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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   44987 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 5, 2022

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The narrative about all-powerful, mind-controlling demonic ads really needs to go away

That's not why I have an adblocker. That's not why I was forced, after years without using one, to get an adblocker.

It's the sheer, unrelenting volume and placement of ads. I couldn't read an online news story without banner ads, sidebar ads, popup ads, autoplay music/speech (which is very disconcerting when you open a page, a voice starts yapping, and you have no idea where it's coming from or how to shut it up), and ads shoved in between every paragraph on the page.

It made any service, be it a website or commercial site or media site, unusable. I literally could not read the news story I had searched for, because the ads crowded it out.

So therefore adblocker. And now I have a much, much better experience because if I really want to find out "six different ways to cut a tomato with our amazing super-sharp knife!", I can go look it up, if I need a super-sharp knife. If I don't want one right now, no annoying ads about it.

I wasn't getting sophisticated, subliminal, slip past your mental guard and persuade you, slick ads with great copywriting and cool visuals. I was getting the equivalent of having my rubbish bin dumped over my head every time I ventured online. That's why I use an adblocker.

I had to start using them because everything is just simply too slow without it. Sites now feel like they have trackers in every pixel of every, otherwise static, page.

That’s a different concern.

Fair enough, however you should also see that using adblockers in that capacity is not sustainable - essentially you are using something that was supposed to be paid for by ads for free. Eventually as the ad blockers gain adoption, content creators are going switch to some other revenue model, like directly charging you for content e.g. what the news websites started to do. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but YMMV

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