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Posted by speckx 2 hours ago

I'm So Tired of Ads(blog.absurdpirate.com)
67 points | 49 comments
Shuang1 1 hour ago|
I use an adblocker and I have for a while now. Every so often I hear a moral argument about why adblockers are bad (ads support free internet, etc) but to be completely honest, I simply don't care anymore. Advertising is in such a malicious state that yes, I'm going to put my own experience quality over whatever collective good there is in watching ads.
blaze33 23 minutes ago||
I understand the moral argument, yes tell me about your product or company from time to time, can be interesting or even funny sometimes but it should stop there.

I always use an adblock where possible. 1. I've seen too much ads trying to straight up serve malware. 2. I'm definitely not okay with the ad-industry data aggregation tracking my every move online.

Plus the algorithm is kinda dumb: I see you bought a mattress, how about another one, every day, for the next months? I was curious once about a product I would never buy but now, weeks later, I still have ten companies paying ads for the same product, each one claiming to be the real deal.

I still use google news on mobile, no adblock there, some publications are okay, others are, well... I take a screenshot when there's 0% of content on the screen → OnlyAds/NoContent folder.

matheusmoreira 1 hour ago|||
Advertising is mind rape. They're trying to force their brands and products into our minds without our consent. Any possible moral argument against ad blocking is overridden by the sheer intrusiveness and entitlement of advertisers. Our attention belongs to us, it's not theirs to sell to the highest bidder. Ad blocking is legitimate self defense.
bheadmaster 14 minutes ago|||
What would constitute "consent" to being communicated information to?

With physical contact, speech can signal consent or lack thereof. How would you consent to speech itself?

ligne 1 hour ago|||
I hate ads as much as anyone but they are not in any way comparable to rape. Please have some sense of proportion.
_doctor_love 1 hour ago||
Please don't post comments like this. The only thing it can trigger is a flame war. It won't go anywhere productive.

Friends, ignore this thread. Move on. Don't engage.

MrWiffles 1 hour ago||
“[…] moral argument […]”

I mean, that’s pretty rich coming from the folks willfully engaging in human rights violating surveillance to overwhelm you with obscure useless nonsense that is literally an assault on your time, attention and mental health all for the 0.00001% chance of a vague hope you’ll click or tap their lie of an ad for snake oil that doesn’t work and is designed to steal your credit card number anyway, all just to make them rich so they won’t have to get a real job in the first place.

Moral argument. Right.

jfengel 1 hour ago||
The moral argument is less absurd from the people who actually run the web site and are just looking for a way to be compensated for their effort.

It still doesn't quite hold, and the fact that it's being handed to them by the companies who get most of the profit is a big red flag.

But it's at least understandable why the site owners don't see themselves nearly as badly as we see the ad companies.

k310 1 hour ago||
If an ad is targeted, it's unwanted personal surveillance. If it's not targeted, it's meaningless crap.

If it's from DuckDuckGo, like its search results, it's based on either crude geolocation or recent movies of similar names, bizarrely, when I search for specific technical terms. I have to qualify searches with multiple negations to get anything of interest to someone with more than high school education and interests.

A lose-lose proposition.

I block all ads with extreme prejudice and disable javascript very often to get rid of nag screens. I turn off javascript very often. A word to web devs. I hate your crap.

(Repost)

Since the rise of "social media" driven by clicks on ads, quality has almost entirely been replaced by quantity. And now, creativity has been farmed out as well. I still believe in quality. George Monbiot said it years ago.

Advertising is a poison that demeans even love – and we're hooked on it.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/oct/24/advert...

dabinat 1 hour ago||
A lot of sites are essentially unreadable. There are things flashing at you, videos that autoplay, and the page will reload every 30 seconds and you lose your place.

And even if ads are respectful of user experience, there is a cognitive load to having the content you want to consume bombarded with unrelated content, especially when it’s trying to manipulate your emotions in some way.

Site owners don’t have a right to complain about people using ad blockers because their insistence on money over user experience is the reason everyone is installing them.

A lot of the time I just read sites in Reader Mode. There are no ads or distractions and it seems that site owners haven’t figured out how to block or detect it yet.

orwin 1 hour ago||
Some website exists where ads are entirely self-hosted (at worst they are affiliate links), and if you self-host your ads, ublock default filters don't catch them. Which is my response: host the ads you run yourself, then we'll talk.
convolvatron 1 hour ago||
its funny, I was trying to read something the other day, and I kept scrolling around and dismissing things, bobbing and weaving as the layout kept rearranging itself, doggedly trying to keep my place in the text.

and I realized its like a video game. we've actually been trained to try to keep your eyes on the actual content and go through a series of skilled motions just to be able to read it.

ChocMontePy 1 hour ago||
I use uBlock Origin and sometimes I have the opposite problem: I find out that a good movie came out months ago but I missed all the ads that flooded the internet because of my ad-blocker.
loloquwowndueo 1 hour ago|
If that’s how you found out, you didn’t miss out on much, did you? You watch it, and that’s it.
goodmythical 34 minutes ago||
If the only reccomendation that reaches me was paid for, it is definitionally not good enough to have garnered any personal reccomendation.
jmugan 1 hour ago||
Even my daughter's dance recital this weekend had them. In between dances they frequently paused to play an ad on the big screen to the right. It was incredible.
touwer 1 hour ago|
Please tell me you're joking
throwaway2037 1 hour ago||
From the second paragraph, if anyone is unaware of "Big Bill Hell's Cars", I highly recommend that you watch the original (fake) advert here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-rsEs4HWXeY

Definitely not safe for work!

Know Your Meme: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/big-bill-hells

    > This highly over the top commercial was originally produced as a joke in 1990 for a faux award show put on be the Advertising Association of Baltimore called The Ad Follies. The AAB searched for agencies willing to produce ad spoofs mocking the top agencies in the city despite the impending threat that people working on these spoofs may place their jobs in jeopardy for doing so. The production was conducted at television studio WBFF and all of the footage originates from car manufacturer promotional videos and generic stock footage. The writer and narrator of the copy are still both unknown.

    > The video was never intended to be shown outside of The Ad Follies show because of the vulgarity and the possibilities of being viewed by the mocked. Copies were only distributed to people who worked on production and to WBFF employees following the screening.
basilikum 1 hour ago||
I just simply do not load, let alone look at ads. Physical ads are pretty virtually the only ads I actually have to see, but there are not thaaat many here.
jppope 1 hour ago||
I don't really see that many ads to be honest. I'm not on social media (except HN), I use Adblock, plus I just don't consume a lot of the media that the general population does.

I totally understand what the article is about though... I went on to my wife's instagram and her ad load is unbelievable. She probably has to look at 1 ad for ever 3 reels or images or whatever the hell they call them. I couldn't imagine having to see that many ads.

Last quick note - part of the reason why I avoid that kind of media, and use the tech to block it. I had a professor in college who pointed out that the purpose of ads is not to sell something, its actually to make you unhappy.

MyMemoryfails 2 hours ago||
Same, for same reason i refuse pay for services, in past paying for service would mean they wouldn't track you and sell your data, but thats not longer the case. Since that's additional profits for companies.

Luckily there's few exemptions services which im happily paying since its proven they dont collect your data so advertisers can't prey on you when you're at lowest.

Like did you know, just by obtaining credit card, your shopping history is sold? And you can't reject this, at least i haven't managed to do so. Yet in EU we're banning cash, where's option so i can buy my grocies without insurances knowing i bought candies for weekends so they'll hike insurance up.

Ankaios 1 hour ago|
Apple's behavior regarding ads is especially annoying to me. I deeply dislike that they allow Uber and Lyft to advertise via iOS notifications. Apple should inflict massive penalties on them for that anti-user behavior. Apple also advertises their own TV shows through notifications, which I view as an even worse breach of etiquette.

On top of all that, I avoid the iOS app store as much as possible because it's an advertising-infested mess. I'm sure I'd have more apps on the phone if I trusted the app store more.

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