But almost all ad networks do way more than show ads, often the ads are just a byproduct of incessant tracking and data gathering.
Combined with inefficient and insecure implementation and fueled by a death spiral of websites trying to outcompete each other on the most gross content.
@thomasfuchs ads started off like traditional billboards. Then marketers started abusing more and more technology to chase after a gross “we will build personas on everyone” goal. People are done with being tracked and manipulated online.
@recker5@nicholashead Fair enough! There’s was some attempts at interactivity with magazine ads, for example flexidisk records and scratch’n’sniff but it was relatively rare and mostly gimmicky
@thomasfuchs
Yeah, unfortunately until someone comes up with a better idea ads fuel the "free" internet
My rule is, I have adblock on and if you ask me nice to turn it off I look at the number of ads blocked. If it's more than maybe 15 I can probably get the same thing somewhere else. Doubly the ones that flaunt CCPA by saying you opt-in just for being there. Like the EU I'm supposed to be given an affirmative choice.
@thomasfuchs I heard consumer advocate Clark Howard on his radio show raging about Doubleclick's cross-site tracking cookies, and telling how to opt out on Doubleclick's site, in the year 1997. I presume there's no opting out now. The WWW has been this way just about from the start.
@thomasfuchs something that helped me was when I stopped thinking of them as “ads” (fun, cool, made by handsome guys in skinny ties who smoke, occasionally too loud, half my money is wasted!) and instead “endpoints of the highly leveraged attention economy” (invasive, creepy, helping to overthrow democracy, makes people pay attention to dipshits like Musk and Zuckerberg)
@thomasfuchs ‘racing to the clickbait bottom’ isn’t just an existential threat to publishers, the internet itself is a threat to most media retail. It’s nothing less than the spirit of the library having a terrible vengeance on the spirit of the broadcast.
@limepeep ads aren't unethical*; using them as an excuse to collect and sell data about everyone is, especially when combined with a grossly insecure way of doing so
*in general for most things, there's definitely types of unethical ads too
If website owners agree to display ads which they have no control over and which could be promoting the exact opposite of their values, doesn't that mean that they care about $$ more than the products/causes the ads are promoting?
Or do the ad platforms let content creators choose what ad topics and keywords to disallow?
@thomasfuchs Great answers! I get similar messages a lot, but I donʼt block ads, they do! I only block trackers, and if by doing so, no ads are displayed, then they are the stupid ones doing themselves out of income!
@thomasfuchs Has anyone noticed that anti-adblock things that look like that are increasingly common? I see them on How-To-Geek now, along with a couple tech news websites, and they all look weirdly similar. I’ve found reader mode bypasses them for the time being though.
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