I posted this question because I once saw a tweet that said something like:
“If you use adblock, you don’t care about creator’s point blank”
What is your opinion on this? Do you agree with them?
Of course. And I’ll continue to do so as long as advertisement is detrimental to my online experience. If it wastes my time by forcing me to watch an ad before a video, if it distracts me from reading a text because of animations, if it tries to scam or shock me, I’m better off blocking it. I’m not against advertisement as communication that a useful product or service exists, I’m against advertisement abuse and greed.
I’ll happily pay for, donate to, or otherwise support services important to me that need and deserve it.
Yeah, I think your last point is the key. I’ve really learned to appreciate the value and quality of software that I pay for. And I will pay for it, just as people have been paying for things they want/need to use well before computers were a thing. The kinds of ads served up on 95% of the internet are essentially a waste and detrimental to a person’s attention economy.
I use AdBlock (and SponsorBlock on YouTube, and a cookie whitelist and a JavaScript whitelist) because only I decide what to see on my screen.
If you, as a creator, choose to use advertising to monetize your content you don’t respect the limited lifetime of the people consuming your content or their security or about the way the marketing and advertising industry is destroying our society, such as (not exhaustive, just off the top of my head right now)
- building a surveillance economy, destroying privacy in the process
- manipulating people into voting in certain ways that are harmful to them and others
- protecting harmful products from scrutiny (e.g. tobacco, alcohol, products with too much sugar or fat or low quality ingredients, the car and oil industries, corporate climate change denial,…)
- encouraging overconsumption both in terms of quantity and in terms of items or services they don’t really need
- destroying content platforms with their mantra “not advertiser friendly”, leading to dystopian self-censorship on e.g. Youtube
And then there is the way internet advertising can spread malware and compromise the security of websites in general.
If you do want to monetize content in other ways there are models such as subscriptions or Patreon-style that are a lot more respectful of the user.
Absolutely. I understand things aren’t for free, but if you make my experience subpar I’m blocking ads.
I wish more creators would make content available across more platforms.
Oh yeah, I completely forgot to mention the way the advertising industry has basically ignored every feedback from users for two decades or more by making ads ever more intrusive and obnoxious. They reap what they sow.
I have been with this idea for a very long time. But over time all the platforms got more and more greedy and I had the feeling that my privacy got more and more invaded.
Since that time, I have an Adblock and use DDG.
Sorry content creators.
Agree 100% with this
Yes, because I don’t like subjecting myself to propaganda and having to hope I’m smart and strong enough to recognize it and avoid succumbing to it.
“People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you. You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity. Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head. You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.” - banksy
Well if I want to support creators, I would rather give them my money directly either by buying their merch or any payment plarform.
Nowadays ads are so intrusive. Also the way ads are delivered by knowing what I prefer is capitalistic at its finest. Not everything that I search are something I want to buy.
This comment shows “-1” dislikes for some reason and it’s counted as an upvote.
Lemmy probably didn’t sync likes for that comment, it has plenty likes now.
The curious thing was it had like 3 upvotes and -1 downvote and it counted as 4 total.
Adblockers are absolutely necessary because ads are a malware threat, never mind the scams and invasive popups. The cReAtOrS didn’t care enough to ensure advertisements were safe, legitimate, or not horribly obnoxious so they did it to themselves.
I used to allow ads for certain sites but after malware attempts and scam ads, I block them across the board. If that upsets anybody, go whine to the shady advertises who made this a necessity to browse the web safely.
- I don’t like getting bombarded with ads.
- It hides scam ads.
- If the creator of something makes something I like I prefer to directly donate to them instead of giving up my privacy, and letting a company like google profit of it, and then they only give a small portion to the creator.
This “you don’t care about creators” is a sham argument designed to make you feel guilty. I hear this about piracy a lot. “You’re depriving all those blue collar people of a paycheck!” meanwhile the WGA has been on strike for weeks because big studios are screwing them over on pay. It’s the corporate executives that are screwing these people over not some individual who downloaded a torrent or installed an adblocker. One only needs to look at who is funneling all the money into their own pockets and it surely isn’t the general public.
Counter point: Any creator blindly putting random ad networks on their site doesn’t care about their users. Every ad should be vetted and served by the creator, those kinda ads are impossible to mass-block. If an ad swindles a user, it should be the creators reputation thats at stake.
I stopped having a bad conscience for blocking when one blog who begged promised to not autoplay any audio. The very next day it of course showed a very loud ad, and the creator excused it with “he didn’t have any control over what the advertisement network showed”.
I use ad blockers everywhere. I hate ads and wouldn’t buy anything advertised there anyway.
I avoid ads whereever and whenever I can. If the stuff I can’t avoid is particularly obnoxious, I make a mental note never to buy the product even if I need something of the sort.
Lmao what a stupid argument. If you want money paywall your content and see how many people really want to see it. You do not have the right to fill anyone’s head with manipulative garbage propaganda just because you made a video about how much you love the second reich and want it to retvrn or wrote some shitty blog post.
People that call themselves CONTENT creators are the people churning out pure garbage for the bazinga-brained sake of contentcontentcontent and the quality of actually worthwhile shit would skyrocket if they would all just collectively quit because what would be leftover are the people who actually care and aren’t in it for some ad views.
Artists, critics, musicians, designers, etc etc? They don’t call themselves content creators like the bazinga-brained influencers in it purely to chase metrics. Tell the bazingas to fuck off.
ublock origin and libredirect are basically a must for browsing the internet. Reddit, Fandom, and Medium are the most unusable websites, those websites are parasites so it gives me joy that I deprive them of revenue.
ayy the only 2 extensions i need for happy living. that plus firefox configured for privacy and anti-tracking
I’ll have to look at Ublock. I used AdGuard for a while but can’t get it to function with a VPN (except for the one they offer, which was terrible).
As the de facto IT guy for my family, I block ads on all their computers just as a basic safety measure.
I can usually spot a fake download button and avoid scammy sites, but my parents and grandparents seem magnetically attracted to them
yes because fuck ads
“If you use adblock, you don’t care about creator’s point blank”
If I care about creators, it makes far more sense for them to run a Kofi tip jar of some kind and let us donate directly. Having thousands of viewers watch a cumulative 35 hours of ads so they can get 7c for it is ludicrous.
I’m not even kidding. The ‘profit’ creators get from ads is basically zero. If they want to monetise, they use Patron, Kofi, merch stores; or they line up sponsors that pay them directly (this comment brought to you by Raid™: Beats© by Legends®)
I would much rather pay a creator 10c a month and not have to watch 30minutes of ads of their platform. Way more profit for them, way better QoL for me, and it’s not like I need to go out of my way to find ads.
If they care about creators and charities, they should donate money to them. They have very little use for your time, but your lifespan is the only resource you can never ever earn back. What a fucking waste to give so much of it away, and for nothing.
