[whoibrar]

This has to be the most unpopular opinion so far

I have a few questions for you

1. How long have you been doing this ? 2. What do you think of other (not just monetization) ways ads are bad as in bloating the web, privacy and security issues ? 3. What if you truly need to access a website but it has too many ads ? You give up ? Use adblock ? Continue with ads ?

[parsd]

1. Been doing this for a few months, using only Safari for all my browsing. 2. My big annoyance is the weight on the CPU and battery. I have this sick pleasure from opening the network tab and seeing hundreds of requests filling my machine with garbage. :) 3. I often disable JavaScript temporarily with a hotkey - in macOS, you can map this action to any combination. This works incredibly well. Once I am done with the page, I re-enable it with a single keystroke. I only wish Safari did this just for the current page and not the entire browser.

[XorNot]

There's also 4: It's not possible to consume content and not be affected by it. How okay are you with the fact that corporate messaging is a dominant mode of influence in your life?

[recursive]

Not the parent, but I've been doing the same thing. For maybe a slightly different reason.

1. Since the 90s. 2. Needs to be solved by user agents. Ad blockers generally work by host name or css selector. This doesn't filter out any of the bad guys that are really trying. 3. Continue with ads I guess. This doesn't actually happen in real life as far as I can tell.

The reason I don't use an ad blocker is that I like being able to see what's going on inside of a web browser. Prevalence of ad blockers creates an incentive to do canvas rendering based on a DRM-obfuscated data blob. That's worse for everyone.

[throwaway81523]

"Prevalence of ad blockers creates an incentive to do canvas rendering based on a DRM-obfuscated data blob. That's worse for everyone."

Next gen ad blocker will be a headless web browser in a data center to capture the canvas, plus automated video editing to remove the ads.

[recursive]

That's a terrible future. Maybe it's inevitable. But I won't contribute to the arms race.

[CubsFan1060]

Not OP, but I find your questions interesting.

I find it intriguing that only in the digital age have we sort of decided that the creator of something doesn't get to dictate the terms of its use.

>3. What if you truly need to access a website but it has too many ads

At least for me, I assume that they created the necessary content and get to decide how it's made available. It seems like only in the digital age do we even consider "I don't like your terms so I'm taking the content anyway" an option.

[HWR_14]

> I find it intriguing that only in the digital age have we sort of decided that the creator of something doesn't get to dictate the terms of its use.

Except that's not true. Mark Twain and Shakespeare cannot tell you you're interpreting their works incorrectly. JK Rowlings cannot stop you from making paper mache out of her books. I can timeshift and spaceshift content with tape recorders, VCRs, TiVo and more.

[CubsFan1060]

That may have been a poor choice of words on my part. I am struggling to come up with a better choice.

I guess the analog would be “Ms Rowlings, I think the price of your book is too high, so I am going to pay you whatever price I want to. You don’t get a choice”

Someone spent time and energy to create something, and decided that annoying ads are the price of their labor. People seem to think they now deserve the labor without the price that the creator has chosen.

In almost all your scenarios they are predicated on having compensated the author in some way. Blocking ads is consuming the content without compensating the author in any way.

[HWR_14]

Then tying it to the digital age was a strange choice. People have infringed in copyrights since before electricity, operating manual printing presses to do so.

[WA]

Your printed newspaper can neither build a profile of you. Nor mine shitcoins.

We have to consider this in the digital age, because in the analog world, ads have very limited impact.

[thewebcount]

> I find it intriguing that only in the digital age have we sort of decided that the creator of something doesn't get to dictate the terms of its use.

Nonsense. Broadcast TV and radio are the same. I use a TiVo for broadcast TV and use the skip ads function.

[themacguffinman]

TiVo is very much a part of the digital age, it's literally called a "Digital Video Recorder".

[thewebcount]

And before that I used a VCR and would fast-forward through the ads. And before that, I would hit the mute button and get up to use the restroom or grab a snack. Or I'd change the channel and hope I remembered to change it back in a few minutes.

[lanstin]

Fortunately goverment and b2c things like banks and insurance dont show ads, tho they are probably selling your data

[reaperducer]

Actually, I have seen government web sites with ads in the last couple of years.

The Cook County (Illinois) Assessor used to have them. There's a new assessor now, and a new web site design, but you can still see the space for the banner ad on archive.org: https://web.archive.org/web/20130708043842/http://www.cookco...

As for banks, yes, some banks to have ads for other companies on their web sites. I see them when I pay my bills online. Not all, but some.