’t know. How did advertisers willingly make it that way over just paying site owners or 1 aggregator or something… I guess Facebook has kind of become that now

    • CileTheSane@lemmy.ca
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      8 months ago

      This is 100% the fault of shitty advertisers spamming us with literal scams, malware, and spyware.

      And the shitty websites running those ads with just a shrug of their shoulders saying “oops, 3rd party. I can’t be expected to control what’s on my website.”

  • SapphironZA@sh.itjust.worksB
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    8 months ago

    The main problem is 3rd party advertising. If the New York Times ran ads on their website like they did with the physical newspaper, we would not have this problem.

    Publishers need to take direct responsibility for every ad on their platform.

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      8 months ago

      Plausible deniability. Oh, a mildly sexual ad has shown to you? Someone probably approved it on the third-party site. Oh, you didn’t want to see it? Sorry, we got nothing to do with it.

      Also scams and other grey-area shit.

  • brsrklf@jlai.lu
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    8 months ago

    I am surprised the reason for blocking ads doessn’t include making sites somewhat readable. I guess faster loading could be it? But generally it’s more of a layout problem than a bandwidth one.

    I tend to not use adblockers, or when I do it’s on a black list system for worst offenders rather than by default. However, I absolutely refuse tracking, and if it’s the only option I go to firefox reader mode immediately.

    The usual false dichotomy of “personalised ads or you’re killing us!” is not acceptable.

    • plz1@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      Ad tech IS the tracking, so if you’re not blocking ads, you’re not actually refusing said tracking. I think you might be conflating cookies with being tracking (they are), but that’s only a part of it.

      • MyFairJulia@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        I wonder why ad tech can‘t be „Let‘s show ads that correspond to what‘s being talked about on that website.“ Kinda like what Google suggested with Topics but without following me through the internet.

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          8 months ago

          There is no real technical challenge in displaying ads that are based on the page content. But ads based on tracking users is much more profitable. Plus they can sell the data collected to anyone else that is interested.

        • grue@lemmy.world
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          8 months ago

          Look, you need to understand that advertisers are Hell-bent on forcibly extracting as much money from you as possible. If they could strap you to a chair, hold your eyes open like in A Clockwork Orange, and then charge you for everything you so much as glanced at, they absolutely would.

          If that’s not how you want to live, then they are your enemy.

          • MyFairJulia@lemmy.world
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            8 months ago

            You know i think i understand companies sometimes but then i keep being baffeld at how evil a company can be.

            Apple for example had me surprised with the reaction to the DMA and i previously thought that they couldn‘t possibly suck harder wirh alö their anti-repair stuff.

            I still have a bone to pick with Tim Cook himself for rendering my well working Mac Mini 2012 unusable for my app development job by simply not updating Xcode and introducing a breaking change that prevented me from adding support for new iOS versions to old Xcode.

        • CileTheSane@lemmy.ca
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          8 months ago

          I wonder why ad tech can‘t be „Let‘s show ads that correspond to what‘s being talked about on that website.“ Kinda like what Google suggested with Topics but without following me through the internet.

          They could be. Sites could talk directly to advertisers, and put the ad directly into the page itself instead of asking the ad server for a random ad. Most ad blockers probably wouldn’t notice it because it’s part of the actual page.

          But then they’d lose out on the tracking data and would be responsible to make sure the ad doesn’t annoy the shit out of you, so they’re not going to do that.

    • TexasDrunk@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      I use them on my personal systems but not my work laptop. I have to use an ad blocker on my phone because so many sites, including “respected” news organizations, are an absolute mess when ads are enabled.

      It’s bad when you go to one of the top news company’s websites in the US and there’s a pile of content covered by advertisements. I guess I didn’t need to read those sentences anyway.

    • gt24@lemmy.world
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      I guess faster loading could be it? But generally it’s more of a layout problem than a bandwidth one.

      There was a website which I allowed ads on to help support them. One day, I went to that site in my browser and my laptop fans spun up at that time. Turns out that ads on that site caused my processor usage to spike near 100%. A reload fixed the issue. Once that same thing happened 2 to 3 more times, I just blocked all ads on that site from then on.

      There are times that people can’t throw the resources of an Intel i5 processor towards rendering the advertisements on one website. I would think that is more common these days with Chromebooks running the modern equivalent of a Celeron processor. Phones also don’t have much processing power to give and will warm up and drain batteries all towards the all important goal of “render those advertisements”.

      I think people tend to allow advertising until it becomes a major problem that needs resolved (such as if the site is bogging down your computer or if the advertising makes the site unable to be read easily). Since those people would then need to fix the issue and hopefully fix it for good, it is easy and efficient to just block out all advertising forever.

  • ConstipatedWatson@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    I dislike the fact that “ads” can also include crapware being injected into my computer (viruses, tracking cookies, mysterious scripts, etc).

    • neo@feddit.de
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      8 months ago

      If you had nothing to hide, you wouldn’t mind Trojans! /s

    • lucid@programming.dev
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      8 months ago

      Is this still really a thing? I remember getting some viruses from ads in the very early days of the internet, like late 90s / early 2000s, but can’t remember getting anything in at least the last ten years.

      • ConstipatedWatson@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        It’s currently late and I am on my phone, so I can’t research this too well, but for example this thread and official Microsoft link discusses th Adrozek malware which injects you with unwanted ads and information directly from your browser.

        Sure, it’s not a virus in the older sense of the term where someone either burns your drive or takes over your computer and locks you out asking for a ransom, but it’s still piloting you unsuspectingly and you don’t want it.

  • Schwim Dandy@lemm.ee
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    8 months ago

    I don’t think I could use the internet if I didn’t have an adblocker. Ads genuinely anger me. I think it’s just from the early days with pop-overs and unders, blinking, non-collapsible and the like holding content hostage. Intrusive or not, I’ll do everything I can to not see an ad.

  • doggle@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    8 months ago

    Many parts of the Internet has become functionally unusable without one. And given online advertising’s history as a vector for malware, as blockers are just the sensible choice.

  • istanbullu@lemmy.ml
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    8 months ago

    The internet is unusable without an adblocker… I recommend uBlock Origin and Pihole.

      • slouching_employer@lemmy.one
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        8 months ago

        Pihole will also block non-browser traffic (e.g. your OS phoning home). Adblocking extensions are typically restricted to just blocking traffic of the browser it’s installed on.

        It also operates on your entire home network, so it can block junk traffic on devices that can’t run adblockers.

    • Notorious@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      uBlock Origin at a minimum. But I would suggest a privacy focused browser. Librewolf, Mulvad or even Brave. Browsers leak so much information about you it is easy for sites to fingerprint and track you even with an ad blocker.

      https://privacytests.org/

      I know Librewolf is working on their DNS leakage (last section on privacytests.org), but they also allow you to select a privacy focused DNS server which is nice when you’re not on a network you own, so you can’t run PiHole.

  • CileTheSane@lemmy.ca
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    8 months ago

    I used to not run an ad block. I figured the ads didn’t bother me so why bother?

    Then I encountered a banner ad that screamed “HELLOOOOOOOOOO” anytime the mouse went over it and I couldn’t download an ad blocker fast enough.

    Advertising companies will do anything they can to annoy the shit out of you, then act like people running ad blockers are the problem.

    • captainlezbian@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      I was fine with unobtrusive ads, I was fine with a minute of ads before a YouTube video. But it got so bad it was constantly interrupting everything. Also want to know what’s extremely unpleasant? Political ads calling for a moral panic against you or taking bigotry against you as a general assumption. I’m not watching that bullshit. My life is better without ads

    • Specal@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      I once watched a 60 minute ad because I wondered (what would a 60min ad even be about) and I can’t remember

      • Ragnarok314159@sopuli.xyz
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        8 months ago

        That shitty Epoch Times used to do that. I was watching a bunch of satire videos and one of their commercials was on, and I legitimately thought it was part of the skit because of how stupid it was.

        Then it hit me it is a real ad. And real people are watching it. And that’s how I got radicalized even more.

  • ximtor@lemm.ee
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    8 months ago

    Does anyone ever actually click on an ad? Like “hey thats cool I wanna check it out/buy it right here right now”?

    I have adblockers active everywhere and only disable then somtimes for specific sites that really don’t work otherwise, but even if the unlikely case would come up that something is interesting I would just look it up separately? Mostly I just turn a blind eye on them anyway, but just wondering, some people gotta really click/buy from these ads? It just seems so surreal to me…

    • WhatAmLemmy@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      The only obvious ad I’ve ever clicked on was for a “free” IQ test. I figured I’d never done one cause they’re fake, but I had time to kill, so I clicked through. After 20 mins or so answering questions, it ended on a transaction page. The only way to see your “results” was by paying $20. I obviously didn’t pay, and instead tried to report the ad, only to discover that Google Ads has zero mechanism to even report scams to Google. After some research, it turned out that this blatant bait and switch scam had been operating via Google Ads for like 5 or 7 years. Google doesn’t give a fuck if scammers use it’s ad tech to scam your grandma or inject your system with malware, as long as they get paid for the privilege.

      I’ve always used an ad blocker, but the whole experience reinforced how anti-consumer and pro-criminal surveillance capitalism is. Permanent absolute ad block — without exceptions — is how everyone should operate, because none of these companies deserve any trust whatsoever. Even if you trust the site you’re visiting, you can’t trust any ad company they utilize.

      • nehal3m@sh.itjust.works
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        8 months ago

        The only obvious ad I’ve ever clicked on was for a “free” IQ test. I figured I’d never done one cause they’re fake, but I had time to kill, so I clicked through.

        That click should have lead you to a page that says ‘you failed’. 😂

      • lemmyvore@feddit.nl
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        8 months ago

        The EU is currently testing a new payment framework that would make payments faster and easier and also enable very small payments.

        This could finally enable micropayments in browsers (well, in Firefox and maybe Safari) which would eliminate intermediaries like Google and all the scummy ad companies and enable websites to work out deals directly with visitors on the spot (pay a very small amount like a cent or a fraction of a cent to read this article).

        Obviously, Google will need to be dragged kicking and screaming into this.

        • jkrtn@lemmy.ml
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          8 months ago

          I’m still not paying a fraction of a cent for the obviously LLM-generated bullshit that has flooded the internet.

          • reinei@lemmy.world
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            8 months ago

            And yet for content I can be reasonably sure is actually human generated (read: niche enough to not have been flooded to the point I no longer can trust the “usual”/“big” sites) I might consider paying for server costs a little.

      • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        If you’re walking around somewhere and you see a person or people offering a “free personality test,” do not take them up on their offer. They’re Scientologists. They once refused to let my mother leave back in the 70s until she said she would start screaming “rape.”

    • TragicNotCute@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      People definitely do. CTR (click through rate) is generally pretty low, even before the majority of Americans were using ad blocks. But it’s not 0

    • BraveSirZaphod@kbin.social
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      8 months ago

      I’ve personally clicked on Instagram ads and made purchases from them. This has pretty much always been for various events, and I don’t really have any regrets there. I’ve seen some cool plays and gone to parties that I’d never have known about otherwise.

      I can’t imagine what would ever drive someone to click on a random banner ad though.

    • Sc00ter@lemm.ee
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      8 months ago

      My wife does. But she’s a sucker for “a good deal”

      I dont ever click on them myself, but if I start searching for something I need/want, and I see a brand I’m familiar with thru advertising, I’m more likely to explore their product, at least. Simply just because, “of I’ve heard of this before”

      • jkrtn@lemmy.ml
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        8 months ago

        Brand recognition is one of the key goals for running ads, it works.

      • ximtor@lemm.ee
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        8 months ago

        But these are never real deals are they? At least I saw maaaaaaany bullshit fake deals, cant remember anything legit ever…

        I also found my mum buying crap of instagram a while ago, but i kinda got to her to be a bit more mindful what she clicks on.

    • guy@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      I have ad blockers everywhere, except native mobile apps. I’ve clicked on an Instagram ad for shirts. I bought the shirts. People keep complimenting me on the shirts. No regrets there

      • ximtor@lemm.ee
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        8 months ago

        I guess that sounds reasonable. I sometimes miss seeing some of the cool stuff on instagram

    • ZephrC@lemm.ee
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      8 months ago

      I know ad rates and metrics are heavily based around click through, but does it even actually matter? I mean, TV ads are big money expensive, and nobody has ever clicked on those. I guess if you’re advertising a shitty mobile game or something then it matters, but does McDonalds or whatever even want you to buy a hamburger before you watch a YouTube video? That doesn’t really make a lot of sense.

      • higgsboson@dubvee.org
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        8 months ago

        As you’ve noticed, there are different types of ads. Not all have clicks as their goal. Some are just there to make you think about their brand, for example.

    • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      Not only did my late father-in-law click on ads, he also clicked on spam emails. Yes, his computer was super slow and I regularly had to clean off the malware.

    • Brown5500@sh.itjust.works
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      Sometimes the sponsored links at the top of a Google search are exactly what I was looking for. I just need to quickly disable AdAway so that I can follow the link.

  • 4grams@awful.systems
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    8 months ago

    I’ve always thought that the ad supported internet is something people will eventually get sick of and the financial foundation would evolve over time to find models that don’t rely on infinite spam. Instead efforts are focussed on forcing us to view them. At this point I’m expecting the next version of Chrome to require the Ludovico technique while browsing.

    • IndefiniteBen@leminal.space
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      I mean, many (several?) sites tried optional subscriptions where you pay to get rid of ads, but that doesn’t seem to have worked. Judging by the fact that most sites that have subscriptions instead of ads use pay walls.

      People have come to expect free access, so if you can easily use an ad blocker, why would you choose to pay to remove the ads that a blocker removes for free.

      • SwampYankee@mander.xyz
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        8 months ago

        Let’s just take NYT for example. Subscription costs $325/year. Why would I ever pay that much? It’s not 1954. I’m not sitting down with my morning coffee and reading the damn thing front to back. I’m reading maybe one article a week from 15 different sources. Am I supposed to pay $5000/year just to cover my bases?

        As with everything else in [CURRENT YEAR] the value proposition is so absurdly out of step with reality that fixing it basically relies on rolling out the guillotines.

      • 4grams@awful.systems
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        8 months ago

        IMHO the problem is the same one as everywhere. Companies are no longer interested in creating products, they are only interested in creating revenue streams. I’ve been working on my finances lately and it’s incredible how many ‘products’ have become subscriptions over time.

        I’d love to be able to buy a day’s access, or access to an article. If I want to share it, I’m willing to pay a small fee to show it to certain folks. I feel like there could be a market there but in the current financial climate it would never get any interest or backing because it wouldn’t be a method to capture people into a reoccurring billing cycle.

        • TheMonkeyLord@sopuli.xyz
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          8 months ago

          Something I think is interesting is that, in order for companies to adopt these better non ad reliant models, they would have to dramatically scale down.

          In a climate where ad and clicks = revenue, your solution is to scale as large as you can and pump out content to maximize views. But that wouldn’t work under normal models

      • Randelung@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        I’m not visiting any of those sites regularly. I’m not subscribing to any outlet without sampling their content, either. So that was always going to fail.

        In the before times you were able to purchase one edition of a paper and be done with it. Now it’s subscription only, so they won’t see a dime from me.

      • Wogi@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        Not only do people expect free access, they feel entitled to endless free content.

        God forbid YouTube charge a subscription fee to help pay creators or show ads. No no, we all gotta jump on whatever app makes it free of ads and denies anyone a single cent for the content consumed.

        Even if YouTube is the actual devil, other platforms exist that do a better job of paying creators but we don’t talk about Nebula, we just talk about getting around the ads at YouTube without letting YouTube ever see a cent. As if having millions of videos available at the touch of a finger to anyone with an Internet connection is somehow free.

        • CileTheSane@lemmy.ca
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          The problem with YouTube is they will keep adding more ads until people stop tolerating it.

          It used to be a single ad at the start of the video you could skip after 5 seconds. Now it’s multiple unskippable ads before the video starts. Often you don’t know if this is the video you want anyway, and if it’s not you spent more time on the ads than the video itself.

          Once you do find the video you want you get random interruptions mid sentence for more unskippable ads. If people just shrug and say “they have to pay for it somehow” then YouTube rubs their hands together and puts more ads in until they find the point where more ads = less viewership.

          If the single “skip after 5s” ad was untenable long term then they shouldn’t have started with a service they couldn’t actually provide. I’m sick of these companies purposely running an unprofitable business just to get users, and then when they change the model to try to become profitable act like it’s the users fault that the company sold them on something they can’t maintain.

          If you want to support a creator do it through Patreon. The amount they get from YouTube is garbage. If I didn’t have a way to block YouTube ads I just wouldn’t watch YouTube anymore, so they aren’t losing any money from me running an AdBlock.

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    8 months ago

    The surprise is that apparently 28 percent of “experienced programmers” don’t have an ad blocker. I’m not sure how they got the data, but I wonder if their methods are up to the task of sorting out any possible inverse correlation between blocking ads and being willing to respond to polls.

    • Boxtifer@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      There’s a surprising amount of programmers that don’t know basics of various parts of an operating system. I know people that know several languages, but get lost on installing a mod pack for a game or installing an app from within another app like a browser.

      • LordCrom@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        True. 100% Even today I had to screen share with our lead DB developer to show him how to create a key and ssh to a host.

        Also worked with a guy who would design custom circuit boards for devices, but his windows skill was less than my mother’s (which is terrible)

    • Specal@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      “experienced programmers” in would have web developers fall under that umbrella, I’d guess web developers are less likely to adopt adblockers if their livelihood depends on them

    • jjjalljs@ttrpg.network
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      8 months ago

      The engineer who sat next to me at my old job didn’t use an adblocker. She also would just ignore anything on the screen that wasn’t directly related to her task. There’d be “please update” OS popups or “do you want to install a plugin for markdown?” ide prompts on her screen for days. When I’d roll over to work on something at her desk I’d be like “how do you work like this?” she was like “like what?”

      She was pretty good at engineering and generally smart. I don’t know how she did it.

      • mrmanager@lemmy.today
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        8 months ago

        I’m wondering about her reason for not using one too. What is the advantage?

        She thinks the web can’t exist without ads? It can, because it did once.

    • HowManyNimons@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      20 years pro experience here: I run several different browsers in various states of blockedness for various reasons. But when I’m off the clock, of course, it’s firefox with ublock.

    • iopq@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      My mom, in her 60s, is an experienced programmer. She programmed before she had the internet

  • daddy32@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    Ads are just pure negative. There was even one study that calculated this as a direct financial negative, although unfortunately in narrow circumstances: it was calculated that for mobile users in the US, paying for the data transferred to display the ad was more expensive than what the site owner got paid for including it on his site.

    • derpgon@programming.dev
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      8 months ago

      That’s is indeed a pure negative - for the users. The site and the the mobile carrier both got paid.

      Yes yes, capitalism good.

      • Jojo@lemm.ee
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        8 months ago

        Don’t forget the company serving the ads, and also the company paying for them