The people who make ad blockers have improved my life enormously.
Compare with a world where an omnipresent virus has been eating all adblockers since the beginning. Perhaps some of us would be in a better place, using the internet less. Perhaps it’d actually have become a norm to pay for ad-free content and many of us would stay on the parts of the web we paid for.
If that’s the alternative, I believe they have harmed your life. Remember that bending backwards for ads is not just making your site uglier—it’s doing everything to maximize pageviews and clicks, which affects everything, down to selecting the very kinds of content that get posted. The web as a whole is less honest.
Maybe forcing sites to mask their ads as content is a good thing.
Are “ads” just visual clutter to you? To me it’s a low signal-to-noise ratio, demonstrated by the filler content on a cooking recipe or how a 10-minute YouTube video is carved into 3 minutes of introduction, 3 minutes of pointless digressions, 1 minute of information, 3 minutes on why the information was great, and “please like and share and don’t forget to hit that subscribe button”. Masked ads are in the same vein, you have to realize you’re reading “nutritionally empty” content and filter it out. It’s immensely tiresome and I’d rather have simple visual clutter.
Compare with a world where an omnipresent virus has been eating all adblockers since the beginning. Perhaps some of us would be in a better place, using the internet less. Perhaps it’d actually have become a norm to pay for ad-free content and many of us would stay on the parts of the web we paid for.
If that’s the alternative, I believe they have harmed your life. Remember that bending backwards for ads is not just making your site uglier—it’s doing everything to maximize pageviews and clicks, which affects everything, down to selecting the very kinds of content that get posted. The web as a whole is less honest.
Are “ads” just visual clutter to you? To me it’s a low signal-to-noise ratio, demonstrated by the filler content on a cooking recipe or how a 10-minute YouTube video is carved into 3 minutes of introduction, 3 minutes of pointless digressions, 1 minute of information, 3 minutes on why the information was great, and “please like and share and don’t forget to hit that subscribe button”. Masked ads are in the same vein, you have to realize you’re reading “nutritionally empty” content and filter it out. It’s immensely tiresome and I’d rather have simple visual clutter.