Yep, they brought it upon themselves, I still remember as a kid falling for a “you are the visitor number 1 million” and getting a virus; and now we have porn and cults advertising on youtube, nothing changed.

I certainly do lot miss the days when I’d go onto a website covered in ads for cheap, garbage MMOs… And then suddenly hear random music really fucking loudly. Scrambling to figure out where it’s coming from I’d find 4 or 5 smaller windows has opened up behind my main browser window.

Honestly I wouldn’t even mind some basic banner flashing, i.e. not neon fucking strobe and plastered over everything. I can understand them wanting to get a little bit of an eye catch. But not all of the ads can be like that and not with pop-ups and shit.

It’s ironic, they depend on perpetual growth, which means the more efficient they get at growing, the faster they outgrow their effective markets and then end up in a position where they need to further optimize optimal positions.

Sure, there’s probably smaller optimizations they could make, but they don’t just depend on growth but a certain % of growth.

Cornering markets is the beginning of the end for businesses in our growth obsessed system.

What they’re “forgetting” is that those who block ads are more likely to say “fuck product X I’ll never buy it because of this ad” if forced to see an ad. (Well, they don’t care, they know, but they can still sell the “spot” so to speak because the advertisers themselves are dumb enough not know that it is just shooting themselves in the foot.)

I go a step further and block them in DDG. This includes any “article” I have to scroll through to find the answer.

I love cookies!

…not the browser kind. I’m partial to chocolate chip!

Get PopUpOFF and AdNauseam. Don’t just back down without a fight. If I need to read an article to find some information I am going to read it, dumb bullshit be damned, even if I have to break half your site to do so. I’ve even been spiteful enough to hack away at the page with inspect element if it still manages to get past those add-ons.

Well first it’s not “fuck you”, its “goodbye”. And second it’s not about “you”, it’s about “me” not visiting your site if I need to turn off adblock. End of the story, our path will not cross again. Ciao, aurevoir, hasta not luego.

You can’t seem to grasp that we’re not just single people. We’re a force that also influences the non-tech people around us.

When I use, repair or configure the computer of a friend or family member, it’ll definitely get an adblocker.

I completely get your point, and to an extent I agree, but I do think there’s still an argument to be made.

For instance, if a theme park was charging an ungodly amount for admission, or maybe, say, charged you on a per-ride basis after you paid admission, slowly adding more and more charges to every activity until half your time was spent just handing over the money to do things, if everyone were to stop going in, the theme park would close down, because they did something that turned users away.

Websites have continually added more and more ads, to the point that reading a news article feels like reading 50% ads, and 50% content. If they never see any pushback, then they’ll just keep heaping on more and more ads until it’s physically impossible to cram any more in.

I feel like this is less of a dunk on the site by not using it in that moment, and more a justifiable way to show that you won’t tolerate the rapidly enshittified landscape of digital advertising, and so these sites will never even have a chance of getting your business in the future.

If something like this happens enough, advertisers might start finding alternative ways to fund their content, (i.e. donation model, subscription, limited free articles then paywall) or ad networks might actually engage with user demands and make their systems less intrusive, or more private. (which can be seen to some degree with, for instance, Mozilla’s acquisition of Anonym)

Even citing Google’s own research, 63% of users use ad blockers because of too many ads, and 48% use it because of annoying ads. The majority of these sites that instantly hit you with a block are often using highly intrusive ads that keep popping up, getting in the way, and taking up way too much space. The exact thing we know makes users not want to come back. It’s their fault users don’t want to see their deliberately maliciously placed ads.

A lot of users (myself most definitely included) use ad blockers primarily for privacy reasons. Ad networks bundle massive amounts of surveillance technology with their ads, which isn’t just intrusive, but it also slows down every single site you go to, across the entire internet. Refusing that practice increases the chance that sites more broadly could shift to more privacy-focused advertising methods.

Google recommends to “Treat your visitors with respect,” but these sites that just instantly slap up an ad blocker removal request before you’ve even seen the content don’t actually respect you, they just hope you’re willing to sacrifice your privacy, and overwhelm yourself with ads, to see content you don’t even know anything about yet. Why should I watch your ads and give up my privacy if you haven’t given me good reason to even care about your content yet?

This is why sites with soft paywalls, those that say you have “x number of free articles remaining,” or those that say “you’ve read x articles this month, would you consider supporting us?” get a higher rate of users disabling adblockers or paying than those that just slap these popups in your face the moment you open the site.

Ignore the last panel and it makes way more sense. When the site demands I see their ads, I leave that site and look for that same content elsewhere. There’s never a time when I think “HA! Gotteem!” I just don’t engage with the site, and don’t care about it or who else does.

Yes and no. Similar with apps, you can say “well if you’re not paying/seeing adds then we lose nothing by you not visiting”, but, depending on their growth stage, it’s very hard to grow and get investors without a sizable audience.

Say you’re a startup. If you have 10k people and you ignore ad blockers and people who don’t play subscriptions. Then you start preventing people with ad blockers and no subscriptions from your platform and it drops to 1k… You lose investment pulling power.

The effect is amplified, or much worse, if you actually require user generated content as well

This is Lemmy, though. We’re not the normal crowd, not even the normal tech crowd. We’re the “Hacker News in '07 that laughed at Dropbox because you could just use curlftpfs and source control” crowd. As a general rule, if it’s not about Linux or Star Trek lore this place knows nothing.

It really is dead, isn’t it?

You got any blacklists that catch YouTube and twitch ads? Afaik those are provided from their own cdn now, so dns won’t work unless I’m mistaken

An AI feature actually useful for consumers? Corporate overloards say no thx, let’s instead fill the net with more AI-generated SEO bullshit

І ԁоո’t раrtісulаrly thіոk thаt summаrіzеrs аrе а gооԁ gоаl, sіոсе аі summаrіеs саո оftеո bе wrоոg, mіsіոtеrрrеt іոfоrmаtіоո, оr оmіt іmроrtаոt іոfоrmаtіո thеy fаіl tо іԁеոtіfy аs іmроrtаոt.

I think if that starts to become common people should start using tools like this as well as the use of pre-baked PDF or image rendered text to thwart it on their content.

You can say “bullshit” here, lemmy isn’t so concerned with making everything child friendly to appease advertisers like tiktok or youtube.

and the people who make the content get compensated via ad revenue

We’re assuming that the only possible goal is money. The people who make the content can also get compensated by enjoying the propagation of their ideas, just as one example.

The web, “as intended,” worked for several years with utterly no ad content. And when ads did start coming along, they were largely innocuous; little things in side bars, not obnoxious full-page videos that are rarely dismissible.

Anyone who tries to sell you on the idea that the web was designed for commerce or as a way to distribute anything other than information is a lying fucker.

I don’t know how people who block ads are so delusional to think that these websites would be sad to see them go, any more than shops would be sad to see shoplifters take their business elsewhere.

I get why some people might block ads but don’t kid yourselves, you’re blocking the only revenue stream for most sites and it doesn’t cost you anything. I’m not taking about tracking of course, sites that track you can get fucked.

This is exactly why I choose to persevere with ad-blocking addons and make their website work the way I want it to without dumb bullshit getting in my way. :D

If you want people to use your website, make your website usable with unobtrusive ads or I’ll make it usable for me, and you won’t see a dime of ad revenue. Unfortunately, most sites seem to just double down (which doesn’t work because it just makes ad-blocking even more necessary and popular). Sucks for them.

The honest answer are general fees like they are used for public broadcasters. It’s not a perfect system either and it requires significant effort to keep things neutral, but overall it seems to have the best results if you compare the quality of the outcome.

News sites are in need of a paradigm shift.

I think we might get to a system where summaries of news are free, but indepth articles and videos are paid.

Oh and I believe that news sites should scrap subscription only models, I should be able to pay 1-2EUR for a single article that I want to read, with no risk of the payment being a subscription.

Obviously subscriptions models should still be an alternative if the users want it.

The news sites that we have today are an inversion of what they should be. As a journalist, you wield tremendous power that is entrusted to you. Being able to set the narrative for millions of others is a privilege and, in fact, something that journalists should be paying to enjoy (e.g. footing the bill for web hosting).

Subscription models. Some sites even combine some free articles with it, so that anyone can look into their works, but not necessarily everything. If it fits you, you get a subscription. Sort of the same way people would pay for their daily newspaper.

It can be argued that “news” should be free, and there are some news site that are basically picking up AP/AFP/whatever and repost these, but actual journalism do requires work.