Neat software, but I think this is less defensible than other ad blockers.
With web ad blockers you protect against tracking, privacy violations and potentially malware and thus don't see "unacceptable ads".
In contrast this seems to be about blocking ads just for the sake of blocking ads.
There is a reason ad blockers are called "ad blockers", and not "tracking protectors" or "privacy protectors" or "malware protectors" (the latter three being their own category of software). It's because they exist precisely for blocking ads "just for the sake of blocking ads".
Ads are malicious. It's perfectly fine to block them. Privacy protection is just a convenient side effect.
I agree that it's perfectly fine to block ads. And that ad blockers' primary feature is blocking ads.
At the same time, I think most ads aren't malicious. They aren't "intending to do harm". Ads sell things. Sometimes things people want. I'd guess that most people who use ad blockers just don't like being sold things.
You can't get much weaker and softer than this right here. I'm just trying to imagine the PTSD you must experience when faced with billboards on the highway or when you attend a sporting/musical event and see BoA plastered around the venue.
Also, it's not "unsolicited" when you made the choice to turn on the radio and turn up the volume. If you don't like the ads, turn the radio off.
> I am happy to be sold things, on my own terms.
I'm pretty sure everyone is happy with everything, when they define their own terms.
> I'm just trying to imagine the PTSD you must experience when faced with billboards on the highway or when you attend a sporting/musical event and see BoA plastered around the venue.
GP isn't getting PTSD, but ads here are like mosquitos. A few here and there you won't notice, but once there's lots of them buzzing around and biting, the quality of life goes down very quick.
As for unsolicited - they are. They are a malicious third party injecting itself where it isn't welcome. Also, be it TV or radio, ads weren't supposed to be there. This is where the infectious nature of advertising shows. They came and took over these media, and dragged their quality down.
I've always had a problem with this, who thought it was a good idea to allow large colourful structures literally designed to capture the attention of people operating heavy machinery next to places where they are travelling at high speeds?
The point of ads is to create demand where none existed, as much as adtech people want to pretend thats merely via informing people of all these wonderful products they were previously unaware of (which I admit, does happen), the vast majority of advertising is trying to convince you to buy useless shit you don't need, or even worse, stuff that actively harms you. (these are the most profitable things, thus the most profitable things to advertise).
They do this by preying on insecurities and making you feel less valuable and incomplete. Another tactic is either outright lying about the product, or constructing statements where a reasonable person would "fill in the gaps" to produce the lie they intend, even if they don't explicitly state it. Closely study some ads sometimes, they are incredibly psychologically manipulative.
This is before such considerations as privacy, tracking and data leaks with online advertisement, and the general idea that advertising is a zero sum game, and the only way to "beat" your competitor at it is to blow even more money on it, thus its a massive economic inefficiency, advertising doesn't create value, it merely shifts it around.
While advertisement is rarely actively malicious in a targeted way, they are a systematic evil much like pollution, everyone would be better off if it didn't exist in the first place.
> Closely study some ads sometimes, they are incredibly psychologically manipulative.
Also, study the 101 of the domain. Like the famous Cialdini's book Influence: Science and Practice, or Cliff Ennico's How To Sell Anything To Anybody talks. Moral bankrupcy is in the very DNA of the practice, so no surprise that most ads just reflect this.
Ironic you'd bring up ethics in a discussion of ad blockers. Considering how radio & podcasts depend on sponsorship, isn't it unethical to remove ads that pay for the content? Effectively it is stealing.
Yes. Radio and podcasts aren't entitled to their business model working, especially if their business model involves purposefully exposing their listeners to harmful material.
I believe ad blocking is ethically justified on the grounds that it's just defending yourself from other's unethical behavior, and that you're entitled to do so - claiming otherwise would imply you're supposed to be forced to sit through entirety of a performance. That would be absurd invasion of your autonomy.
Also note that you are not paying radio hosts/podcast authors through advertisements. The ad network is. The exact payout structure is complicated and agreed upon without involving me the listener, but it boils down to parties speculating that a fraction of ad impressions will turn into eventual boost in sales, and money flowing from advertisers, through networks, to publishers, based on that expectation. At no point was I consulted in this, so I feel no obligation towards participating in whatever deals these parties set up between themselves - doubly so given that I'm being harmed by those deals.
Further, if you buy a product that was advertised, you are paying for an unwanted service. The price of the product must be higher than the product is worth in order to fund the ad campaign.
I think there were some legal rulings IIRC in the UK regarding software to auto mute/block/skip ads on TV/Radio, but for the life of my can't find them.
If it was ruled illegal, then it being "perfectly fine to block them" might be correct ethically but not legally, although I suspect the details of implementation might be the important point.
If it's illegal to mute ads automatically, is it therefore illegal to mute them manually? How can automating a human function be illegal? Computers don't have legal capacity they simply do what humans tell them to. All computer actions are ultimately human actions, I don't see how they can draw a distinction between the two cases.
I can't be the only one who literally can't stand the sound of radio advertising. They make a point of using as many annoying and attention-grabbing sounds as possible, not to mention the cheap and cheesy jingles.
I'll often find myself turning the radio down to the second-lowest volume it goes, so I can turn it back up when there's actual music. Equally often I turn it down and then forget about it for the rest of the trip. Honestly, a trip in silence is sometimes preferable to one where I have to micro-manage the volume knob, let alone one where I have to listen to radio ads.
Ever since raising the volume on ads was banned they simply switched to using using limiters, that basically boost all frequencies to achieve the same effect. They'll even use common ring tones or the buzz of a silenced phone to draw your attention.
Personally I mute or switch channels as soon as the commercials start and I've actually turned down at least one job offer because they had radio on the office floor.
Since (commercial, music-based) radio in the US became dominated by a handful of companies running syndicated programs, I just found myself moving away from it in general.
Too little variety, no real local personality, basically none of the things radio was great at doing.
When I'm in the car now, it's all a mix of public radio/podcasts for news and discussion and Shoutcast-type streaming radio for music. I do sometimes pull up specific stuff from my personal uploaded music collection on Google Play Music or find something else I want to hear on YouTube, etc. but not often.
The funny thing is that I've found more streaming "radio" stations that do a better job of (the things I liked about) radio than actual radio stations do. It dropped off a lot since the '00s when the cost of legally running a station skyrocketed but it still beats the endless Clear Channel wasteland on the FM dial.
Had absolutely the same sentiemnt, forgot the radio off and realized how much joy I got from it. I gave up on TV about 14 years ago and felt a lot less invaded in my home.
I block ads because I don't want to be conditioned to buy things I don't need or legitimately want. I don't want the mega rich to gradually chip away at my mind day by day, hour by hour in order to make themselves another fat pile of cash. If a site shows me some sad puppy image about me stealing their money by blocking their brainwashing, I just add their whole site to my filter.
Content on the internet powered by ads is almost entirely content made to distract people. Cutting it of my life is only doing me good. Until everything decides to block me, I'll just be blocking ads because I hate them and the industry behind them.
My clients are small business owners. They run ads. They are not "mega rich" and are not building a "fat pile of cash". You need to step outside your bubble, and consider the broader ad landscape.
The well has been poisoned. If most ads were politely advertising local businesses, nobody would object. But the essence of advertising is to seek attention, and the inevitable result of that is ads that are obnoxious and discourteous. Even if they are not outright dishonest or manipulative.
Businesses do not communicate between themselves using obnoxious language. Business letters are stereotypically formal. They reserve the brash language of advertising for their potential customers, and those subjected to it are within their rights to point out this hypocrisy.
I find this argument very weak. Should communists not buy anything? Should anarchists not use roads?
When your political beliefs are at odds with the current legal framework, you have no choice but to compromise to some degree. That doesn't mean you don't actually believe what you claim.
My point was it comes from a entitled position. I'm not making the absolutist position, nor am I dismissing all advertising like OP, but these business models exist for a reason and that is why we have so many of our products online.
It's easy for us to use adblockers as the minority of technical users, but that's a privilege based on the other 90% still seeing them (which I personally see nothing wrong with and clearly most publishers dont want to poke the bear either).
Otherwise of course people would love to have everything free plus no ads. But ads built and paid for a lot of good things on the internet, which wouldn't have been possible had they all expected payment or other models.
I'm all for pushing Google et al to be less aggressive with ads and make the web more usable and not requiring adblockers in order to have basic performance. But I don't disparage advertising as a whole because I understand the tradeoffs.
Why would anyone have to defend blocking ads? It’s a personal choice that doesn’t negatively impact anyone. You could argue that if enough people did it, it could effect the potential advertising revenue, but if that were the case then the end result is not that “people are bad for blocking ads” but rather that the current state of advertising is incompatible with user needs and desires.
TV and radio ads are probably embedding inaudible signals meant to be overheard & catalogued by your smartphone, smart home devices, etc.
Don't defend advertisers. They are vampires. Don't mournfully look upon them and proclaim, "Even these wretches must eat." Plenty of jobs need doing. Advertising is not, never has been, and never will be one of them.
Has anyone developed a system to embed redundant inaudible signals into an audio signal? Seems like you could support publishers 100x+ more than any other listener by spoofing these, while poisoning the advertiser's dataset.
On the contrary I would say it's more defensible than other ad blockers. When blocking ads/analytics the potential advertiser sees that the ads reach just part of the audience. With audio blocking, advertiser has no feedback and only thing he an do is to guess how many people listen to the station. This blocking would have to become incredibly widespread to start matter.
Podcast ads are extremely annoying though. They tend to repeat the same message 2 or 3 times, then spell out the name of the products as if people were dumb, and this like 5 times in an hour.
I feel like I'm living in a parallel universe where podcasts either don't have ads (and are Patreon-supported) or the ads are read by the podcast hosts themselves as a humorous "bit". Which podcasts are you listening to?
Podcasts feel like they are at an inflection point. Ad tech people are either going to wreck podcasting or there will be a podcasting bubble pop and the ad tech will go find some other field to destroy.
Isn't technology supposed to make our lives better and solve problems? If skipping the ad manually is fine and defensible, then so is telling a machine to do it for you.
Frankly, I don't care whether people think it's defensible or not. If something's only purpose is to waste my time and sell me shit I don't need I will use every possible solution (whether technical, legal - GDPR complaints, etc - or else) to get rid of it and make my life better.
Maybe instead of thinking whether blocking/skipping ads is defensible, we should ask ourselves why as a society we are accepting having an industry whose only mission is to waste as much of humanity's time as possible while manipulating them to do things against their best interest?
I don't see why blocking ads for the sake of blocking ads shouldn't be a good enough reason to block ads.
As a user I'm not in charge of ensuring that the market works, and I'm certainly not required to ensure that corporations make a profit. It's their duty to do so, and companies making a profit out of ads have proven repeatedly that they will seek profits however feasible.
The worst thing one might be doing by blocking ads is to breach some contractual agreement, assuming that one was ever undersigned.
The only reason one should refrain from blocking ads for the sake of blocking ads would be if that was illegal. But I don't know of any criminal law that punishes such a behavior, and honestly I don't think it would easy to draft one.
I certainly will block ads whenever possible, which in first place means paying for the services I like (entertainment, email, productivity, news, etc.). But when paying is not an option, and too often it is not, I simply quit the service (e.g. Facebook), or block the ads when even that won't work (surfing the web).
You have a point that radio ads are less hostile and invasive than more targeted advertisement, but that argument feels a bit like "It's less defensible to resist a stabbing, because it's better than getting shot"
Resisting psychological manipulation by entities that don't want the best for you remains highly defensible.
Media creators want what's best for the hand that feeds them.
Both advertisers and mediums that host advertisements are subjecting me to messages that are intentionally designed to influence my behavior, often in ways that 1) I did not ask for, and would not elect given a choice 2) are misleading 3) are interruptive or otherwise undermine the utility of whatever I'm watching/listening to.
Many ads are justifiable to block in and of themselves because of the message they send.
"Do you have ugly crooked yellow teeth..." Why do we need to tell people that crooked teeth are inherently ugly. This sort of add is the reason we have girls under 10 worrying about getting braces when their dentist never even mentioned the idea and who are whitening their teeth.
Not all are that bad, and some ads exist just to inform. But given that someone doesn't know until they have already had to listen to the ad, it makes simple enough to justify.
Ads themselves are not defensible. Trying to manipulate others for gain is a disgusting practice. It can lead to depression in individuals and encourages extreme materialism in culture. There's no such thing as an acceptable ad.
Advertising is necessary (paid or not it's the same shit) for small businesses to get off the ground, at all. Cut off ads and you'll strangle thousands of startups/SMBs. Physical ads haven't lost their effectiveness. If they had then we'd be in real trouble.
I don't like ads either but remember there are multiple perspectives here. We should focus on purging bad actors than the entire practice. For now though, I see ad blockers as the tools of change and fully support them.
There is nothing wrong with simple ads. The problem is that at least a century of research into persuasion techniques have morphed ads into objects that can seriously compromise your beliefs and emotions in ways that you did not consent to. Modern ads are the equivalent of refined sugar products we have today compared to the relatively tame fruits. Eating fruits is great, eating refined sugar products is terrible for human health.
Currently, once a few businesses in the market start using refined-sugar type ads everyone else has to or they die. I want legislation that only allow ads that are the fruit kind, not the refined-sugar kind. Until that happens, I will block all ads.
100% there on the analogy. It's incredibly difficult to define but I think we can put some boundaries on it straight away - flashing ads, usage of audio for static ads.
Those things are just annoying. They are not even remotely the most dangerous tactics. See the discussion here [1] on Google Fi's advertisement for medium level tactics. Things like font sizes, colors, placement of text have already primed your mind to think 50 dollars. It will take a huge amount of rational thought to overturn the good gut feeling one has developed toward Google's offering based on the false 50 dollars statement.
>Advertising is necessary (paid or not it's the same shit) for small businesses to get off the ground, at all.
I think there is an issue here because people are talking about different kinds of ads.
A new restaurant putting an ad out that lets people know what the attraction of the new restaurant is (the first Hispanic Sushi bar in town) is not a problem at all (to me, anyways). But if you listen to ads you will find that many don't fall into that category. Political ads are a big example, but also many ads for cosmetic surgery and weight loss. The ads for scams are some of the worst (though generally those last only a few days per scam). Ads for gold that try to scare people into making investment decisions that aren't likely in their best interest are another example.
If ads self policed themselves better perhaps people wouldn't be so set on blocking them.
I'm not talking about that garbage. I'm talking about the mom and pop stores. The catering service, the stationery shop, etc.. These services are competing with shit (other ads) right now. Wouldn't it be nice if we could clean up the ecosystem and have these companies benefit?
Absolutely agreed! And these services you mention have to expend great amount of money and effort at advertising, and often resort to dishonest practices, because the market is already saturated with advertisements.
I like to picture it like this: if everyone around you is shouting through a bullhorn, you have to use a bullhorn too just to have a shot at being heard by the person next to you. But how about taking away everyone's bullhorns? Suddenly, people would have a chance to have an actual conversation.
A floor needs to be put, to stop the ethical race to the bottom, and that floor needs to be put way above where advertising industry currently is.
If I need a catering service or a stationery shop I do a search and look for the websites, not the ads (which are blocked anyway). I don't see how ads disappearing would prevent them from getting business through their website.
At the moment everyone "needs" ads because everyone else does it. If this cancer would disappear then everyone is on a level playing field and can attract business by ranking well on search engines, etc.
I agree. These ads exist (I do see them a lot in Search) but at a much lower proportion than other places. The reason is it's a quantity game and it's much more expensive to buy ads for irrelevant keywords whereas display ads aren't like that.
This is an over exaggeration that doesn’t imply a lot of thought for the consequences.
How are new products and inventions supposed to create word of their existence? As a musician I see ads for new VSTs and instruments or accessories all the time I’ve never heard of, and affect my workflow in a massively significant and positive way.
Why would you feel the need to defend it? It's your bandwidth. Your paying for it. Filter the content you access however you like with a clear conscience.
With web ad blockers you protect against tracking, privacy violations and potentially malware and thus don't see "unacceptable ads". In contrast this seems to be about blocking ads just for the sake of blocking ads.