Experimental Youtube "feature" detects and blocks some users of ad blocking browser extensions on Youtube

[Kisai]

3 minutes ago, Spotty said:

I disagree. There are malicious advertisements displayed on legitimate, trustworthy websites. Both Google and Bing search results will display advertisements for phishing websites at the top of the results. Facebook will display ads for scam websites and scam products. Like @Vishera mentioned there was even a notice posted by the FBI to use an adblock when using search engines because of the advertisements being served for phishing websites. https://linustechtips.com/topic/1480218-fbi-recomends-adblock/

 

If you don't want to use an adblocker or think it's immoral to use one you're definitely entitled to your opinion, however I don't think it's reasonable to say that there's absolutely no legitimate reason to use one and that legitimate websites won't serve bad ads when it's known that even the largest ad networks (Google, Microsoft, Facebook) have problems with malicious advertisements.

It's fine to disagree, but it doesn't change the point that adblocking is always done as a spiteful thing first, and just because "I" personally have never once seen a bad ad from google on youtube, doesn't mean someone else who was micro-targeted didn't. If you live in the US, Canada, AU, NZ or UK, where English language is the only necessary language to use, I doubt anyone has ever seen a "malicious ad" on youtube itself. Yes, there are a lot of barrel-scraping ads that I would rather not see and feel are poorly targeted (like how often I was targeted ads for "legal" drugs) or the more disgusting ads put out by some companies that are trying to be funny about their hygiene products.

 

But to rely on "ad blockers" just moves the needle to needing to trust products in the same way we had to trust anti-virus products. Back in the day of floppy disks, yes Viruses were a real thing, but the average computer would install McAfee once and then never update it. When floppy disks went away, so did pretty much all computer viruses. The last virus that was actually a virus I found in the field was the Win95.CIH virus. Back in 1999. And how did I find it? Win98 computer lab that the CD-ROM drives were not working. You know what else I found at the college? People had installed piracy background servers on some computers.

 

Do you really think I'd want to use one of those computers to do schoolwork? No. Even after I cleaned the machine I was using. I preferred to use the NT4 lab that only has MSIE2 on it.

 

And I feel this is the same situation. It's not that people don't trust ads, it's that people have been told that ads are viruses when they are not, and it's moved from only people being spiteful jerks using ad blockers, to people pointing to that FBI thing and go "see the government says all ads are malware" and using that to justify blocking ads, even so much as to using sponsorskip.

 

 

[suicidalfranco]

4 minutes ago, Kisai said:

it's that people have been told that ads are viruses when they are not

as long as they are filled with trackers, they effectively are viruses. End of story.

[Spotty]

3 minutes ago, Kisai said:

-snip-
It's not that people don't trust ads, it's that people have been told that ads are viruses when they are not

You can't classify "malicious" as meaning "Computer Virus" and exclude everything else from the classification. Ads for things such as phishing websites are also defined as malicious. An ad that displays a scam message saying that your computer is infected is malicious. An ad saying that Elon Musk is giving away free crypto is malicious. Malicious includes much more than just a computer virus infecting a system. Just because an advertisement isn't installing a virus does not mean it's not bad.

[Vishera]

6 hours ago, Kisai said:

There is no legitimate reason to block ads on a site that isn't a garbage site. Block ads on garbage sites, because those are sites peddle in stolen content anyway. Blocking ads on youtube is just being a spiteful jerk.

 

5 hours ago, wanderingfool2 said:

Just because there are valid reasons doesn't justify using it for sites like YouTube where you don't get displayed those types of ads.

Do some research about the topic, you will be surprised about the results...

Also, All YouTube ads have trackers anyway, so a privacy conscious person would want to block them anyway.

 

Now even YouTube serves ads with CPU-draining cryptocurrency miners

 

 

[Sauron]

11 hours ago, grg994 said:

But more importantly I would like to note that Google Chrome is planning to remove support for a some browser extension APIs (Manifest V2 / eg. webRequest API) which are necessary for more sophisticated adblocking techniques

That's why I use firefox

[Sauron]

6 hours ago, Kisai said:

There is no legitimate reason to block ads on a site that isn't a garbage site. Block ads on garbage sites, because those are sites peddle in stolen content anyway. Blocking ads on youtube is just being a spiteful jerk.

The legitimate reason is that I don't want to see ads. All ads are garbage, most of all the ones that interrupt or delay you while you're trying to watch something. Further, ad trackers are a privacy concern. Since the content is playing on my machine I have absolutely no moral qualms about removing the parts that I don't want. It's not my responsibility to make sure megacorporations are profitable in exchange for my comfort. If they wanted to they could paywall the whole site and the problem would be solved for them, but they probably never will because free access is the reason youtube is in a monopoly position to begin with. So yeah, as long as it remains technically feasible and legal I will block all ads and youtube can cry about it.

[starsmine]

10 hours ago, OhioYJ said:

There is a way to do advertisements without them being obnoxious, possibly serving malware, etc. 

AKA the way youtube does ads

28 minutes ago, Sauron said:

The legitimate reason is that I don't want to see ads. All ads are garbage, most of all the ones that interrupt or delay you while you're trying to watch something. Further, ad trackers are a privacy concern. Since the content is playing on my machine I have absolutely no moral qualms about removing the parts that I don't want. It's not my responsibility to make sure megacorporations are profitable in exchange for my comfort. If they wanted to they could paywall the whole site and the problem would be solved for them, but they probably never will because free access is the reason youtube is in a monopoly position to begin with. So yeah, as long as it remains technically feasible and legal I will block all ads and youtube can cry about it.

So, pay for the service with a traded currency. 

[Kisai]

49 minutes ago, Sauron said:

The legitimate reason is that I don't want to see ads. All ads are garbage, most of all the ones that interrupt or delay you while you're trying to watch something. Further, ad trackers are a privacy concern. Since the content is playing on my machine I have absolutely no moral qualms about removing the parts that I don't want. It's not my responsibility to make sure megacorporations are profitable in exchange for my comfort. If they wanted to they could paywall the whole site and the problem would be solved for them, but they probably never will because free access is the reason youtube is in a monopoly position to begin with. So yeah, as long as it remains technically feasible and legal I will block all ads and youtube can cry about it.

They pay for youtube premium, and quit being spiteful about it.

 

It's not that hard. You are using a service. The service has to recoup your usage somehow. You are getting value from it.

 

There are services where I feel it's entirely justified to block the ads. Twitter for example. Because the service itself has stopped having any value to me, and I'll use it's own block system to block or mute all the advertisers I don't want to see. For the amount of time I spend on it, I know if there were no photos or videos in the stream, the entire data consumed would be in the Kilobytes. 

 

It's this obsession with pushing video ads to everyone that is devalued the "safe" ads, the still images and text-only ads. Nobody buys text ads (remember adwords?) Now you go to newspaper sites and half the page bumps down to show you a 720p video ad.

 

Like WHY is this a thing? I'd rather just not use the site and stick to news sources that are still generally text.

 

And you know why "malware' in ads is even a thing? Because Google decided allowing third party resources (javascript, videos, WASM, etc) in ads is acceptable. It should have NEVER been a thing, and the only way ads ever return to being trusted is by making ads first-party, and that just is never gonna be a thing as long as people keep using Chrome and Google never allows for "disable third party linked resources" because that would guarantee no ads would be shown on any site.

 

 

[Arika]

2 hours ago, Spotty said:

I disagree. There are malicious advertisements displayed on legitimate, trustworthy websites. Both Google and Bing search results will display advertisements for phishing websites at the top of the results. Facebook will display ads for scam websites and scam products. Like @Vishera mentioned there was even a notice posted by the FBI to use an adblock when using search engines because of the advertisements being served for phishing websites. https://linustechtips.com/topic/1480218-fbi-recomends-adblock/

i decided to turn adblock off for a day a few months ago, 3rd video i got a porn ad on youtube....went straight back on.

[starsmine]

1 minute ago, Arika S said:

i decided to turn adblock off for a day a few months ago, 3rd video i got a porn ad on youtube....went straight back on.

bulllllshit
 

[Arika]

2 minutes ago, starsmine said:

bulllllshit
 

i don't care if you believe me ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[DANK_AS_gay]

Honestly, I would love to support YouTubers, but with the switch to AV1 and the cost reduction that entails... Trying to stop adblock is stupid. YouTube already is profitable, why do they need to constantly push for more profitability? Why does that money have to come from us instead of from reducing costs on their end? Keep the status quo, and reduce costs, and boom profitability. AV1's reduced bandwidth requirements will save YouTube BILLIONS.

[DANK_AS_gay]

1 minute ago, Arika S said:

i don't care if you believe me ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

If it matters, I believe you. I watch YouTube with adblock on my computer, but on my phone, I don't have adblock. I either get women's clothing advertisements, child toy advertisements, or women's underwear advertisements (aside from CONSTANT Mint Mobile ads). I am neither a woman or a child, or Ryan Reynolds. 

[starsmine]

Just now, DANK_AS_gay said:

If it matters, I believe you. I watch YouTube with adblock on my computer, but on my phone, I don't have adblock. I either get women's clothing advertisements, child toy advertisements, or women's underwear advertisements (aside from CONSTANT Mint Mobile ads). I am neither a woman or a child, or Ryan Reynolds. 

Notice how NONE of those are porn ads.

[DANK_AS_gay]

1 minute ago, starsmine said:

Notice how NONE of those are porn ads.

Close enough to be believable. 

[Sauron]

43 minutes ago, Kisai said:

They pay for youtube premium, and quit being spiteful about it.

Why?

44 minutes ago, Kisai said:

It's not that hard. You are using a service. The service has to recoup your usage somehow. You are getting value from it.

Not my problem. Youtube has used their financial advantage to shut out potential competitors by operating at a loss for years, if now it turns out that that wasn't a sustainable investment then too bad for them. If they want me to pay for the service then they can just paywall the site and then I'll decide whether accessing it is worth my money.

48 minutes ago, Kisai said:

There are services where I feel it's entirely justified to block the ads. Twitter for example. Because the service itself has stopped having any value to me, and I'll use it's own block system to block or mute all the advertisers I don't want to see. For the amount of time I spend on it, I know if there were no photos or videos in the stream, the entire data consumed would be in the Kilobytes. 

This is a completely arbitrary distinction.

50 minutes ago, Kisai said:

It's this obsession with pushing video ads to everyone that is devalued the "safe" ads, the still images and text-only ads. Nobody buys text ads (remember adwords?) Now you go to newspaper sites and half the page bumps down to show you a 720p video ad.

Yes, and if youtube doesn't understand this then I'll just block the video ads. I'd probably have been ok with some banner ads on the side, I still allow them on this forum. Google did this to itself, after all they're probably the largest ad broker in the world (possibly second to facebook? I'm not sure).

52 minutes ago, Kisai said:

Like WHY is this a thing? I'd rather just not use the site and stick to news sources that are still generally text.

 

And you know why "malware' in ads is even a thing? Because Google decided allowing third party resources (javascript, videos, WASM, etc) in ads is acceptable. It should have NEVER been a thing, and the only way ads ever return to being trusted is by making ads first-party, and that just is never gonna be a thing as long as people keep using Chrome and Google never allows for "disable third party linked resources" because that would guarantee no ads would be shown on any site.

Yeah, and you know how we get them to stop? We block the ads. Paying not to see them would just be an incentive for google to make the ads worse.

1 hour ago, starsmine said:

So, pay for the service with a traded currency.

[starsmine]

8 minutes ago, Sauron said:

Why?

Not my problem. Youtube has used their financial advantage to shut out potential competitors by operating at a loss for years, if now it turns out that that wasn't a sustainable investment then too bad for them. If they want me to pay for the service then they can just paywall the site and then I'll decide whether accessing it is worth my money.

This is a completely arbitrary distinction.

Yes, and if youtube doesn't understand this then I'll just block the video ads. I'd probably have been ok with some banner ads on the side, I still allow them on this forum. Google did this to itself, after all they're probably the largest ad broker in the world (possibly second to facebook? I'm not sure).

Yeah, and you know how we get them to stop? We block the ads. Paying not to see them would just be an incentive for google to make the ads worse.

Then dont use youtube.

youtube did not use thier financial advantage to shut out competitors. They were big before google bought them out. 
Vimeo exists, Nebula exists, Floatplane exists, OF exists, Patreon exists. Hulu exists, Netflix exists, Fansly exists. TikTok exists, etc etc etc etc etc. 

also ads get worse because of adblockers generally. The cost to run a site is correlated with how many users it gets and how much data each user demands. The more users that use AdBlock, the smaller the monetizable audience is, meaning they need to get more money per audience member to break even. Attention and patience for ads is a currency. There is always a balking point, site makers have to balance not going past the balking point and dollars they get.  THEY ARE FORCED to run more ads to make up for YOU costing them money. That is the incentive, not premium. Premiums incentive is the opposite, they do not have to monetize non-payers as much to make money. 

[Kisai]

13 minutes ago, Sauron said:

 

Not my problem.

So, when the content you enjoy stops being made, who are going to complain to?

 

A service I do tech work for, gets, like clockwork request like "why doesn't X artist update anymore?" , "why doesn't comic update anymore?" and the answer to both of those is "the artist wants to work on something else that pays them", even though I know the true reason is their comics are up on the chan piracy sites within minutes of going up and they are not incentivized to produce more because it's not bringing subscribers to the platform to justify the platform paying them more.

 

It's very hard to accept new artists to the platform because the existing subscribers rarely express interest in new content, they want the stuff they paid to see.

 

You're only going to sell yourself short so many times before you realize that doing X thing is not going to pay the bills, and then the content dies. At least the ad-supported content allows for some trickle of revenue over time. The paid subscriptions do not. Once you stop updating your content those paid subs drop to zero immediately. The evergreen content ensures you occasionally get some revenue.

 

[Sauron]

10 minutes ago, starsmine said:

Then dont use youtube.

Why not?

10 minutes ago, starsmine said:

youtube did not use thier financial advantage to shut out competitors. They were big before google bought them out. 

Nowhere near the way they are now. Incidentally they had nowhere near as many ads and the ads they did have were much less intrusive.

11 minutes ago, starsmine said:

Vimeo exists, Nebula exists, Floatplane exists, OF exists, Patreon exists. Hulu exists, Netflix exists, Fansly exists. TikTok exists, etc etc etc etc etc. 

Most of these have a paywall and/or are not comparable.

12 minutes ago, starsmine said:

also ads get worse because of adblockers generally. [made up stuff]

Citation needed.

9 minutes ago, Kisai said:

So, when the content you enjoy stops being made, who are going to complain to?

The content I enjoy isn't made by youtube. It's made by people who get a very tiny slice of the videos' ad revenue and usually rely on external contribution methods like donations or sponsor spots (which at least can be immediately and entirely skipped and don't interrupt the video at inconvenient times). If youtube implodes those people will likely just post elsewhere.

12 minutes ago, Kisai said:

A service I do tech work for, gets, like clockwork request like "why doesn't X artist update anymore?" , "why doesn't comic update anymore?" and the answer to both of those is "the artist wants to work on something else that pays them", even though I know the true reason is their comics are up on the chan piracy sites within minutes of going up and they are not incentivized to produce more because it's not bringing subscribers to the platform to justify the platform paying them more.

Blocking ads is not piracy.

14 minutes ago, Kisai said:

It's very hard to accept new artists to the platform because the existing subscribers rarely express interest in new content, they want the stuff they paid to see.

 

You're only going to sell yourself short so many times before you realize that doing X thing is not going to pay the bills, and then the content dies. At least the ad-supported content allows for some trickle of revenue over time. The paid subscriptions do not. Once you stop updating your content those paid subs drop to zero immediately. The evergreen content ensures you occasionally get some revenue.

There are plenty of people who manage to make a living as a content creator while not monetizing their videos at all, and even if that weren't the case then so be it; it's not my duty to stress myself out in order to allow you to monetize your hobby. I, too, do things in my free time that don't make me any money; I'm not going around demanding that you sit through a dozen tedious ads so I can do them as my only job. Just like donations are voluntary, so is electing to watch an ad that makes me want to gouge my eyes out so you can make 1/1000th of a dollar.

 

And you know what? It's google that made it so ads are paid depending on the views they get. They didn't have to do that. When you pay for a billboard you don't get your money back because an eye tracking camera detected that a random person on the street wasn't looking up. They are the reason their own business model is not sustainable while also being maximally inconvenient. And I'm perfectly willing to let youtube die rather than watch a single manipulative ad in my free time or pay for the "privilege" not to see it, if it really comes down to that.

[Curufinwe_wins]

3 hours ago, Kisai said:

It's fine to disagree, but it doesn't change the point that adblocking is always done as a spiteful thing first, and just because "I" personally have never once seen a bad ad from google on youtube, doesn't mean someone else who was micro-targeted didn't. If you live in the US, Canada, AU, NZ or UK, where English language is the only necessary language to use, I doubt anyone has ever seen a "malicious ad" on youtube itself. Yes, there are a lot of barrel-scraping ads that I would rather not see and feel are poorly targeted (like how often I was targeted ads for "legal" drugs) or the more disgusting ads put out by some companies that are trying to be funny about their hygiene products.

 

This is just false. It isn't even remotely worth pretending to be true, and is intellectually dishonest. If you live in the US, it is literally impossible that you have not seen malicious political advertising on youtube. Or a more directly malicious ad in general. Google routinely has malvertising get through its ad systems, so don't give me that BS line; they also have suffered more than a few failures to catch pornographic ads from going through despite that being supposedly against policy. Even more directly than that, more than once in the last decade, youtube suffered a large breach of literal malware ads directly on popular content. See 2014 Sweet Orange malware, which hit almost exclusively US users.

 

Pretending that many reputable sites, whose content is indeed worth existing, function consistently and properly without adblocking is ridiculous. Even BBC, which barely has ads at all breaks more than once a week for me with loading failures or banner ads that prevent accessing the content at all (due to not resizing properly). Or ads which autoplay audio and video content etc etc. There are many extremely valid reasons to use adblock by default and only permit certain sites, notably that the people buying ad slots and pushing for more and more ads content (those same ads that are intrusive and/or even interface breaking being by far the most profitable) don't give a shit about the user experience. Youtube doesn't care either, more engagement is good for buisness, even if it is being pissed off or negative experiences due to shitty ads. 

 

And I don't blame them for not caring. They exist to make a profit, and get as much money as possible with as little effort as possible (as does every company, I'm not singling them out), and if their value matrix says they'd rather make a site non-functional or spread harmful content than control their greed, I have absolutely no moral or ethical qualms doing everything in my power to A bypass those constraints and B make the platform actually worth using for me.

 

PS: I pay for premium, and still use adblock. Spite has nothing to do with it.

 

[Kisai]

23 minutes ago, Curufinwe_wins said:

 

This is just false. It isn't even remotely worth pretending to be true, and is intellectually dishonest. 

 

Nope, it's the objective truth, that is exactly what adblock was made to do. And then adblock tried to monetize it.

 

https://dl.acm.org/doi/fullHtml/10.5555/1090168.1090169

Quote

The Right Tool for the Right Job

Now, of the above personal observations, some are simple to rectify and do not require GreaseMonkey. If you dislike advertising, then the AdBlock extension is for you; there's nothing, or at least little, to code. Similarly, for a long time, all browsers have supported user-specified stylesheets.

 

http://www.populartechnology.net/2005/03/why-adblock-is-bad-for-free-internet.html

Quote

 can understand and sympathize with the general distaste for pop-up advertisements. They are obstructive and annoying but I do not sympathize with the distaste of standard banner advertisements that pay for all the free content we currently enjoy.

Again the idealists fail to understand how websites pay for their monthly server and bandwidth charges. For most "free" sites their revenue is generated through advertisements. Other sites use subscription services and the rest eat the cost. The ones eating the cost have another source of revenue usually not Internet based.

Since day one, I've understood the back end reason for banner ads. They are a necessity of free content. Lets be honest any web savvy user generally ignores all ads that they choose. So pushing features such as Adblock is harmful to the Internet, as we know it.
 

"Adblock is a content filtering plug-in for the Mozilla and Firebird browsers. It is both more robust and more precise than the built-in image blocker." - The Adblock Project

While Adblock is nothing new in terms of ad blocking software, it is significant in that it's current hype and price (free) is making it widely recommended and used as an extension to the Firefox web browser - this is a dangerous trend.

Adblock effectively robs these free sites of their revenue. If Internet Explorer came with a feature such as Adblock, you would effectively wipe out thousands of websites, maybe more. These are the same free sites users of Adblock frequently visit. The irony is how this is self-defeating.

 

I'm all for youtube wagging the finger at people stealing from them. You can keep blocking the ads, I don't care. And many content creators that aren't earning triple-digit revenue from youtube/twitch/etc don't care either. They know the ads are garbage, but Youtube/Amazon/etc took the choice away from them to not run ads at all.

 

And the author of that 2005 article is exactly right. Notice how everyone is pushed to use youtube or facebook or twitter, and not people's personal websites now? That's because it's no longer possible to have a "free presence" on the internet. If you don't have a twitter or a facebook, you do not exist. If you do not have a youtube, it doesn't matter what video or music you produce, how much money you invested in it, you are stupid if your video or music is not on youtube. You are required to put your content on the most-popular platform for that content, or you simply will have zero discovery.

 

Ads used to be a way to discover content, but guess what, you block them, so there is no opportunity to show you stuff you might like on similar sites. That opportunity has been destroyed by peoples spiteful use of adblock. However it was also destroyed by greed stuffing of ads on sites that people aren't going to pay attention to. If you have a blob of text on a page, the most amount of "ads" someone might see is one, before the content they came to the site to read finishes loading in their browser. If it's a comic you might get away with up to three visual ads. But video ads? You know what people do when they see video ads on a text or comic? They close the page. Video ads on text content today is the same problem we had in 2005 with popups on the garbage sites.

 

[LAwLz]

4 hours ago, Spotty said:

You can't classify "malicious" as meaning "Computer Virus" and exclude everything else from the classification. Ads for things such as phishing websites are also defined as malicious. An ad that displays a scam message saying that your computer is infected is malicious. An ad saying that Elon Musk is giving away free crypto is malicious. Malicious includes much more than just a computer virus infecting a system. Just because an advertisement isn't installing a virus does not mean it's not bad.

There have also been cases where actual harmful code have been executed through ads. Maybe not on YouTube but on fairly large and trusted websites. 

I think it even happened on this forum at one point but I might be misremembering. 

 

And besides, we all sooner or later, some more often than others, will open websites that may not be the most secure and trusted.

[wanderingfool2]

4 hours ago, Spotty said:

You can't classify "malicious" as meaning "Computer Virus" and exclude everything else from the classification. Ads for things such as phishing websites are also defined as malicious. An ad that displays a scam message saying that your computer is infected is malicious. An ad saying that Elon Musk is giving away free crypto is malicious. Malicious includes much more than just a computer virus infecting a system. Just because an advertisement isn't installing a virus does not mean it's not bad.

That is skirting around the general point of his post though...that YouTube (Not google searches where it's a different ball game) are serving the malicious ads.

 

At a certain stage as well, you are depriving them of revenue streams.  If everyone used ad-blockers YouTube wouldn't be a thing or you would have a lot more baked in ads into the video or other concepts.  Using ad-blocker on YouTube specifically is doing nothing more than making the experience worse for others while trying to pretend that it's only for protecting yourself.  Generally speaking people who use ad-blockers are also the ones smart enough to realize even those sketchy ads on YouTube aren't true.

 

There comes a point though where Google and other sites need to start accepting those sketchier ads because thats the way they make money when people use things like ad-block.

 

 

 

I think it's important to note, that AdBlock (at least the one that really kicked off) essentially operated on a Mafia extortion type of principle.  Block ads and then charge companies to get them unblocked because they were "trusted" types of companies.

[Curufinwe_wins]

On 5/11/2023 at 9:43 AM, Kisai said:

Nope, it's the objective truth, that is exactly what adblock was made to do. And then adblock tried to monetize it.

 

https://dl.acm.org/doi/fullHtml/10.5555/1090168.1090169

 

http://www.populartechnology.net/2005/03/why-adblock-is-bad-for-free-internet.html

 

I'm all for youtube wagging the finger at people stealing from them. You can keep blocking the ads, I don't care. And many content creators that aren't earning triple-digit revenue from youtube/twitch/etc don't care either. They know the ads are garbage, but Youtube/Amazon/etc took the choice away from them to not run ads at all.

 

And the author of that 2005 article is exactly right. Notice how everyone is pushed to use youtube or facebook or twitter, and not people's personal websites now? That's because it's no longer possible to have a "free presence" on the internet. If you don't have a twitter or a facebook, you do not exist. If you do not have a youtube, it doesn't matter what video or music you produce, how much money you invested in it, you are stupid if your video or music is not on youtube. You are required to put your content on the most-popular platform for that content, or you simply will have zero discovery.

 

Ads used to be a way to discover content, but guess what, you block them, so there is no opportunity to show you stuff you might like on similar sites. That opportunity has been destroyed by peoples spiteful use of adblock. However it was also destroyed by greed stuffing of ads on sites that people aren't going to pay attention to. If you have a blob of text on a page, the most amount of "ads" someone might see is one, before the content they came to the site to read finishes loading in their browser. If it's a comic you might get away with up to three visual ads. But video ads? You know what people do when they see video ads on a text or comic? They close the page. Video ads on text content today is the same problem we had in 2005 with popups on the garbage sites.

 

I'm sorry, what world do you live on here? <removed> Please pull some random ass throwaway comment from an author of a non-relevant script that does nothing other than add some flipping weird fancy letters up front. Or the completely unsubstantiated unresearched throwaway blog post. You have to be able to find better supporting arguments, right?

 

 And god forbid, look at those ad examples shown on the webpages. They are definitely demonstrating 'ads for discovery' alright.

 

I have to ask, were you using the internet pre-adblock (or shit, just using school/work computers where often adblock wasn't installable)? Because let me just say, ads are a lot... less likely to be malware or inappropriate than they were in 2005, let alone 2000. Used to be an extremely common issue that if you click on that addicting games ad on accident, you are spending the next 10 minutes fighting ad popups and autoinstallers, and more than once having to wipe the computer from malware that got installed. UAC didn't come around because Microsoft just wanted to intentionally piss people off. It came around because the internet was a cesspool (and it still is in the deep corners, but the general standard has improved sooo much). 

 

I don't think I saw a single content relevant ad on the internet in my entire life prior to 2010, certainly I had never seen on on youtube ffs. For a while there, the *only* ads you saw on websites were for porn or malware. These days most reputable sites are only mildly infuriating, not dangerous.

 

There is no golden age to fall back on.

 

-

I do apologize for the ad hominems, but this is just a false reality, with no substantiation, that even if substantiated, wouldn't bypass the arguments noted about impairing basic function of websites or protecting users. And prescribing an absolute like 'always spite first' is just laughable. Honestly. 

Edited May 14, 2023 by SansVarnic
Removed content.

[xAcid9]

3rd video after i turned off adblocker.

 

*turn it back on*