Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

ChatGPT, summarize this for me like I'm a geriatric politician.

That's including showing the ads. The data itself isn't worth that much unless people are viewing them.

The efficacy of advertising is sold primarily by advertisers. It's possibly worth a vanishing fraction of what these ghouls say it's worth. But so long as buying it and acting like a greedy invasive bastard is more profitable than ignoring it, even by a tiny margin, corporate giants will keep doing it, since the cost to them is a rounding error.

The industry enabling this is large because they get to sell the same garbage to so many bastards.

As an OSS advocate, I fully agree. Sadly, OSS alternatives have to compete with easily accessible, slick and well-integrated products that are aggressively positioned. Just imagine all the steps you need to go through, just to install Fennec from F-Droid.

Exactly

If you want to pirate, pirate. But there are plenty of free and public domain sources of entertainment and information.

Same with software. It won't be exactly the same experience but if the goal is truly an altruistic attempt to not give money to bad companies or avoid tracking or whatever... there are ways.

I pirate shit. I am not going to pretend it is some holy struggle. I want things that I don't/won't pay for.

To be fair, it makes sense to liken the use of ad blockers with piracy. Consuming the content without paying for it either way, either without directly paying yourself or without indirectly paying through watching ads. Doesn't change that ads on most parts of the internet are extremely invasive and far too much.

I feel fully entitled to protect myself from the ads because of the problems with them. But I don't feel the need to lie to myself about the fact that I'm consuming content without paying for it in some way. Then again I support some content creators that I feel deserve it. Not sure if that helps offset it somewhat or not, but I don't really care that much either.

Anyone who considers adblocking immoral shouldn't block anykind of advertising anywhere.

With some games you need to pirate them if you don't want a Russian nesting doll of launchers and accounts

I'm not a gamer but is this really true? I thought it was the other way around, that pirated games were the ones filled with malware.

They have to break the law to make sure that you aren't "breaking the law".

Open signups happen frequently but you have to be quick to catch them

Opentrackers.org and r/opensignups (or r/trackersignups) are good to check once in a while

MyAnonaMouse has open applications twice a week and the test is very easy

Depends on which tracker. In general though invites and you get invites by association with relevant groups. Sometimes open registration occurs (though rarely) an other times the trakcer may do interviews.

It mostly comes down to time and patience.

By not torrenting. Use Usenet instead. Way safer and easier. Once I went Usenet I literally haven’t touched a single torrent in over a decade.

Search the term "OpenSignups"
They less elite one open usually during holidays like Easter Christmast, Black Friday and summer break.

I'm not sure I would want my ip address being tied to the activity of a large amount of strangers who want to hide their IP address. Seems like a good way to get a visit from the friendly neighborhood black van.