I'm So Tired of Ads

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.

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.

Just block them everywhere you can and ignore them when you can't or - when they're too annoying - close whatever medium tried to push the bulshytt [1] on you. They're trying to influence you and the more you show you're annoyed, the more they notice they've succeeded in reaching you.

Block and cover [2], block and cover. For the rest, live on.

[1] https://anathem.fandom.com/wiki/Bulshytt

[2] Yes, I sometimes just cover them with my hand if I happen to use a device without functional content blocking.

i'm curious what will happen to online ads as more and more internet traffic is done by bots. eventually, advertisers will catch on that humans are driving their impressions and will pull back, right?

as soon as people realize the diminishing value of buying ads on random internet platforms... what next? ads have subsidized almost everything online. will we start paying for basic services, or will there be some other new mechanism for us to sell our attention in exchange for somebody else's web hosting?

Would you be willing to pay a small sum per piece of content? Maybe 10c per video or article? Maybe 1c for a short or something? Assume that it’s anonymous and frictionless (big assumptions, but this is just a thought experiment).

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.

I hate ads to the point I either pay or use other means to avoid ads in basically everything I use

- NPR (I pay, happy to support)

- Podcasts (I skip ads, using a client that supports that)

- Movies/TV/Music (I self-host, thank you open source community!)

- Twitch (I pay 1 creator 6$/mo and must watch 40+ hours per month)

I don’t have mainline social media downloaded on my phone, I sometimes visit reddit.com and see the ads that aren’t blocked by ad block but I find myself visiting less often recently anyway.

All of this to say, pay a bit and put in some work and you can avoid 95% of ads

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.

Lord Dunsany, 1915, wrote "WHAT WE HAVE COME TO":

When the advertiser saw the cathedral spires over the downs in the distance, he looked at them and wept.

"If only," he said, "this were an advertisement of Beefo, so nice, so nutritious, try it in your soup, ladies like it."

I see some tenuous connection between advertising and extinction of our species. It goes something like:

One: Human psychology tends to ascribe more weight to negative things than positive things in the short term. In the long term this generally balances out, but in the short term it's more prudent in a biological sense to pay attention to the rustling in the bushes than the berries you might pick from them. This is known as the [negativity bias](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negativity_bias).

Two: The modern gatekeepers of social interaction, Big Tech, employ blind algorithms that attempt to steer your attention towards spending more time on their platforms. These companies are the arbiters of the content we experience daily and what you do and don't see is mostly at their discretion. The techniques they employ, in simple terms, are designed to provoke what they call 'engagement'. They do this because at the end of the day FAANG have not only a financial interest, but a fiduciary duty to sell advertisements at the behest of their shareholders. The more they can engage you, the more ads they can sell. They employ live A-B testing, divide people into cohorts and poke and prod them with psychological techniques to try and glue your eyeballs to their ads.

Extrapolated conclusion: These companies have a financial and legally binding interest to divide the population against itself, obstructing politics and social interaction to the point where we might not be able to achieve any of the goals that we need to reach to prevent oblivion.

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.

We all feel this way, but a wholistic view includes acknowledging what we receive in return for our time spent viewing ads. The author starts off the article by referencing getting up in the morning and wanting to watch a 10 video but having to spend several minutes viewing ads. They fail to mention how the person who spent their time creating that video should be compensated. Will he pay for the video? I doubt it. He wants it at no cost. This has another name: entitlement. He’s upset because no one will give him the things he wants for free, so he’s throwing an obvious tantrum about it.

How about proposing a better model? I don’t have the answer, but I have a feeling we gravitated to the ad-supported freeware model because it’s actually the best and most efficient middle ground. It allows us to exchange our time for creators’ time without the inconvenience of turning it into money first. It removes a step.

I will point out at no point in the article does he complain about seeing advertisements for golfing tees in his Golf magazine subscription.

IMO, the real problems with ads are

1) They just aren't relevant to you. No I'm not going to start drinking AG1 ...

2) There's no information about the product. How do I even know if AG1 is a good idea?

I’ve used Adblock aggressively for the last 10 or 15 years. I don’t have a TV, don’t read magazines or the newspaper, don’t listen to the radio.

I essentially don’t see or hear ads in my life.

Advertisers end up corrupting ad supported media, too. Before ads, Google keyword search was ok. After ads, it decayed, because catering to advertisers was how they got payed.

It looks like ads will corrupt our only hope, AI.