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Comment by yukkuri | Hacker News Reader

A lot of absurd moralizing here about "you're stealing by not watching ads".

I keep adblock on for most sites because ads are so intrusive and often malware vectors. If advertisers want my eyes they need to not be obnoxious.

I started blocking YouTube ads in particular because it kept serving me ads that were brazenly homophobic ("how gross and smelly is gay sex? Find out!")

I feel no moral problem with this, if you do then your priorities are bad, IMO.

Edit: as a counter example, ubo doesn't seem to work on Twitch but I have never attempted to find a different solution as it has never run ads worse than the usual "lying about how good a product is" you always get with marketing. Further, I don't see them very often because the channels I watch the most I buy subscriptions.

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Agree. Many are ignoring the fact that these ads aren't all traditional advertising.

Particularly appauling in my view is the propaganda: https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/clive-palmer-spends-...

We saw similar things with The Voice referendum recently.

When someone has paid to manipulate society en masse, and there are no more targeted controls to stop the content being forced on you available, why is anyone surprised people choose to filter that?

... and Australia has (had maybe?) pretty good rules around television advertising. I mean, at least it's a good way up the logarithmic scale from internet advertising standards anyway.

P.S. I use Clive Palmer's advertising as a useful data point for what not to support, so it's not a total waste.

This is the kind of content adblock users are missing out on.

https://twitter.com/baroquespiral/status/1716488758030118931

I was going to invest in it until Cathie Woods showed up.

That's a really good point about Twitch ads. I leave Twitch ads enabled for channels I regularly watch and I cannot recall seeing any malware or scam ads. Some can be annoying (especially if it queues the same ad 3 times in a row), but they're all from legitimate companies offering legitimate products and services.

Twitch ads have no chill, not that others do either but...

They run at different volumes than streamers. They run over streamer's content. They run pre-roll ads so you can't "flip channels". If I accidentally reload the page or the Twitch video player crashes, pre-roll ad. The ads aren't related to the steamers and streamers don't get to tell Twitch to not play a certain ad during their stream. I can pay $10 a month for Twitch Turbo but that just promotes ad revenue over subbing.

I bought 4 six month subscriptions to some of my favorite streamers in September for about $80. My internet costs $69.99 so that's kind of a bargain.

The pre-roll has basically stopped me using Twitch entirely now. Just last week I checked out an sub I used to subscribe to, immediate pre-roll for 1 minute and I was out.

i have never found myself to be in agreement with any ads. That is just how it works. I don't like alcohol ads. I don't like ads that start off with one topic, get viewer's interest, and then switch topics (geico, progressive). I don't like ads that advertise holiday travel with barely clothed women (what's driving the sales?). I don't like clickbait ads.

If we were to work off of morals, commerce and morals don't go hand in hand.

So going back to topic, is it moral to block the ad and stop the revenue to a content creator? The content creator should not be getting revenue from alcohol companies or companies that profit off of intoxication. But everything else? No restrictions.

If you're not able to block Twitch ads, you can at least bypass them with Firefox.

I wrote a "tutorial" of sorts: https://lemmy.world/post/5452725

The moralizing is a bit pointless since every big tech company is trying to monopolize and lock-in users as much as possible. It's just the old blitzscaling enshitification cycle. They have deep enough pockets to subsidize the cost until monopoly status is achieved. Pot meet kettle.

When was the last time someone got malware from YouTube ads? Has that ever happened?

Google ads absolutely have malware.

YouTube I'm not sure but there are blatant crypto scams so you could lose your money

The time and money I save by using ad blockers, I use for helping other people, the world, the environment. I don't feel morally guilty for blocking adds.

> "how gross and smelly is gay sex? Find out!"

Sidebar, and I assume the ad wasn’t that way, but that does actually sound like a sarcastic pro-homosexual-sex ad ;)

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