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Comment by Jaygles | Hacker News Reader

> The enshitification of the internet is largely driven by people ad blocking

This is unfairly putting the blame on only one rational actor in a prisoner's dilemma.

Content providers are free to put their content behind a paywall with no ads, but they choose not to.

They choose not to because people don't pay for content when they can get it from other providers who don't use a paywall.

Consumers then are left without the option to pay for an ad-free experience.

But ads are run on hardware the consumer owns, consuming their resources and harvesting personal information on the consumer, which is a security concern.

So even if they want to support content creators by viewing the ads they run, they need to also accept the security trade-off, which many reasonably do not

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Just a note that many creators integrate the advertisement of their sponsors into their content presentation and not all of that can be stopped by ad blockers (most, in fact, can't). Those creators also tend to have a Patreon or similar so their content can be supported directly. And I'd wager that's a much better model for the creators than relying on ads they don't even select themselves and that possibly clash with their content. This also makes it much more clear to users that the creators directly benefit from those integrated ads, so those kinds of ads are probably much better tolerated.

The SponsorBlock extension automatically skips the type of integrated ads you're referring to.

Which btw doesn't work. Users have to first watch the video, identify "sponsor blocks" and then update the blocker's database. So between the Sponsorblock users who have to watch the video and the multitudes who don't even know it exists... Sponsorblock won't block many sponsors.

Yes it's crowd-sourced, so of course it's not perfect. Saying it doesn't work isn't true though, and as more people get onboard, improves. I don't think it's the final solution, but it helps right now.

40-50% of people are ad-blocking some rather beloved content creators. That means, not paying for premium, and not viewing ads.

Ok, so maybe they are suscribing to patreon? Maybe Nebula?

Well those two have conversion rates around (on a good day) 1%.

You can swim in the waters of cognitive dissonance because ads really do suck and ad block is a great way to stop the pain while still getting what you want.

Understand though, the statistics are so damning against the ad-block crowd, that you come off like the people screeching about human generated CO2 being totally fine for the environment (It helps plants grow!) because they cannot imagine having to give up commuting in their diesel monster pick-up truck everyday. (Ad block does no damage because I cannot imagine having to see ads...)

As an aside, ironically, security nightmare ads are really only served to people with tracking blockers, because those people are the lowest value visitors and only scammers/bottom feeders really bid on their views. Regular tech illiterate people get ads for Tide and Toyota. The more you know.

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