Genuine question as I’m having a dilemma.
I’ve seen many of my friends using Chrome without any ad blockers. Most of them don’t even know that there are things called extensions that can be installed. Whenever I use their laptops, I want to throw them away. I want to tell them about extensions and ad blockers.
But as much as we hate ads, they fuel the internet. Without them, the internet wouldn’t be what it is today. If ad blocker users increase, there would be a massive change in the web, and everything may be paywalled.
So should we gatekeep ad blockers and enjoy an ad-free internet as a minority? It’s not like they know what they’re missing.
I advocate for FOSS, though. I will tell my friends to try Linux and dual-boot it, and suggest alternatives.
I’m old enough to have seen the Internet without ads. It was better.
Remember having a toolbar for your toolbar’s toolbar? It was a simple, more innocent time.
Don’t forget ActiveX Objects which could run code outside your browser, and for some strange reason was required for windows update to function.
Ad blocker is a terrible misnomer. Go to ublock’s github and read the README. Ublock’s primary purpose is to protect your right to privacy. Blocking ads is a consequence.
That given, your question could be reframed as “I don’t have spyware and my friends do. Should I tell them how to protect themselves at the risk of being spied on again?” An ethical dilemma where only a coward makes the wrong choice.
This exactly. It’s more like a firewall for your browser. Because web browsers are incredibly crap software that’s pretty completely ignored privacy and filtering along their development and it’s being slowly patched on in tiny kludges and extensions instead of being set in policy from the start.
Of course spam and malware is a hard problem in web browsers. It’s been a hard problem everywhere else, too.
Yeah no. Ad blockers for everyone. Death to the corpo web. Death to youtube and all other ad driven platforms.
But as much as we hate ads, they fuel the internet. Without them, the internet wouldn’t be what it is today.
Indeed, because of relying on ad revenue, journalism has given way to sensationalist click bait factories, and interesting or unique content is drowned out by invasive and manipulative commercial interests in search results .
If ad blocker users increase, there would be a massive change in the web,
Sounds pretty good to me.
they fuel the internet
no they don’t
they fuel shitty companies
Yeah the internet wouldn’t be what it is today: complete shit.
Internet is better than ever. The web is the broken part.
“Let others suffer with ads so I can have a cost-free browsing experience”
I’d much rather pay to support platforms that enrich my browsing experience, than continue allowing the ad-fuelled, spyware ridden, clickbait filled internet to continue even one more day.
Ad blockers for all, until we don’t need them anymore!
Everything is already headed to a point of being paywalled, I wouldn’t say there’s any reason to not spread the word and let more people know.
Web ads are a security risk that even the FBI has acknowledged, so your friends should be aware that having uBlock Origin installed is nearly as important as having virus protection.
Ad block users are already the minority.
Adblockers are a must have for protecting against mailware and phishing attacks. Google and other ad services have proven to be incompetent in protecting their service against those kind of attacks targeting users.
Less so than you’d believe. Over 30% of people use them
Source?
https://backlinko.com/ad-blockers-users
If you search ‘percentage of people who use ad blockers’ on ddg you find the same thing on several sites. I found it unbelievable too, but given multiple sites, I’ll take it at face value. I don’t have time to deep dive everything. Let me know if you find anything to the contrary.
Not much information on the data. But still some critique of the data:
- the source claims
“use ad blocking tools at least sometimes” so not all the time
- It is only 16-64
Both of those metrics exclude lots of data for example, when you scroll down you see that yes a lot of ppl use ad blocker on the PC but not on phones or tablets. Also ppl below 16 have a very low usage rate also ppl above 64.
I think actually ad block usage by sites visited with and without ad blockers would be nice too.
But thank you for the link, guess ad blockers are indeed more popular than i thought.
Donationware >>> Adware
deleted by creator
I believe my digital person is a part of me. Anyone collecting and owning any part of my person with intent to manipulate me in any way, is stealing a part of my person. I call that digital slavery.
The third pillar of democracy, as we all learned in early primary school, is freedom of information through a free press. The Press, does not mean corporate media owned by a few shitty billionaires. It means freedom of information. There are only 2 relevant web crawlers, Google’s and Microsoft’s. It doesn’t matter where you search the web, the query is going through one of these two crawlers directly or through the third party API. This is like if a hundred years ago, all newspapers were sold by one of two companies. The worst part is that, at the present, search results are not deterministic. If we both search for the exact same thing, the results will be different. This is a soft coup on the third pillar of democracy.
You should be ashamed when your life is so worthless that you can waste it watching ads.
This must be reduced to one word, to spread fast, like other topics have simp, cuck and coomer.
The content creators(YouTubers, news writers) whose content you are watching should also be able to make money right? If they earn enough money to not think about it, they would be happily creating content for us.
If someone is being finaned by ads, they are doing something wrong. That is not sustainable nor secure, especially if one wants to reamin truthful.
Ads are used to control media, and are a bad thing. Also ads are not problem, bit random JavaScript executed on my computer is.
Put paywall (just don’t push it into my search without marking it as paywall), Patreon, sell hats and t-shirts… there are better ways.
Where did I say they shouldn’t take money? First, your ad won’t block? I’ll block your content too. Try take money then.
Donating $20 directly to a creator or buying one item from their merch will more than offset a lifetime of ad revenue from just yourself if you use ad blockers for their content. The fractional pennies you are worth to them is completely eclipsed by directly supporting most of them a single time.
