What would convince you to uninstall ad block?

[Ydfhlx]

In the current state of things, ads can spread malware, get you scammed, also advertisement companies track me and sell my data without my constent. And as a cherry on top, autoplaying videos with sound is the most annoying thing on the whole internet.

 

First three points make blocking ads morally right thing to do (at least in my eyes), and as long as they don't stop doing all of these I will not uninstall adblocker.

[XNOR]

I voted Other. For me to uninstall AdBlock (or more likely whitelist the site) they would need to eliminate tracking and the automated trading of ads. I don't want to be profiled, I don't want to be tracked, I don't want my data to be collected and sold to god who knows. This is why I will never pay for Youtube, unless they change their model significantly. Even if you pay full price, they still collect your data. And honestly, even if they were to change it now, the historic bad blood and untrustworthiness would take a long time to wear off.

 

Of course, ads shouldn't be massively intrusive either. Current Youtube is ridiculous. I don't mind having a static banner or bannners in the corner of the screen, if and when they're served from the same server, if that means supporting the content I'm viewing.

 

I don't mind directly contributing to content makers either, but companies have to understand that people can't spend USD $1, $2, $5 or $10 on tens or even hundreds of different sites. It's just not feasible or desirable. The online world has splintered to such a degree it's too much.

[Arika]

On all other sites except youtube? Nothing. i don't trust 99% of sites to do their due diligence on the ads being run on their websites that would make me willing to turn it off.

 

On youtube, let me pre pay for ads. Let me put money into a "wallet" and instead of playing the ad, take the ad impression money out of that. We always hear that 1000 views is about $1, so I'll be genius and say that $1 is worth 400 ads because youtube needs an income.so if I put say.. $20 in that wallet, I can watch 8000 videos ad free, I'm not paying almost the same amount of money per month for yt premium.

[Guest]

11 hours ago, whispous said:

Lacks option "If ads weren't intrusive"

This?

Spoiler

 

[whispous]

21 minutes ago, fpo said:

This?

  Hide contents

 

Not that, no.

 

Intrusive is more wide-ranging in meaning than "blocking content".

[SkipRat]

F YouTube.

Linus is utterly wrong about this, it purely about greed and the tech industry has ballooned it's costs in recent years and the only people who are benefiting are are investors who care about the square root of F all towards consumers.  Just look at nVidia and the price hikes they are trying to force down everyone's throats and it's not just graphic cards. It's every part of the tech sector and they are are aggressively perusing profits for a minority of very wealthy people.

Also youtube's move towards 4K can F off too, the vast majority of people don't even use it or care about it, but 4K is ruining YouTube.

Google make astronomical amounts of money, syphoning and selling peoples data and they all using that money for is making people lives miserable, by trying to be clever, rather than just keeping things nice an simple.

Then you look at how much they are charging for their subscriptions and then add that to all the other subscriptions.

Youtube - £11.99
Netflix - £14.99

Amazon - £8.99

Your internet connection - £33 (250Mb)

And youtube doesn't even have to make content, it has no stars to pay, nor writers, producers, music,

People can't afford it, especially the cost of living right now and it's disgusting how tech companies are fleecing their customers.  Just look at adobe's profits, the thieving scum.

And the worse thing is, most people could tolerate adverts, if it wasn't for the fact that seem to appear every 2 minutes on a YouTube video.   Adverts before you start the video, 2 mins in, adverts, move to skip a section, adverts, fart you get adverts...  They are aggressively pushing adverts down people's throats to the point it is making the whole experience miserable for everyone.

So no way in hell am I removing adblock to help make these companies richer, when they sell my personal data to dodgy organisations, who supply scammers with my information to call me, send me phishing emails or identity theft.

Data is the new liquid gold.

[Mark Kaine]

To replace it with a better one? 

[Lurking]

On 7/1/2023 at 6:50 AM, Eigenvektor said:

The large majority of YouTube videos still have ads, they're simply called sponsor spots. Ad block is primarily needed for sites that plaster ads everywhere so that you can't click anywhere without accidentally triggering something or popups with weird close button placement.

 

How about a compromise: An ad blocker that still loads the ad, but simply doesn't show it to me. That way I can enjoy the site without garish ads, and the ad company has exactly the same they had before. An "ad impression" that has zero effect on me, except now it also doesn't annoy me or do weird things to my browser.

Sponsorblock takes care of much of in-video ads. It even removes the self-promotion. 90% of the time it works 100% of the time.

[emothxughts]

On 7/1/2023 at 7:25 PM, fpo said:

If you could seriously consider this unrealistic scenario... What would sway you? 

1. Someone aimed a gun at me.
2. All the ads are anime gacha game ads.

[cooky560]

Since my adblocker also blocks various trackers and other things unrelated to ads, even an ad-free internet wouldn't stop me using one.

[Sauron]

On 7/1/2023 at 1:50 PM, Eigenvektor said:

How about a compromise: An ad blocker that still loads the ad, but simply doesn't show it to me. That way I can enjoy the site without garish ads, and the ad company has exactly the same they had before. An "ad impression" that has zero effect on me, except now it also doesn't annoy me or do weird things to my browser.

It's easier than that, companies could just stop tracking impressions. If you buy a billboard ad you pay a fee regardless of how many people actually look at it. There's no reason ads on the internet couldn't work the same way; google dug its own grave by tracking ad impressions hoping to convince more advertisers to go with their service.

 

I have no moral or legal obligation to make these people money so I'm really not concerned with finding a middle ground.

 

I Initially clicked on "if there were no ads" in the poll but then I rememebered that adblockers also block some malicious content that isn't technically an add so I changed it to "nothing".

[Guest]

1 hour ago, cooky560 said:

Since my adblocker also blocks various trackers and other things unrelated to ads, even an ad-free internet wouldn't stop me using one.

 

1 hour ago, Sauron said:

It's easier than that, companies could just stop tracking impressions. If you buy a billboard ad you pay a fee regardless of how many people actually look at it. There's no reason ads on the internet couldn't work the same way; google dug its own grave by tracking ad impressions hoping to convince more advertisers to go with their service.

 

I have no moral or legal obligation to make these people money so I'm really not concerned with finding a middle ground.

 

I Initially clicked on "if there were no ads" in the poll but then I rememebered that adblockers also block some malicious content that isn't technically an add so I changed it to "nothing".

 

In an unrealistic scenario where they stopped tracking you, would you be open to uninstalling ad block? 

Unrealistically where they'd actually be truthful. 

[cooky560]

1 minute ago, fpo said:

 

 

In an unrealistic scenario where they stopped tracking you, would you be open to uninstalling ad block? 

Unrealistically where they'd actually be truthful. 

In a world where profiling, data collection, telemetry, tracking etc was illegal and never used by any company ever. I would certainly consider removing my ad blockers. 

[Sauron]

54 minutes ago, fpo said:

In an unrealistic scenario where they stopped tracking you, would you be open to uninstalling ad block? 

Unrealistically where they'd actually be truthful. 

If there were no ads and no malicious content on the internet to be blocked then obviously the adblocker would be pretty useless...

[Guest]

1 hour ago, Sauron said:

If there were no ads and no malicious content on the internet to be blocked then obviously the adblocker would be pretty useless...

Is there any kind of ad you would put up with if the world was unrealistically at your whim?

[thevictor390]

If platforms were actually held responsible for the ads they served, that would be a start. Right now Facebook (for example) doesn't care if you get scammed by the ad it shows you, so I don't think twice about preventing it from loading.

[Tan3l6]

I said in the first reply - "only cold,hard cash" but how much, that's still up to debate. 50€ in a year is perhaps not enough. 100€ would be more like it.

Depends how long the ads are though.

[Sauron]

49 minutes ago, fpo said:

Is there any kind of ad you would put up with if the world was unrealistically at your whim?

I would only accept to see an ad if I was specifically looking to buy something. I.e. it would be fine to see products listed with some selling points on a store catalogue.

[Smith6612]

The only thing that would get me to uninstall Adblock in my browser is a GUARANTEE that the advertisements won't ever be able to execute or install Malware to my computer.

 

I know in recent news, the YouTube Adblocking trials have been getting discussed. YouTube is actually the site which brought me back to using Adblock. Not because video ads are annoying or because the site has too many ads. But because I'd often have a rogue advertisement appear on the front page or video page of YouTube trying to execute something that hijacks the browser or tries to install malware. This was back when YouTube still required Adobe Flash, and anything exploiting Flash would be a nasty infection to clean up after. Prior to that, I only used Adblock in order to speed up page loading back when my Internet connection was still delivered over a 56k dial-up link, where longer page loads for animated advertising actually cost me money.

 

I also install Adblock onto computers where a person with chronic malware infections or chronic tech support calls for hijacked browsers. Adblocking cuts down on basically EVERYTHING except the "my printer doesn't work" calls, and I prefer the peace of mind and free time over the money earned from fixing the computer.

 

Otherwise, whether an ad is personalized or not to me, that doesn't matter much. If ads are hyper-personalized, I'll get annoyed. If sites are billboards rather than useful, I won't use them. Scam ads? Yeah those need to go...

[cooky560]

2 hours ago, thevictor390 said:

If platforms were actually held responsible for the ads they served, that would be a start. Right now Facebook (for example) doesn't care if you get scammed by the ad it shows you, so I don't think twice about preventing it from loading.

This is the solution, if a platform serves you malware, they should be responsible for the costs of putting right. They maybe they'll actually make an effort to screen the ads they show.

[Guest]

1 hour ago, cooky560 said:

4 hours ago, thevictor390 said:

If platforms were actually held responsible for the ads they served, that would be a start. Right now Facebook (for example) doesn't care if you get scammed by the ad it shows you, so I don't think twice about preventing it from loading.

This is the solution, if a platform serves you malware, they should be responsible for the costs of putting right. They maybe they'll actually make an effort to screen the ads they show.

Don't know why I skipped this reply...
This definitely seems like something to report to one's representative if (ending sentence to avoid politics. Don't reply to these statements to avoid locking thread.)

 

 

1 hour ago, Smith6612 said:

animated advertising actually cost me money.

oof...
Didn't know that happened.

 

 

1 hour ago, Smith6612 said:

I also install Adblock onto computers where a person with chronic malware infections or chronic tech support calls for hijacked browsers. Adblocking cuts down on basically EVERYTHING except the "my printer doesn't work" calls, and I prefer the peace of mind and free time over the money earned from fixing the computer.

hmm... yeah, I mean, there are a lot of malware ads. Maybe on other sites. I mostly consider youtube since I don't do much else with the internet. (Or I don't see ads because I have like 4~7 ad block extensions on chrome alone.)

1 hour ago, Smith6612 said:

Otherwise, whether an ad is personalized or not to me, that doesn't matter much. If ads are hyper-personalized, I'll get annoyed. If sites are billboards rather than useful, I won't use them. Scam ads? Yeah those need to go...

Why do you get annoyed at personalized ads?

Also scam ads are illegal. I'd imagine no one would allow those and to bypass that illegal activity as a consideration as obvious not allowed.

[Smith6612]

4 hours ago, fpo said:

oof...

Didn't know that happened.
...

Why do you get annoyed at personalized ads?
...
Also scam ads are illegal. I'd imagine no one would allow those and to bypass that illegal activity as a consideration as obvious not allowed.

Yeah, so at least over here, the costs depended on your phone plan and your dial-up Internet plan. Some phone providers didn't have unlimited calling, and would meter your calls per minute. Other times, a dial up provider didn't have a dial-in number which counted as a "local" call and would force you to call long distance. Long distance wasn't always unlimited, even if local calls were unlimited. In my case, my phone provider and dial-up provider had local access numbers and unlimited local calling. Now in some instances, calls were also billed per connection. So I could be charged $0.08 per outbound call, and from there the call could be either unlimited or metered. Sometimes dial-up had a tendency to disconnect under heavy usage when the phone line conditions are poor, in order to negotiate a lower modem speed for reliability, so extended loads also increased the chance of a redial as the modem would rack up errors due to line noise. The line could operate at any speed between 48000bps and 1600bps for example.

 

This ties into the other problem - not all dial-up providers supported unlimited dial-up access, and would charge per minute. The longer you stayed connected, even if you were idle, the meter would continue to run, even if nothing was being downloaded or uploaded. This is because access numbers would only be able to support so many dial-in connections at once just due to the physical number of phone circuits ordered. The longer it took for a page to download, the more it would cost to access a page. So it was always important to make sure pages loaded as fast as possible, so if a user wanted to download the page and go offline, they could do so as fast as possible. Many dialers had functions like this too; download what you need, and once the connection is idle for more than five minutes, it disconnects itself. Advertising sort-of incorporates these fast loading elements, but especially with the rise of animated and video ads, that all went out the window.

 

For the personalized ads, I mostly get annoyed at them thanks to stuff like the Amazon ads. I purchase a lot of one time purchase items on Amazon, and they continue to recommend items I won't be purchasing again. Instead, I prefer to see ads for things that I may not necessarily be interested in, but could be lured into being interested in. For example, books even though I don't currently purchase books. Because life and habits do change over time, and the ad may be an encouragement to change. It has to be like how billboards in real life work. Not tailored to me specifically, but something I might glance at and go "Oh, I didn't know that was a thing. Let me look at it" whereas personalized is just the same-old.

 

Scam ads are definitely taken down as soon as possible. But they are screened by robots just because it's impossible to ingest all of those ads at once with humans. That's how those Microsoft scammer ads, and the "your phone is slow and infected!!!1111" ads show up. Same with the malware ads. Once the ad runs out on impressions, or the ad service catches the abuse and takes down the ad, then that's that. But the damage has already been done at that point. Better advertiser pre-screening could be done, but that's expensive to do. Likewise in real life, ads are screened before they go up on radio, TV, billboards, a newspaper, etc by a human, since those mediums are so limited compared to what the Internet can do in terms of scale and reach.

[Donut417]

4 hours ago, fpo said:

I'd imagine no one would allow those

If that was the case I wouldn't have had AVAST pop up a few years back when I was on Facebook complaining they were sending me malware. The fact is these faceless soulless corporations dont care. They dont do their due diligence because that costs time which costs money. If they get fined it just the cost of doing businesses. 

[IKEA Cherry Chair]

If ads weren't pushed so hard, i.e. all over the screen and even covering on mobile, if there were less scam/"Free button" ads, and if they were less distracting from actual content when not directly gatekeeping it

[Polderviking]

My problems aren't the ads as much as the trackers.
Move away from advertising giants like Google and serve them in-house.

I'll immediately "disable adblock" for your website.

 

In fact. I don't even explicitly ad-block to begin with.

Extentions like privacybadger aren't ad-blockers persé but due to the big brother state of that industry blocking trackers means you're blocking ads.