The fact that advertisers will use things like 'brand awareness' and other subtle ways to try to get into my brain against my wishes is, IMHO, an excellent reason for blocking.
That's also a good argument for holing up in a cave somewhere and never coming out. The whole of human culture and communication is full of subtle cues and plays on how our mind works, and has been for millennia.
What matters here are intentions. Yes, pretty much every human interaction is a form of manipulating the emotional state of participants, often on an unconscious level. But most of the time people do that to facilitate win-win situations, to help each other. On the other hand, most of advertising and marketing is adversarial; companies and salespeople literally want to scam you. I think it is a reasonable stance to be against manipulation with malicious intent.
In a way, when it comes to advertisements, I do that already. I don't watch broadcast tv, I don't read newspapers or magazines on paper, I listen to BBC radio if I listen to the radio, I have adblockers for the internet.
Th world can be a quieter, calmer place when you stop letting people make sales pitches at you constantly.
That's an easy decision to make when you stop letting them make the sales pitches, but still take what they offer in exchange for those sales pitches. If you stopped the advertising and didn't view the content they offered in exchange, it would be quieter, calmer and a lot more boring.
I mean, that's kind of the root of it for me, this implied bargain - you get this stuff for free, just let us pitch our stuff to you for x% of the time - that's over, I reject it entirely.
Happily for me I no longer have the to make the choice of either putting up with it or not funding the content when it comes to most media.
The root of this for me is that you don't reject it entirely, you just reject the portion you don't like. You (like most of us, let's be clear) reject the pitch, but take the stuff. I don't really think that's right, but many of us do it anyway. I do object to casting it as positive for the ad companies and the content producers though. I think it's very clear it's not, and making that more clear to more people would make update of alternate content payment schemes more likely.
Otherwise, if you don't owe the content producers anything after consuming the content, why bother paying for something like Google Contributor? Just to help support artists, patron style? I don't think the uptake due to that will be enough.
>> The root of this for me is that you don't reject it entirely, you just reject the portion you don't like. You (like most of us, let's be clear) reject the pitch, but take the stuff.
There are sites now that block access if you block ads. I am happy for them to do this. But to get technical - on the web I request content and it is sent to me, I make no promises about rendering anything.
>> I do object to casting it as positive for the ad companies and the content producers though.
I didn't say it was positive for the producers, it's clearly not. It's positive for the advertisers because they don't have to pay for a 'view' that is useless to them though.
>> Otherwise, if you don't owe the content producers anything after consuming the content, why bother paying for something like Google Contributor?
I don't actually owe them anything as at the moment they don't charge, except in an implied way. They can charge, either by insisting I look at their ads, in which case I won't use their service, or by insisting on something like Google contributor or Patreon before I get the content. I'll say again, if sites make it clear I'm not welcome without viewing their ads, I won't go. It's OK with me. I don't think I find any online content or service compelling enough to change my mind on that, with the possible exception of Google's stuff.
>> I don't think the uptake due to that will be enough.
To be honest I don't think the uptake will be very high anyway because people are used to the current model and most don't object as strongly as me. Just as I think the number of people who use streaming services for the convenience probably vastly outweighs the number who even care that they enable ad-free viewing.
> I'll say again, if sites make it clear I'm not welcome without viewing their ads, I won't go.
Considering a needed mechanism for an ad-blocker to function is to be undetectable, they could be trying ten different ways to detect if you are blocking ads so they can display a note that you aren't allowed to view the content, and you would likely never know.
Or do you think they should put a banner at the top of ever page, inconveniencing every user just so the ones that don't want to view ads and are running ad-blockers have a chance to notice the content producers don't want them skipping the ads, after purposefully blocking their ability to determine if the message applies to them specifically?
Or how about we just assume that if a site attempts to display ads then they intend their users to view them? Is that too crazy to assume?
You are correct, in that currently it's a feature of anti-adblock killer and some other scripts/plugins with a similar goal, and I was conflating some comments about an adblock detector[1] and it's inability to detect ublock initially (most likely because it wasn't trying). My apologies.
That said, I don't think we're that far away from ad-blockers blocking detection. As soon as some large sites detect and bypass ad-blocks by moving to a ad source in those cases (or displaying ads in some other manner), ad-blockers will be forced to prevent detection to fulfill their purpose.
One of the reasons technical people use ad-blockers is because they don't want to download 10 MB of crap for a 300-word page. "The customer hasn't downloaded our crap" should be trivially detectable.
The people displaying the content (the site) and the people providing the "crap" (the ad company) are often different entities, with different servers. This is why ads are often served with javascript. Since the scripts that load the ads can change, as they are deployed by the ad company, there's not always a definitive way to know what you can expect to exist. Additionally, since there are exchanges and aggregators, you can't always be sure the same ad company is providing the script. This could be normalized, but anything that makes it easy to detect that the ad has been loaded form the page is probably also easy to detect from the ad-blocker, and trace back to something that needs to be removed.
>> If you stopped the advertising and didn't view the content they offered in exchange, it would be quieter, calmer and a lot more boring.
Not really, I already pay for my tv, music and radio directly (tv license, streaming services etc) so I don't have to be advertised at, and I'm seriously considering signing up for these various no-ad services for the web.
It doesn't have to be more boring without advertising, in nearly all media now there are ways to enjoy great content without letting the sales pitch in. I hope we find good ways with the web too.
> It doesn't have to be more boring without advertising, in nearly all media now there are ways to enjoy great content without letting the sales pitch in. I hope we find good ways with the web too.
My point was that it's more boring if you forego the content that has ads, and I think your use of an ad-blocker to access this content supports this position.
I also hope we find good mechanisms to pay for content without advertising, but I also don't want advertising paid services to go away. It does allow a freedom of access that wasn't possible beforehand.
>> My point was that it's more boring if you forego the content that has ads,
I dunno, I might get more done actually and have a more interesting life, but that's something of a philosophical point.
>> I think your use of an ad-blocker to access this content supports this position.
I think that if I didn't have one I would use the web much less, as I do find advertising that intrusive and awful now.
>> I also don't want advertising paid services to go away
I honestly don't care about them, I'd rather not have ads or the service and would be more than happy to see a model develop that blocks people like me from content if the advertising is that important to the site.
I agree it we would be better off overall with the ability to choose whether or not we wanted to see content if it requires ads, as that would make the choice clear to many people who I think it isn't clear for now. Ideally, I think we would be well served by a choice where we could choose to see an ad, or choose to pony up a small amount from a list of services that escrow these small amounts for us (Google Contributor for example) with the cost clearly defined, and the option to forego seeing the content entirely. Being able to set defaults for this on browser and per-site basis would make this really smooth.
