adblock on mobile is 95% the only reason I use firefox : memes

[+] [email protected] -1 points 2 months ago

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

I don't use an ad blocker. I like to know what sites I need to avoid.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 months ago (2 children)

I don't understand ads. Do people actually use services and buy products because of a shitty advertisement?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 months ago (4 children)

You do, and don't fool yourself that you don't.

You probably don't click on ads, but they stick in your brain. You might see a half-dozen ads for Doritos, and then when you go to the store a week later, you're slightly more likely to buy Doritos.

The vast majority of advertising is just getting a brand or an idea into the back of your head so when you're looking for something in that product category, regardless of it's a VPN, a web host, a snack food, a car, or whatever, you're going to have a bias towards what you've seen in the past.

Most of my ad-blocking isn't to stop myself from buying some herbal supplement/spray tanner combo, it's to stop myself from being biased by the capitalist propaganda machine.

I am not immune from advertisements, and neither are you.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

First thought was to deny this but its somewhat true. Although i use adblocks to the extreme so i never really had the urges to buy stuff randomly or felt influenced into buying it whereas the occasional times an ad comes through i'd maybe consider getting the stuff when i'm at the shop but usually don't.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

And also consider that even if you block out the ad the people around you probably haven't, the most effective ad is the one your friend saw.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago

I've certainly heard this said before. Lately I've been thinking more about it as ads seem to be infecting more and more aspects of my life and so I've started to question it.

I've started to think that the whole "it makes you subconsciously think about the product when you're in the store" thing might just be made up by marketers. You know, the people whose jobs entirely depend on advertising being a good investment. That does kind of self-prove the point though, because if marketers just made it up and a bunch of people now think it's true, it follows that people will just absorb "information" if it's fed to them from the correct place.

I figured I'd see if I could find some science research on the subject. I managed to read through six studies (at least the abstracts and the methodologies) before my eyes glazed completely over and I needed to stop.

First I will say that none of them are able to draw links from advertising consumed to purchases made. The methodologies tend to focus on the immediate, how the ad makes a person feel in the moment. Generally this is done by asking people. Surveys and the like. The first one measured facial expressions and emotional responses. The PLOS one (fifth link) just asked marketing managers if their marketing was effective or not (and wow do they ever use a lot of words to say that, they turned their thesaurus up to 11). The second one is actually a bit of a side-bar in that it's specifically looking at the effectiveness of gamified advertising, but it does investigate brand memory based on different exposures. Again, just brand memory, not actual purchase behaviour.

And all that makes sense. It would be extremely difficult to build a study that manages to track every motivation for purchasing a given product, especially if some of those motivations aren't known by the purchaser. So what I'll say is that while it's likely that advertising can prod us one way or another, the wisdom that it's an effective subconscious driver of sales is not evidence based.

Do with that what you will.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I actively avoid buying anything I've seen being advertised.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

You are not immune.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago

some of my normie friends refuse to use adblockers and willingly want to watch ads because "ads show them stuff that they didn't know they wanted"

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Google is fighting a war that it can’t win, people in general had enough of all these ads.

Whenever I can, I use a DNS or an adblocker or an open source app that it doesn’t track his users.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

The vast majority of users did not use or even really know much about adblockers in general until recently, when Google/YT shot themselves in the foot by Barbara Straisand-ing adblockers into the general public's consciousness.

[+] [email protected] -35 points 2 months ago (6 children)

Until you self-host funny cat videos, OP, you're just a leech. Maybe like a poor kid or something.

Where do you get this attitude that everything should be provided to you for free and you're entitled to it?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I will block any and every ad I possibly can using all technology available to me. Does that break someone's business model? Too bad. Do I care if all this glorious ad-sponsored content goes away forever because of the actions of me and others like me? Not even a little bit. In fact, I will welcome the day that ad blocking gains enough momentum that it causes businesses to go under or restructure their entire operational model. If ads are the only way something can exist, then it deserves to die.

In case it wasn't clear enough: I don't care.

I've been working in the IT/Internet industry for over 30 years, in one form or another. I understand how things work and I probably have a better perspective than most on how dysfunctional we have become.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

The f are you on about? YouTube has a fairly affordable ad-free tier with a transparent revenue-share model that multiple top content creators have openly endorsed.

This ad infested hell only exists because most of the internet users think it's outrageous to pay 10$/month for an all-you-can-eat VoD service. Some top creators did branch out to create their own streaming services, and spoiler alert, it's more expensive, or just as expensive but with muuuuch less content.

I do care if all that YT content is gone. It's a fuckin goldmine.

I'd really wish they actually had the audacity to just paywall the entire platform. Pay or fuck off, no ads.

And then people like you can go back to the good old days of some other random free video hosting service where a 360p video with a cat meme was buffering for a minute on a good day, or was completely unavailable on a bad one.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

Pay or fuck off, no ads.

Contrary to what you seem to have understood with my previous post, I'd be absolutely fine with this.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

They did not say everything should be free, only ad free.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Cope and seethe lmao

[–] [email protected] -3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Don't come crying back when they'll force you to either pay 50$/hour for your cat videos, or entirely block off your access to the internet as they control the engine behind 99% of the browser market share.

No, you will not come and host it for free on lemmy. It already struggles with hosting, and already needs monetary support, even though most heavy content is on some 3rd party domain.

But maybe you'll be happy to donate 10$/months so your only source of fun content doesn't die.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

I won't lol

[–] [email protected] 17 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Spoken like someone that is too young to remember what the internet was like before everything got sucked up into google.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I was there. And it stood on the shoulders of volunteers. And we collectively gathered money so our favorite imageboard could pay for hosting. And we discussed how unethical it was to block ads, cuz the imageboard needs to pay for hosting. So either donate or click on the ads, ane make sure the revenue flows. (Remember the tiny text "please click on the ads, it supports the site"?)

We offloaded imagehosting to shady weird websites with virus autodownloaders, where you absolutely had to block JS just so you don't get pwned. And so some suckers would eventually get pwned, have their screen locked, pay ransom, and finance our collective love for zipgifs.

I was there, Gandalf, I was there 20 years ago. YouTube and Tumblr were the holy saviors.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I'm a system admin who self hosts a bunch of shit off of a 48 Ru rack in his washroom.

The internet used to be run off of the collective will of a bunch of people like me. I was there, back when it was FIDOnet and pirate bbs's.

P.S. while I disagree with your viewpoint, this was a hilarious read, and I didn't down vote you.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 2 months ago

What's there to disagree with? you prove my point.

it stood on the shoulders of volunteers

Yeah. A classic story. A sysadmin took the old server from his work after they upgraded and now runs <insert video game guild imageboard/wiki/chat> on it.

With the amount of traffic modern web pipes through Google's and Cloudflare's servers, all of you homebrewers wouldn't be enough to take over even 5% of that.

You can't go back to the good old days because you'll break your back trying to, and the collective lemmy anon can't, because they're too used to freeload while getting big tech quality service.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Where do you get this attitude that everything should be provided to you for free and you're entitled to it?

From (non-capitalistic) utopic ideas, where humans try to be excellent to each other.

[–] [email protected] -3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

So, is OP donating to lemmy? Or self-hosting some content?

Or only leeching while explaining to everyone that this is how communism is supposed to work?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

The level of your argumentation:
Are you a firefighter or a medical doctor? If not, you're obviously in favour of fires, death and disease.
Why aren't you donating all of your stuff to homeless people? Or are you happy all those people don't have a home?
Why aren't you saving the world already???

You know, demanding change and maybe showing some sort of protest does not mean you need to do those things exactly as you would like to see them, especially if those efforts wouldn't change anything on the larger scale and rather lead to a bunch of problems in your life.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago (1 children)

they can make the site unusable to people with add blockers any time they want, must be a reason they dont. Also for free? they are still harvesting ur data regardless of ads.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago (1 children)

They're making it unusable. YT is literally starting a massive war on users with AdBlock. And oh boy was lemmy angry.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

They arent really trying to make the site unusable with adblocker they are trying to bypass adblockers which is fundamentally different. And they gave up months ago theyll go at it again sure but for now they arent doing much about it. If they trully wanted to just disallow adblockers they could and it would be trivial, there are plenty of websites that do it certainly google could figure it out but they dont because that would push away a subtantial number of users and clearly those users are still worth having even if they are not seeing ads, presumably because of the data they are still harvesting and the numbers number of users and the word of mouth.

anyways maybe u should stop licking the boots of fucking google of all companies and make a real argument against adblockers like that it actually meaningfully hurts smaller websites, because not only would i not give a shit if youtube went under somehow i would be fucking dancing in its grave.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 2 months ago

You're too far up your own ass.

Vanced got nuked, revanced constantly needs to be patched, otherwise it slips to the low quality settings. Free YT days are numbered.

And no, it's not easy. Unless they want to encode ads into videos, and re-render the whole thing. Which is ludicrously expensive. For as long as they don't there will be a way to not play the ad chunks.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Don't forget to add a phone wide adblocking DNS too.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

AdGuard (app & DNS) does a decent job on iOS.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

Blokada 5 is great (I think that's what that does I don't actually know these things but it does block ads phone-wide!)

[+] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

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[+] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

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