Technology

Honestly, if people successfully using adblockers were a worthwhile market, we'd have seen laws against adblockers years ago.

They would be banned in a world where human happiness was the priority, but we live in a world where profits is the priority. I think in 50 years, there are two scenarios. Either humanity has learned to value happiness over profits, or we live in actual dystopia, with robots patrolling against "rebels", implants, surveillance, Ai... Entire package from sci-fi.

I was born in the early 90s, got non-dial up home internet access in 2003, and never ever, in the history of my time being on the internet. I have never ever, never not even once clicked on an ad on purpose. Like the Yahtzee ad thats showing right above your comment, I will never click this shit and follow it all the way up to giving my credit card info over. Why do we even have these nowadays, aside from tracking you?

I genuinely believe most forms of advertising on the web are ableist because they try to make them as distracting as possible. Removing those ads is accessibility.

I don't consider ads at the start and end of videos to be ableist, but they're still annoying. Mid video ads, pause screen ads, and banner ads are all ableist.

I have wasted so much of my life watching adverts. I am absolutely over it and I get agitated if I watch them now. I cancel any streaming service that tries to force them on me and I am relying more and more on Plex/Jellyfin. I am not going to waste any more of my life watching marketing lies.

I've been wondering if ads never got more intrusive than the simple banners on the side or top of sites if there would've been a huge push to block them. I think most people would figure that, especially on small sites run by people instead of huge corporations, that web hosting isn't free so a banner on a page was a fair tradeoff.

But of course that couldn't be enough for the ad folk who started ramping things up with their flashing ads and pop-ups, eventually culminating in the autoplay video malware hellscape the net has turned into today.

I'm ADHD and I fucking hate ads. They screw up my attention and are just scummy. It doesn't help that I'm constantly cognizant of the evils that are corporations.

I hate it because it’s an unethical practice to manipulate or mislead and all modern advertising uses dark patterns to try to get you to overconsume.

The ADHD distress is just another side effect of all that

Combo of ADHD and living through the 2000s with Internet Explorer where ads often installed malware and viruses. If you DIDN'T use an Ad Blocker you were playing a game of Russian Roulette every time you opened a web page.

Popups, pop unders, blaring audio, malware, slow page loads...ads are a scourge.

On the contrary, my eyes slide right off ads. They even did when I was a little kid.

Why should I care about something I’m not looking for? It’s just going to make whatever they’re advertising more expensive to buy.

Maybe that’s the autism side of AuADHD taking over, though.

It... Really, really is. I remember using Fandom on mobile being so bad I set up an auto redirect to breezewiki, and that was with adblockers. Now that I have DNS-wide adblocking on, when I accidentally click a Fandom link it's pleasantly surprising how well that's working.

I see people who put zero effort into ad-blocking in a similar light as people who don't leave shitty partners. At some point they manage to convince themselves that it's not a problem.

No seriously though. Was using managers laptop very briefly, and needed to look up some instructions. No adblock, Google Chrome default browser, etc. The websites were almost unreadable. Giant video ads in top and bottom corners, big thick flashing distracting ads on all sides making the readable area a little bigger than a postage stamp. Genuinely how do people browse the Internet like this?

Let’s be very clear here. Chrome ripped off the hard work from the KDE webkit people. That is also the reason much of it is open source, because open source and volunteer contributions made it live.

Everyone, they really don't care about ads as much as us.

Oh, you know. Just 3.6 billion fucking people (73% of web users). But definitely not you and me. I've been on Firefox since 1.0 (2004) and switched to Librewolf a few years ago when Mozilla lost it.

Watching TV of any kind at other people's homes, and especially my parents' place, can feel like some real black mirror shit.