this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2023
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Fuck ALL advertisements. Yes, even "unobtrusive" ones, especially yours. If I want your shit, I will find you. If I appreciate your shit, I'll pay you for your time. If you want to connect, I'm all ears. Otherwise, fuck off capitalists, fuck off advertisers, and fuck off useful idiots who want to waste my finite lifespan in this miserable universe showing me ads.
I'm down voting you because I agree lol
Unfortunately there's a lot of products that most people don't even know exist. Hell I keep finding new tools and wondering why I've been doing things the hard way for so long.
OTOH, fuck all the advertisers who use shady tactics to make sales, and especially fuck all the people who pray on the naivety of others to steal their money. I was just showing a customer an email I got the other day stating her domain hosting was past due and required immediate payment, and she asked how I knew it was a scam. Uh, hello, because ---I--- am hosting your domain and website (and this is exactly why I share this kind of stuff with people, to make them think before they blindly write a check).
For sure. I'm not against promotion in the large, but the constant and intrusive advertisements within other tasks, such as web ads that take up valuable screen real estate, or TV/YouTube commercials that keep me from the programs I want to watch.
Like my username is literally PM_ME_VINTAGE_30S. I have no problem getting PM'ed or emailed stuff. For example, I'm subscribed to a number of mailing lists from sites I ordered from. Guitar Center can send me all the emails they want [1], sell me all the crap they want, because I can opt out at any time, and I have a work email so I can put them aside for later.
[1] To the specific email I gave them, which I do check.
I would argue that if there's a product that nobody knows exist that's not necessarily because we need to allow constant intrusive ads, and more indicative that people don't actually need the product.
I want to say that in any given day, 60% of the ads I see are from big, well known companies who don't need me to see them to know they exist. Shit like Liberty Mutual (I swear I see more of their ads than anyone else and THEY ARE ALREADY MY INSURANCE PROVIDER), Coke, Pepsi, etc. 39.9% of the remaining 40% are advertisements for shit that I just don't care about. I don't care about the newest tech toys. I don't care about the newest car mods, or random shit I can put on my desk, or stupid extra kitchen gadgets. Fully 40% of the ads I see are trying to convince me that I should buy a product that I straight up don't need because the ad looked cool. Why should those ads be allowed to exist? Why should I be constantly bombarded with ads for services that I either already know plenty about or for things that are trying to manufacture a reason for their existence?
Only about 0.5% of the ads I see are actually for things I did know know about and that seem useful to me, or like something I would like. Probably even less than that, I'm drunk rn and estimating.
I keep throwing away ads from Comcast trying to sell me on the virtues of their business internet packages. Guys, I left you because your lame-ass shit was expensive as hell, slow as hell, and you couldn't even be counted on to meet a single appointment in 6 months to bury your damn line you left laying across my yard.
I agree with you, there's a lot of companies that just need to be silenced. You're allowed to send me ONE ad, and you better make it good because I don't ever want to hear from you again.
I literally just came from another post that was talking about this.
Basically what happened to the Internet as a whole.
Are there people who genuinely enjoy ads?
YES this. We should start a community. I hate advertising, absolutely hate it, and do everything I can to avoid it. Pihole โ , YouTube premium โ , sponsorblock โ , Firefox โ , ublock origin โ .
What else am I missing, I want it all blocked!
I'm pretty sure ads don't work on me. People tell me 'ackshually they do, you just don't notice.' Nah, mate. They don't. They just annoy me.
I hate ads as much as the next guy, but without ads get ready to start paying for things. You go to a news website, sorry you need to login and hand over your credit card to access anything. Youtube? Sorry you need to login and pay up to watch anything. You want to Google,Bing, Duckduckgo something sorry you better pay up can't sell you data to advertisers anymore.
Not saying this is necessarily a bad thing but it will fundamentally change how the internet works and it potentially could limit informational access to poor people.
And who is to be blamed for setting up this system ?
I brought this up the last time I talked about this, but to be clear, if we must choose between advertisements and paywall, then we should choose advertisements as the lesser evil. However, we must never accept the fallacy that advertising or paywalls are the only possible choices! More generally, we must never accept the fallacy that a market is the only acceptable way to distribute goods, a corollary of which is the idea that any acceptable solution needs to compete on equal terms with existing products in a market.
Well the first part at least would be a welcome change. The issue in my view is the very fact that poor people are treated as second-class citizens in information access or any other field of endeavor.
I very genuinely want those sites to fucking die so I don't have to coexist in a world where they dominate the internet. I would be literally thrilled to join a group of like-minded people who have to reimplement the conveniences of the modern web from scratch for free.
Still end of the day the server bill has got to be paid.
Why on earth is a paywall an evil and worse than ads? This idea that everything on the Internet needs to be free-as-in-beer is the toxicity that has resulted in our entire world corrupted with ads. A News organization needs money to pay journalists and to send them to where news is happening. A video service like YouTube needs to pay for massive amounts of storage and servers. If you want quality professional content, and not just fake blogging thinly disguising advertising, you need to pay writers.
The alternative is that is it all corrupted with ads, or by the "rich uncle" of the day like a musk or a zuckerberg or whatever with an ulterior motive.
If you want the provider of a service or product to be beholden and at all responsive to you, as a user, rather than someone else, you need to be a customer, a paying customer. That's your only real leverage. If someone else is the real source of their revenue stream then their every act is geared to please them and not you. That's what we have now.
If you want to socialize it all instead, like a PBS, I'm fine with that, but good luck.
not unpopular!