A reminder that this war isn't new, even before the mass consolidation of TV stations, they got together to standardize commercial break timing so it didn't matter if you changed the channel because you were just switching to commercials on another channel
this post was submitted on 27 Jan 2023
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Privacy
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You know what's immoral? Advertising medicine. Advertising surgery breakfast foods to kids. Advertising garbage fast food to kids.
That's immoral, not adblockers.
I love a big bowl of surgery for breakfast
Mm delicious triple bypass
It seems I’m stupid because I don’t understand what you imply when you say advertising medicine is immoral
Because people shouldn't be convinced to take a medicine based on good marketing. They should get advice from a good source like a doctor.
Considering that everyone can be targeted by "bad actors" ... by even ads on search engines (see https://www.darkreading.com/vulnerabilities-threats/-nitrogen-ransomware-effort-lures-it-pros-via-google-bing-ads ) adblockers are as immoral as a knight wearing armor because it's an "unfair advantage". Sorry, but no one I know wants ransomware installed on their computers.
Adblockers are self-defense technology by nature
We are in an asymmetrical arms race involving an abhorrent industry. They cannot feign to discuss morality when it's common knowledge they have none.
It's probably fine for a website to kindly request you unblock them, or better yet offer easy & private ways to donate or contribute. If they don't offer the latter, they can't really cry about it can they?
The way I see it, they ruined ads for themselves and it's not our fault for hating them enough to want to get rid of them. If ads didn't make the web literally unusable, steal our data, consume more system resources than the site itself, and be a portal for malware, people would be more accepting of them to support websites.
This is a textbook greed leads to ruin tale, like cyberpunk Aesop.
Actually, I like watching TV commercials. But I think it's just me.
I don't think that's quite right. The act of changing the channel wouldn't have impacted the station's ad revenue because the tech couldn't tell if the ad was served. On YouTube you actually deprive the site of ad revenue with an ad blocker. And if enough people do it, you could also deprive creators of material earnings.
So fucking what?
Well, historically ad revenue for TV is based on viewership, right? I'm not 100% sure how that was calculated before streaming, but I would think that changing the channel would still affect those numbers, albeit in a more gradual way. It would still have a similar effect, just not as immediate.
It's important to differentiate "immoral" from "consequences." The consequences of adblockers/changing the channel is that it may impact content creators, but that doesn't make it immoral.
The Nielsen company doing surveys of a percentage of households is how they know. Nowadays they even have a tracker you wear that reports back to Nielsen what you’ve been watching/listening to based on what it can hear, in the old days it was a form folks filled out saying what they watched or listened to
It was calculated by a sample of households with a tracker box