I categorically reject ads. I want them completely abolished. I will do everything that's in my power to get them out of my machines. If I had just a little bit more courage I would go out at night with cans of spray paint and deface billboards.
It may be less emotionally rewarding, but in many areas
- many places advertisements violate various rules and on notification local authorities (or other entity) is likely to take action. For example in Poland ads (except political ones, politicians exempted themself again) cannot be ever placed on bridges, lamp posts, traffic signs, guard rails etc. Every single one placed there is illegal and road maintainers remove them once notified.
- local authorities may be allowed to pass laws banning or limiting their presence (Kraków, Poland recently outlawed large part of billboards within city)
Also, removing some of ads may be perfectly legal or with penalties so low that eliminating them is not legally risky.
It's silly I know, but I get a tiny amount of satisfaction from not letting them advertise to me.
If one is unwilling to pay for a service but still use it one needs to realize some other form of monetization will be required.
(Sadly, google shut down Vanced, but you can still find it if you go looking and ReVanced is coming along nicely.)
As in Black Mirror's 15 Million Merits.
Will you pay money for the content you consume?
There's Nebula for some creators and Patreon for others, but not everyone has an ad free way to watch them. Also Patreon can really begin to add up.
And yeah there's that extension that can skip sponsored segments but that's blocking ads, not paying to avoid them.
You can't skip the sponsored segment if literally 100% of the video has HelloFresh boxes in the background, or if an important part of the video happens while the creator coincidentally eats a bowl of Keto cereal.
Or what about those LinusTechTip videos where Intel gives them $5k to build a dream system for an employee (Intel based, of course). I find those entertaining but they're really just 20 minute long Intel advertisements.
Videos don't have nipples around, or else they would get flagged, right? Do the same for unmarked ads. This is of course a handwavy way to propose a solution... the idea is that something could be done to improve the ad-free experience of viewers who pay. Otherwise, they'd better remain using the latest published version of Vanced, which even integrated SponsorBlock (again, pirates offering a better user experience!)
If anything, I've seen more and more services where paying is just for "premium features," of which getting away from ads isn't one of them. Spotify is a key example - if you pay for premium you don't get ads interrupting music, but you still see their bundled advertisements on the home screen of the app, you get content suggested to you in a way that is very advertiser-centric, etc.
I think we should maybe split off the discussion of "how will these businesses get paid the way ads get paid" from "ads are bad and we should get rid of them." Frankly, I don't care if advertising as a business tanks and that takes other businesses with it. The externalities of surveillance capitalism are pretty shitty, and I'm fairly confident there are other ways for people to be productive within the economy that don't involve the invasive nature of today's advertising ecosystem.
I use open source stuff when I can, and similarly, I contribute to the projects when I can. This seems to be the only legitimate way to avoid ads.
You can’t outrun the incentive alignment. Nobody can. Case in point - Apple is shifting hard into the ad space after laying low and crafting a premium brand.
The money is just too good.
I wish companies would offer the opportunity to pay what you want to remove ads. People with adblock are probably more likely to pay for it, because anyone not running ads is probably not bothered by them anyway. And people running adblock are unmonetisable. So a little bit of money is better than no money.
At least when one signs up for e.g. Hulu you're forced to realize different rates include different things. With Windows most don't even realize they had a choice.
It does lead to the question why people are fine buying a PC then having ads but again I'm not sure many really understand (or necessarily care) about the difference between ads in the start menu or ads in something like the browser, it's all just "the computer" and ads have just always been a part of a computer for most so what's to make them expect otherwise.
Advertising is popular on the web for historical reasons. Content delivery advanced much faster than payment, so for ~20 years ads were the easiest way for many sites to pay the bills. Nobody was sure what else to do.
But that's no longer the case. Soft paywalls have been around for circa a decade, so selling subscriptions while letting your content self-market is viable. Content creators also have plenty of direct revenue options. Patreon is doing something like $2 billion/year in revenue for creators. Twitch became a huge platform without ads, just allowing direct cash transfers from fans to creators. And that's not even counting the ~$50 billion/year now spent on streaming and VOD in the US.
On the other side of it, per-ad revenue has been falling for decades. I helped start a content site and keep in touch with people in that area. The reason so many ad-supported sites look like absolute shit is that to make any money, you keep needing to up the amount of ads you run, making them more and more annoying to overcome learned ad blindness. So advertising is slowly strangling itself, leading to lots of people using ad-blockers, and counter-ad-blocker technology becoming widespread. What sane person would start an ad-funded content business today?
A world-wide web with little or no advertising is not only plausible, it looks like that's where we're headed.
Suppose someone develops a product that you would love and would make your life better; how do you think you should find out about it?
Word of mouth, basically. Or searching for something that I need.
What I hate most about advertising is it just shoves everything in people's faces and makes people think they need this and that. I find myself somewhat immune to ads (as much as one can be I guess), maybe I just programmed myself to ignore them growing up in early internet days. But it's so obvious the large effect that ads can have on most people.
I find out about new and cool stuff generally from peoples comments on sites like here, reddit etc. If you have a good product, word of mouth is generally pretty damn good. Or coming across something from searches for a specific need.
I just can't think about anything that I needed and found out from a standard advertisement in like.. any recent memory. Maybe I'm the outlier here.. obviously ads must work well enough but I hate them with a passion.
In the 2020s, the web is nearing a level of criticality to a functioning society as the neighborhoods, towns, cities we access it from. Those physical properties are heavily regulated and with good reason.
Also, physical properties are heavily regulated partially because there is a limited amount of physical space for them.
Regarding regulation, physical spade is definitely one part of it. But the public is also generally against nuisances, including too many advertisements. It’s an imperfect analogy, but not too far off.
I felt assaulted. There is no reasonable justification or purpose for this that takes into account basic human empathy. Granted this might be different from ads that do just make you aware of a product. But this reasoning is looking more and more like justification rather than purpose.
> Granted this might be different from ads that do just make you aware of a product. But this reasoning is looking more and more like justification rather than purpose.
I have no problem with promoting a product, as long as it takes into account basic human empathy. But I guess if your bank account is directly correlated with product sales, you kind of forget about that.
My original comment was arguing that even if a lot of advertising today is bad, that doesn’t mean we should get rid of all advertising. I don’t understand what your response has to do with that. Were you just agreeing with me?
I just moved to a new laptop. I haven’t installed ad blockers yet. But interestingly, I seem to have got out of the habit of using the obnoxious ad supported sites. Probably because they became too low quality. I hadn’t even realized my ad blockers weren’t installed until this thread.
That said this case isn't much of a moral mystery. YouTube offers a reasonable paid plan, most people just prefer ads.
First being that there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism so that makes things difficult.
Second, “voting with your wallet” is pointless, you’re much better off voting with your votes and ad blockers if you want to see real change. If anything by your logic buying YouTube Premium is worse ethically since you’re directly supporting a company that makes money on unethical ads. Giving them more money won’t make ads go away.
And to that, third, demanding self-flagellation to prove that one is sincere in their beliefs is puritanical nonsense. You are absolutely allowed to both buy Nike shoes and fight for legislation that forbids them from treating their factory workers poorly.
I'm not quite sure I follow how opting for the business model one doesn't find unethical is supporting unethical business models. It may not be attacking the business model they find unethical but that's a different claim. Unless of course we allow any connection with a service to taint the entire lot in which case I can again see how someone with those views would have problems with pretty much any service anywhere.
As for the conversation on shoes when you have a basic need sure, don't let people's ability to source needs get in the way of people bettering their working conditions. After all they don't really have a choice in forgoing either. That's not really relevant to people's desires to consume entertainment services though. Particularly when people are given their own agency on deciding what is the right way to fund it already or even to be able to not consume the want should there be nowhere to do so. In the end it may come down to whether you think it should be alright for people to operate on different morals than you so long as their choice is mostly limited to impacting them or if there is only one true set of morals everyone must be forced to follow by law.
Not to say that the service they provide isn't useful. It's obviously more economical to operate media platforms at scale, and obviously most content creators don't have the technical ability to do it themselves.
When you look at say, podcasts for instance, you have this giant shared wealth of free content and you can pick a number of creators to support depending on your budget. You usually get extra episodes or perks as an incentive for doing so. Imagine if, instead of paying YouTube X dollars or watching Y ads and letting them choose out how to spread that money around, you pay the people you actually watch and the platform vendors, who ought to be the least important and most replaceable factor in this transaction, gets the cut they actually deserve.
Before they were ruined by copyright trolls, streaming services like Netflix demonstrated that charging everyone a reasonable amount of money for access to the entire park was a viable business model.
YouTube is getting more heavy-handed as time goes on, but one reason for this is that they were operating at a loss for so long, and in doing so provided extra utility that we might take for granted.
GP comment mentioned Netflix, but that is in fact a good example of what I mean. They started to struggle because competitors moved into the space. Unlike YouTube, they did not have an unassailable position. Unlike Spotify, they did not have a market that allowed sharing catalogues across platforms.
In a sense, what we interpreted as Netflix showing a viable business model was rather Netflix showing early mover advantage on borrowed time. Having an ecosystem with multiple mediocre services such as what streaming is becoming now would not necessarily have been in the advantage of videographers if it had happened to video-sharing platforms. It would almost certainly have lead to a smaller and less engaged overall audience.
hmm... you do know this is the reason companies like Google + Meta make lots of money, right?
I know you don't like ads but... a lot of people obviously are ok with them (otherwise businesses wouldn't find it worth it to advertise on those platforms, in hopes of capturing customers/increasing sales)
I am not sure why it would be reason for ads.
Would be even more stupid to try after writing this post though.