I do think that for moderators, they could have some special app to help them do their jobs easier, but for regular users, meh, the ads are easy enough to scroll past, like in other social media outfits.
I also don't agree that the mobile app is shitty.
Who do you think creates all the content? The community is all there is, and Reddit the company adds zero value other than paying for servers to host the data. They managed to create one of the worst performing and buggy websites on the internet by burning through millions of investment money. It's more pathetic than anything.
Because my attention belongs to me. Exclusively. It's not yours. It's not reddit's. It's not Google's. It doesn't belong to anyone other than I, certainly not a corporation. It's not a currency that can be used to pay for services. They do not have the right to sell it off to the highest bidder.
I deserve not to be advertised to for the same reasons women deserve not to be raped: basic human dignity. I don't consent to it. I don't consent to their forcible injection of their silly little brands and taglines into my mind. As far as I'm concerned it's mind rape and anything I do to kill ads is legitimate justified self defense. I couldn't care less how much money they lose either, find another business model or disappear.
Rape is an act of physical violence, and you're arguing about a small price to use a free service.
I don't know about you but I consider my mind even more sacred than my body. It's not some advertiser's playground for them to spam their bullshit with complete impunity. I will resist that abuse. I don't need to "deserve" it. I'm not alone either. It's hard enough to cope with attention deficit without these spammers around.
Their advertising bullshit though? They're knowingly sending me stuff for free. They chose to do it. I won't be guilted into accepting abuse based on that. They did so hoping I was gonna look at the ads but the truth is I'm under exactly zero obligation to actually do that. So I won't.
But second, you are unhinged if you think this is a reasonable comment:
> I deserve not to be advertised to for the same reasons women deserve not to be raped
Wow
If you want to discuss the matter further and hopefully understand why I said what I said, I'm happy to do it. Provided you approach the matter seriously without name calling.
Of course being raped is miles ahead of the weak form of mind control attempt that is advertising, but it's the same damn scale.
the difference in severity is huuuuuuge
It absolutely does. What nonsense. My cognitive functions don't belong to some corporation just because I visited their website. They are inalienable.
It's really difficult to say these things because people come at you to call you entitled, unhinged, a freeloader, downvote you. I always say it anyway. I hope it inspires others too. We're not alone.
True.
> You knew reddit included ads, you consented to use reddit which includes ads.
It's not really an all or nothing, take it or leave it proposition. Just because they sent me ads, doesn't obligate me to view them. I get to view just the parts that I want to view.
We're not some captive passive consumer audience that reddit can jerk around at will. We are in control. We own the machine and we decide what it's going to display. If we decide we don't want to see ads, we're not gonna see ads and that's pretty much the end of it. What reddit wants or needs has pretty much zero bearing on the matter.
If you send me a page with some annoying element and I decide I want to get rid of it, it's within my power. All I have to do is inspect the element and delete it. Alternatively, I can download an annoyance filter extension with a huge database of those annoying elements to do it for me. It's called uBlock Origin.
This is called adversarial interoperability and it's an essential freedom.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interopera...
If I'm handed a magazine and it has annoying ads on it, I can rip out the pages and throw them in the trash. Same thing.
> Just because you don’t like ads doesn’t make it “mind rape”.
I think it does. I don't consent to having information I didn't ask for forcibly inserted into my mind for someone else's profit. When I opened this post, I wanted to see the comments, not irrelevant brands of products I don't care about. If I wanted to see products I'd have visited Amazon or gone to the market.
It's really simple. If you add noise to your signal, I'll filter it. I don't care if you make money by adding that noise. Find some other way to make money or go bankrupt.
> It isn’t the world’s responsibility
I'm having difficulty understanding what you're saying. I think you mean "it's not reddit's responsibility to cater to your needs". Well it doesn't have to. I'll look after my own needs -- by blocking its ads unconditionally and with no exceptions.
It's absolutely mind-blowing to me the entitlement people have thinking they should get things for free.
They chose to have a free site. Don't want to give things away for free? Charge for access then.
No, they chose to have a site funded by ads. If you don't want to be advertised to, get off Reddit.
If you don't want ads, pay for the privilege and get reddit premium. If you don't want to pay and you can't handle ads and you refuse to use an adblocker but MUST keep visiting for some reason, then stop whining - you've directly refused every solution.
But they want that mass media appeal that comes with giving things out for free, don't they? Guess they'll have to deal with it. If they send ads along with their free pages, we'll delete them. I used to rip out the ads from the magazines too. Same thing.
IDK who "we" is in this sentence, but if you mean "the average internet user" then you're wrong. There are ads on Facebook, Instagram, Tik Tok, Google, YouTube, Twitter, PornHub... No significant percentage of the population has "deleted" these apps or websites because of ads.
I can't help everyone but I try.