Indeed. People need to understand that blocking ads will harm the industry and doom the economy. I’d go as far as banning ad-block users completely from my website.
Ads should be blocked relentlessly until companies realize what reasonable, secure and tasteful ads look like, instead of the intrusive malware-ridden pile that interrupt our lives at the current time.
Tracking, on the other hand, will never have a place in this world.
It'd be cool if browsers could send some sort of do not track header, that sites could then use to refuse to serve you any content.
Assuming that they actually do want none of those users to consume their content in that way.
Then IE10 turned it on by default, making it pretty much completely useless as a signal for site owners.
In other words: if most users do not want to get tracked, this should have been a signal to stop fucking tracking. The fact that it didn't doesn't reflect well on sites, to put it mildly.
I totally agree with josteink: this is good news because it means that anti-tracking measures are starting to hurt.
IE10, Safari and Firefox all did sensible things. The industry just doesn't want sensible things, it wants to violate everybody's privacy uninterrupted.
Better than one that tries to trick you, or tries to violate your privacy in secret, but bad none the less.
On medium.com or affiliated site: 40% chance of BS.
Blank page with JS disabled: Built by people who would love 5 GB web pages; 80% chance of BS.
"Please disable your ad blocker": Only people who love ads are real people; 90% chance of BS.
"You seem to be offline." Built by idiots; 100% chance of BS.
ducks rotten veg
Loads almost 500k in 0.75 seconds, CSS looks a decade old, uses no obvious JS: 95% likely to be exactly the content I want with none of that nonsense because it was written by a domain expert for fun, not ad revenue.
Instagram and Facebook ads are the worst.
Also: everything on my PC is English, everything. I am using English keywords only. WHY THE FUCK IS STILL EVERY AD IN GERMAN
Which industry?
Imagine a web browser that doesn't let publishers decide how ads are displayed, where and how many of them. It can choose an acceptable ad format for the user, like textual non-tracking ads below the content, and if publishers want, they can use that format to put an ad here, but nowhere else. It will still permit a lot of ad supported content, but will remove all those ad surveillance capitalism incentives and clickbaity user engagement.
The ad industry 100 years ago solved this problem. Wanna sell widgets? Take out an ad in Widgets Weekly and you know you will perfectly target an audience of widget-fans. All this tracking stuff is totally unnecessary and everyone must know it.
Maybe I'm just a freak or something, but I've been pretty happy as a monthly-paying Spotify subscriber. It's not my impression that the ad-supported version of Spotify is the "core" product.
Nearly all content online is user-generated. The publishers simply rip off contributors, slap ads on their content, and sell the content back to the same public that created it.
> It harms all the industries where the content is ad supported, which is the majority of the Internet right now... almost all news... absolutely massive portion of the modern Internet is monetized right now..
I don't like ads.
But I positively loathe underhanded tactics ad networks utilize, all the way from the "I can disagree but see their point of view" tracking, to "what the fuck are you doing" drive-by malware installs.
Fuck them, unequivocally. They're incapable or unwilling of effectively policing the content they serve, so they don't get to serve it to me.
Out of all of those xkcd is the only one I like and I don't see any ads on it... The author does writes books though.
> I get why people don't like ads but it's clearly how an absolutely massive portion of the modern Internet is monetized right now
Maybe it just doesn't need to be monetised, everyone who defends intrusive internet ads talks about no alternative - Here is the alternative: If people aren't willing to pay for it, it probably shoudln't be monetised, there are plenty of things on the internet which are free, cost little to run and don't make a profit: search, social networking and video, all decentralisable in an affordable way... they don't need to be monetised, their corporate future is short.
Or, you know, someone will get the info and repost it somewhere less restrictive.