this post was submitted on 20 Feb 2026
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ad blockers are necessary to effectively navigate the internet
fandom.com is bad WITH an adblocker, i would never consider opening it without one
anyone who would seriously think using adblock is unethical is a bootlick
They certainly are. I met one of those people in the middle, and they also had interesting opinions on other things like immigration and women's sports...
I'm old enough to remember when the internet managed to end banner ads, popup ads, and flashing ads....
I remember when the white box Google Ad Words(?) first started appearing in sidebars of sites and being creeped out that they kind of knew what I was in to. Now that is everywhere.
I remember it before ads...
Advertising unethical
I'd say it's not inherently unethical. How else would you find out about options for a thing you need?
How current the ad industry works however, can die in a fire.
You can just search for it, you don't need ads for that. Ads is a really bad way to find out about options, because it's never about quality, it's all about appearance.
How would you know what to search for? Some advertising is fine - a sign for a restaurant or industry mailers or magazines, "related products", etc etc are all very tame forms of advertising. The problem is hyperintrusive advertising which has now spiraled so far into hell that it drives a model of data harvesting and content slop that's slowly tainting all access to information we have.
How would you know what to search for?
Because of the needs I have, when I am hungry ill search for recipes or restaurants. When my apartment needs cleaning ill search for cleaning supplies, when I am bored ill look up what movies are playing.
I actually can not come up with a single situation where advertisement would be needed or helpful in anyway. I also do not have a problem with smaller advertisement, but in my dreams they are all banned regardless. Won't be missing those.
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I walk to the store, I check what's there, I ask an employee for help, then make my own decision. If it's shit, I don't get it again and tell who I know to avoid it. I don't get products that people I trust have had bas experiences with.
Advertisements are lying. Every dollar spent on marketing is a dollar that could have been spent either improving your product or paying your staff. If you advertise to me, I will actively avoid your product.
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Consent is a key factor.
If you mail me an ad? Fuck you.
If I search out your service and find you? Okay. Though people game this system obviously. Google used to fight back against this but now they don’t care and even have just given in, allowing pay to play. So fuck that too
I think an even more important aspect to me is something I don't have a good term for, but something like honesty/intrusiveness. The key issue is that advertisement should be an honest, truthful, non-deceitful representation of a good/service. But instead ads are designed to catch your eye, insert themselves into your thoughts with catchy music, play on your emotions even using kids, all while avoiding really telling you what they're about.
On the note of consent, it reminds me of a certain website for webnovels, which hosts ads submitted by users, for their own novels. It's been kind of ruined by GenAI, but it feels very different when the ads are often badly made memes about the premise of the story, since that's what you're already on the site for and it's the actual authors wanting to share their stories.
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Let's say I go to an Invasion Day rally where thousands of people are protesting against the current date of Australia Day because it celebrates colonialism. I bring with Me a stack of flyers about the pro-Palestine rally in two weeks. I hand them out to protesters and say "There's more colonialism happening right now in Palestine. Come to this protest too."
- Am I advertising?
- Is it ethical?
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Some local news sites in my city show local ads that are simply static images loaded in their pages, mimicking old newspaper ads, without any kind of tracking. Although it's questionable at a philosophical level if ads can be ethical, I can live with it, and that method will pass automated adblockers, so it's a win-win.
You know, I think I’d be okay with that. As long as it’s not something that’s begging for your attention or trying to get you to click on it.
Or loading at random intervals so you have to scroll around to find where you were before the page jumped around. Very little infuriates me more.
I could almost live with ads if they were static, but the typical article-reading experience without afblock goes like this:
See the first paragraph. Start reading. An autoplay video pops in at the top of the page obscuring the view. You scroll down but it's pinned to the top of the viewport. You close it with the miniscule x button. You finish the first paragraph and scroll down past a huge ad to the next paragraph. A banner ad appears at the bottom of the page. You dismiss it with the x. You start reading and two seconds later the banner you dismissed reappears with a new ad, obscuring the content again. You try to dismiss it, but miss and open the ad. Press back in the browser and start again from step 1.
Its exhausting, and it's so painfully constrained, like trying to view a webpage by peeking at it through someone's letterbox.
The Internet with ads, as it stands, is not worth seeing.
Not to mention it greatly lowered the quality of content. Now it's 95% getting a catchy clickbate title with the actual body often not even agreeing with the title. It's fucking exhausting.
I think the biggest issue with personalised ads is that they can exploit weaknesses in people are prevent public discourse about themselves (since they're different for everyone), which is especially bad for political ads. So these ads that you're describing seem good in my book.
Adblock is digital self defense against malware for your pc, as well as your mind.
https://xcancel.com/SwiftOnSecurity/status/1569083806224715776
Ads are violence on the mind.
Adblocking is good security.
who are these people in the middle
i do not recognize them
Largely bootlickers and trolls, they don't exist in as great of numbers as the OP's post implies. The ones on the left are far FAR more common.
Never met the person in the middle. Those would be in the 1%
Adblockers came up in conversation with a (non-techie) friend the other day and they said they don't have one because they are afraid they'd "get the wrong one" or end up with a virus trying to download "something like that" because they've had trouble with those shady download websites that have a ton of fake download buttons... Like, they look at adblocker as if it is the most scandalous form of piracy or something.
I habe been at all three of these stages in my life, so this seems pretty accurate
i'm quite curious about your "adblock unethical" phase because... the fuck?
The only argument ive seen with any weight is for content creators whose revenue stream is ad dependent, and even then sorry not sorry im not turning off ublock
Ad networks are known to be a large distributor of malware and scams.
it’s prudent to block ads.
Adblock smart is high iq.
This seems flipped, there's no way a majority of people like ads.
Maybe it should be Low IQ are people who don't know what an ad blocker is, and High IQ are people who say ad blocking is unethical.
This seems flipped, there's no way a majority of people like ads.
Honestly from some of the interactions I've had with my peers I didn't even think of the meme as strange.
Like one time I saw my roommate running Opera GX of all browsers without any adblockers and I asked him "don't these ads bother you?" and he responded, I shit you not, "no, quite the opposite! they're really helpful!". I didn't say anything because at that moment I was genuinely stunlocked.
I had a similar experience with a work colleague. His response? "They are helpful. They tell me what to buy". I guess some people are just like that.
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I think you’re just used to the lemmy(/reddit) crowd. Pretty much everyone I casually know has ads when they show me something on youtube. Every time I ask “Why not use an adblocker?” they reply either “The ads don’t bother me” or “I want to support the content creators”.
Doesn’t make sense to me. I’ll buy some swag or donate to creators I like, but I am not voluntarily watching ads.
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