No Stupid Questions

"At least they’re personalized now"

"At least they're tracking everything I ever do, all the websites I ever visit and everything I look up, storing that data forever in data centers to tie to me so they can know everything they want about me forever, and making a profit off of me so they don't have to work a day in their life" - there I fixed your comment OP.

If you pay for a finite amount of mobile data, and want to find the answer to something but first have to watch a 30 second ad, wouldn't you be upset that you are paying with your own money to use a portion of your limited data just to load something irrelevant that you don't want to see? And while you think about how you are losing money and precious time on this Earth during those moments, you can think about how your time will go straight into the wallet of the creepy 30 year old dude who paid for you to watch his ad. And get this, you can do this for every single ad you ever see! Which not too long ago was nowhere, and now they are everywhere they can be jammed in:

Website banners, side bars, autoplaying video ads, suggestions, promoted posts and anything sponsored or promoted in the app store / play store, social media ads like in Snapchat and instagram, ads before every video on youtube, mobile game ads, ads before a movie, billboards you have to see while you drive on a road, airplanes carrying a banner behind them polluting the sky with an ugly ad, on every bus stop, before your favorite podcast, before any movie at any movie theater that you already paid for a ticket to see, before you can see the recipe you want to make, on the back of grocery receipts, between each song on the radio, every 10 minutes on Hulu, every 5 minutes on Twitch, plastered all over your $900 Samsung smart 4k TV and unable to be disabled, written inside the game case of your latest video game, and also full screen once you start your new $60 EA game, eventually they will be on the home screen of your phone, before you can accept a phone call, before you can read new text messages, and eventually you'll be watching an ad to dial 911. Hope your emergency can wait 30 seconds!

You know all those useful youtube videos with detailed, quick instructions how to save a life, like CPR instructions? Would you mind sitting through 2 15-second ads while your friend chokes to death?

On the plus side, OP, it takes less time than a 30 second ad to install an adblocker. Have you ever tried Ublock Origin? Not only is it free, respects your privacy, limits ad tracking, and lets you remove anything annoying on any website, including every single ad ever made automatically without you having to do anything, but it also works on PC, Mac, Linux, Android, but not iOS because Apple likes to be annoying. There are other safari adblockers in the app store though.

Also last thing, there's a reason why the U.S. F.B.I. officially recommend using an adblocker just to browse the web. Not only do they have the potential to let your system (even with a good antivirus) be susceptible to a malware attack, transmitted just by loading the ad... But they also just plain suck! Nobody likes them for good reason!

Ads are the epitome of the enshitification of the internet. It corrupts the incentives to make anything online.

At least they’re personalized now

This is a whole other can of worms that makes it so much worse. From data harvesting to selling your information to third parties etc.. It is a privacy nightmare and rather malicious in nature. This is one of the things that FOSS (Free and open-source software) tries to remedy.

90% of the internet has always had ads

No, it didn't, kid.

Ad Blocking IS Cyber Security

Many people have become accustomed to life without ads. I have used adblockers in my browsers for probably the past 20 years. So the experience that you are talking about (just scrolling past them), is an experience that I don't really know, unless I am suddenly using some other computer that belongs to a friend or something.

People have also gotten away from ads in their entertainment by subscribing to things like Netflix rather than cable.

Once you don't have advertising shoved in your face 24/7, then suddenly being bombarded with it is incredibly offensive.

You can’t scroll some of the ads, that’s one of the problems.

There are video ads that remain on the bottom of the page regardless of what you do. Same for image ads.

I’m trying to read an article and there is distracting ads all over the page.

Ads back in 90s were subtle, I have zero problems with textual google ads in the article but videos and images that is also slowing down my experience with its large downloads?

Sites are like loading 10m of content for a 2kb text article. Come on.

My personal take is that people start understanding the negative impact unhinged marketing can have on your well-being. Ironically, while following influencers and having their happiness and worldviews happily influenced by social media.

90% of the internet has always had ads

I very clearly remember a time when only a handful of websites actually had ads on them and having an ad blocker wasn't a straight up requirement to stem the tide of popups and banners.

Ads as a general concept are ok to me, otherwise a lot of the Internet that is free will either go away or cost money. It's just how many ads and what type. Pop-up ads are bad, too many ads are bad, ads that are deceptive are bad. They need to be small, curated, non-intrusive, and non-deceptive.

Personally, I don't mind ads that are not extremely obnoxious. A clickable link on the sidebar advertising something or a random picture here and there - no problemo, as they're easy to ignore.

What I can't stand are the extremely intrusive ones - pop-ups that obscure half of the screen with such a tiny little X in the corner that you need to click it in a pixel-perfect manner so you won't "accidentally" open the ad itself. Ads that play music at full volume without warning. Unskippable ads in videos. Sites that greet you with "we noticed you're using an adblocker" and just won't let you view the actual site content. Ads that make the rest of the site lag like hell or freeze entirely. Rapidly flashing ads in neon colors that almost make you have a seizure by looking at them. Those can GTFO and if my adblocker isn't able to / allowed to hide them, I simply won't use the site in question anymore and that's it.

To make an IRL comparison: I don't mind at all if there are advertisement brochures just lying around on a counter while I'm in a mall, because I can decide on my own whether or not I want to take one of those. But if there is an employee blocking my way, screaming at the top of their lungs and slapping me across the face with said brochure, and I am not allowed to knock them out cold, then I'll never set foot into that store again, ever.

90% of the internet has always had ads, you just scroll past them and mind your business.

Nah, I've always hated ads, and always blocked them as soon as we had the capability.

At least they're personalized now

All that means is that they're tracking everything about you to figure out what ads would work on you. They share your data between companies to build a profile on you.

I used to think the same as you but after enough time I just got completely fed up with everyone constantly trying to sell me things. Basically every interaction online is someone trying to take money from me. Not only that but they go out of their way to make things shittier because you're more likely to part with your money. Like how article websites wait just long enough before you start reading before covering the screen with an ad and breaking your concentration. You can't just scroll past those and mind your business.

Ads is never just ads. It's primarily a business model that is fundamentally anti-consumer, because when your main remenue starts becoming showing ads to your user instead of selling them something of value, your priorities shift from trying to make a good quality product to trying to max out engagement in order to print as many ads as possible.

Its a privacy issue as well as just an awful annoyance. Fuck you I dont want to watch your shitty ad I need to watch this video so I know how to fix my dishwasher.

I'm just sick of ads cluttering every damn thing I lay my eyes on.

The people who are reacting so negatively to ads are probably the same people who extensively use adblockers. Seeing a ad sneak through is jarring, and offensive, because an ad demands your attention and distracts you from the mission, its personalized propaganda.

My shows have ads

My videoes have ads

My video games have ads

My language learning app...ads

My podcasts...3 mins of ads

Not just banner ads like the old days but content covering ads, noisy ads, unskippable ads, 1 of 3 ads. It's totally out of control.

Advertising is a huge waste of societal resources.

Think about it: what's the actual point of advertising, from the consumer's point of view? I would argue it's to get notified of available products, and why you might want that product.

But that's not what advertising does 99% of the time, now. Advertising now is a collection of products that you already know exist, have probably already looked at, but now you're getting spammed. Because they aren't trying to educate you as a consumer - they're trying to use exposure to trick you into buying their particular product instead of someone else's identical product.

If you look at the total GDP that goes to advertising, it's frankly insane. It's lost 20%. Add finance into that, and most of our GDP is centered around meta-economics rather than stuff people want/need/will use.

I get ads may be a necessary evil if you're using a website or service you aren't directly paying for, but 9/10 times it's because of how they're implemented and behave and advertisers and large publishers are out of touch with users and never learned or they simply just don't care.

First off, it seems that ads always have to be presented in the most obnoxious ways and this is a problem that's almost as old as the internet. I remember going online back in the late 90s and early , you'd get those extremely obnoxious and seizure inducing "YOU'RE OUR 1'000'000 VISITOR" or "YOU WON A FREE IPOD" ads. Today though, ads are still as annoying or even worse to an extent since every website now insists having autoplaying videos with sound or if you're using a phone and trying to read an article, 3/4 of the page will be taken up by an ad and you have little room to view the actual content.

Secondly, ads have been increasingly becoming a privacy issue. Advertisers want to know every little thing about us and have the ability to track us around the web. I really want advertisers especially to know as little as possible about me because they clearly can't be trusted with data wether they keep it internally or sell it to data brokers because some of the data they're able to collect is alarming.

No the internet has had ads during your lifetime but older people know exactly how it was before. :)

theres a good part in Ready Player One (movie) where the ceo guy is showing how many more ads they can cram imto your field of view and you can still see. Was like 60 or 80% of the visual area. Unfortunately that example is how most advertising heads think. Just cram more and more ads on screen makimg the thing you are trying to do impossible or unusable

Hey, found a YT clip, it was 80% of an individuals visual field before inducing seizures! How exciting
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KpPE85Jogjw

The little personal time I have and by attention has to be wasted on looking at something that's trying to convince me that I need a product or a service or whatever and to spend my hard earned money on it. Money that I received in exchange for my time.

We don't live forever. The little time we have in this world is wasted on stupid work instead of enjoying life. I don't want to waste whatever I have left on this shit.

If I told you that you could see a movie for free, but every 20 minutes or so we'd pause the movie and slap you with a fish, would that be okay?

Would it be better if we analyzed your website usage to choose the specific kind of fish that you'd prefer to be slapped with, would that be okay?

That's what ads feel like. I hate them, and I've almost entirely eliminated them from my life.

Ads have gotten worse and worse overtime. Some websites are so stuffed with ads the performance of the website suffers. Then there are risks associated with ads when many have become malicious or used to track people. Then what is advertised can also be extremely questionable. Everything from useless products to addictive mobile games to harmful "health" products to crypto scams show up on ads.

I'm fine with some ads on free websites/service if they're not crazy but too many sites have gone nuts. I'm not ok with ads with paid services. Ads during shows/movies are a no go when I paid for them.

Because I can't go two minutes without someone trying to sell me something, and it's infuriating. I can't even browse Lemmy without someone spamming my feed with their shitty Lets Play videos, or some random selfhosted project posted by the company who made it.

It's disingenuine, and is to me one of the single largest reasons I've switched over to decentralized platforms.

An ad here or there I don’t mind. When well over 3/4 of the screen is ads… then I get pissed.

If it’s what Reddit has become and it’s tons of ads… again thanks but no.

90% of internet has always had ads

And we were content to be back when it was a single banner. But then they started flashing, and crowding the screen, and popups that got so obtrusive they would sometimes spawn forever and crash your PC.

You are almost certainly using a browser with a popup blocker, because advertisers can never just let it be: they need to become more and more obtrusive until they start harming their customers. Protecting yourself from ads is a necessity.

Every modern browser has that built in, and phones actively block most of it. Unless you’re surfing the internet on IE4 or whatever, you are already filtering a good chunk of the dreck, because someone else saw fit to protect you from it.

Yes, the internet has always had ads, and us not being ok with it is why you’re able to browse at all without infinitely spawning popups in front of you.

Also, you realize you’re posting on an ad-free platform?

It’s the websites with ads that heat up my phone so much it hurts that are the problem.

For most people it isn't the ads, it's the way ads are implemented. They harvest insane amounts of data to track and identify you. Then the ads in social media are inserted deceptively, or you get popups that deliberately make it difficult to dismiss them, or you're trying to read an article but there's an ad between evwry sentence. Most people would be ok with small, non deceptive ads that didn't require you to sogn away your entire life to target them to you, but most ads these days are not that.

Perhaps the reasoning changes from person to person, but for me, it goes along the lines of this image posted, oddly enough, on a memes page:
https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/cbae2e12-4fe0-45c4-8657-f033da6eab20.png

There's this idea, that if the companies just knew enough about you, they could send you the perfect ads. Ads you'd appreciate. Ads for things you didn't even realise you needed until you saw the Ad. This ignores that there are entire industries, and entire product ranges between industries, that - for one reason or another - never advertise.

All the information in the world about how I might want a new microwave is no good when you realise that you never see and ad for a microwave. Likewise, the 'perfect ad' for me most of the time would be something for specialised tools (for plumbing or bike repair or whatever) - again, something you never see an Ad for. So the ads I get are just weird, and I spend longer trying to figure why I getting it than I ever would do entertaining the idea that I'd click on it. In fact, the only adverts I've ever clicked on have been by accident, so every one is just a waste of time and space.

I feel many people are so privileged on both sides of politics that they have nothing better to do than to create their own problems.

There may have always been sites with ads, but they didn't always track and profile you behind your back - that's what's wrong with online ads, not that there's something wrong with advertising per se.

At least they’re personalized now

And if they're personalised then that's a whole level worse because that means that A: they've profiled you and B: they can now be much more effective at influencing you. Don't buy the story that any of that is for your benefit.