Technology

I legitimately don't understand how people tolerate using the internet without an adblocker just from a usability standpoint.

Some pages are fine but frequently wandering to new pages on the internet is an experience in frustration.

I use an adblocker. I wouldn't click on an ad even if I could see it.

I agree with you in principle but in practice way too many sites are doing ads in bullshit ways. If they were just along a sidebar or at the top/bottom of the page I'd have no issue but usually they affect the actual usability of the site and I'm not dealing with that. If they want to expose me to ads they need to make it not a problem for me.

The big assumption here is that the website had time or money invested in it. I feel like the vast majority of websites these days are just ai garbage with enough ads to prevent you from even reading the thing and give your computer herpies as a bonus. The era of good faith advertising where the ads were reasonable and balanced with the quality of content is long gone. Most sites are now explicitly designed for exploitive data harvesting and endless ad delivery.

Of course, some websites are exceptions to this and adblock can easily be toggled off for those websites if you really want to support them. Taking off protections for a trusted partner though is quite different from raw dogging the whole internet

Look, the boot tastes perfectly fine. Besides, how will the millionaires eat if I don't spend my attention to get them paid? What's another ad. And another ad. Ads when I drive, ads when I park. Ads when I'm reading the news and ads when I'm watching TV. Anyone else hungry for lol.

Not everything I view online deserves money. I decide what is worth it to give money to and I decide what news articles I'm allowed to read.

At this point ad blocking is more about security and optimization than stopping ads themselves. If a site wants to run some banner ads to pay for costs, I have nothing against it, but once Javascript is involved, that just becomes a vulnerability for attack.

Also, websites that bury their content in layers of overlay and popup ads with loud audio and several unrelated videos can go fuck themselves.

I run ad blockers. As a security measure. Ad companies collect insane amount of data and do a bunch of shady stuff whenever they can get away with it.

I want to support websites whenever I'm able, but the way ad companies operate just ain't it.

If they clean up their act, maybe then I could stop using ad blockers, but it's been decades and I don't have high hopes.

Also using ad blockers for performance and usability reasons. For example, I used to use a bunch of Fandom wikis and couldn't understand why people hated the UI. Then I saw how Fandom looks like without ad blockers and holy shit how can humans live like this

You remind me of the old guy at work who called me a "FUCKING FREELOADER" because I told him about uBlock origin.

I'm never recommending it again to anyone and I have since kept it a secret that I use an ad-blocker. I guess it's a problem for people.

I agree with your reasoning but I still do run an adblocker. There are only 3 things in my life (that I can think of) where what I think is right and what I actually do don't align: adblocking, piracy and eating meat.

Your annoyance does not pay the bills though. You are annoying yourself for nothing.

Bike cuck vibes

I respect your stance and I agree with the subscription vs ads decision, websites need to make money somehow and I dont want to pay a subscription for everything either. I do run an adblocker but whitelist websites I use often and that dont have intrusive ads. It unfortunately affects websites that I visit quickly and dont come back to, they get a visitor but no advertisements. Its not a perfect solution but ads tend to be very intrusive on random websites.

I do, but it's less about the ads and more about privacy. I don't use things like sponsor block because there's pretty much no privacy violation there. But I do use an ad blocker because advertisers track me across websites to build up a profile.

I also don't want to make a free account, again because of privacy concerns (both from the site and from any data breaches.

I'm happy to pay a little for content, but I haven't yet seen a system that respects my privacy and is reasonably priced. If that was a thing, I'd totally pay.

There have been very decent alternatives, but they never took off.

One such was Flattr. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flattr

Flattr was a Swedish-based microdonation subscription service, where subscribers opted in to pay a monthly patronage to help fund their favourite websites and creators. It shut down in November 2023.[1]

Flattr subscribers installed an open-source browser extension that records which websites they frequent and shares this data with Flattr.[2] Flattr processes this user data and pays out shares of the user's subscription to each registered Flattr creator based on which websites the user consumed.[3] Flattr filtered websites by domains with a default allowlist of participating domains, but individual users could override and contribute to any website they want or withhold contributions from any website.[4]

I used it for a while, but not many websites and creators used it, so most of my money was going towards a select few.

Good, click on them for the rest of us

I still use Google news, I really need to get rid of it but I've been slacking. Anyways, every once in a while I'll click on a story and the website will literally be paragraphs separated by gigantic, scrollable ads, and ads between paragraphs done in a way that you're not sure if you've actually finished the story or not.

I can't use fathom being on those websites without an adblocker. It's horrendous.