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Why is the internet overflowing with rubbish ads – and what can we do about it?
(theconversation.com)
this post was submitted on 18 Sep 2024
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How about becoming literally disabled and pushed away from the one area i was deemed proficient in?
Seriously, if the internet is going to be like this, might as well pull the plug.
I have been investing in running my own services and programming my own life essential tools anyway. I will always be computer nerd but one of these years i am just going offline, trow my phone away and glue my mailbox shut.
And yeah this is anger talking but i am so fed up with this “someone must make profits to justify our existence” excuse. That is not how passion works.
I'm not talking about "someone must make profits" that's disingenuous. What I'm saying is that services that you consume for free cost money to run. Someone somewhere has to provide if nothing else the computer/server, and electricity to run it the fediverse runs on donations and ads literally the sync app I'm using runs on ads, paid tier, etc. because it costs time and money to upkeep.
Your personal problems with tech in general and your disability don't have anything to do with that. People are talking on the tech community about how Google is taking out competing front ends for YouTube and what this means for an ad free experience, and while I agree that Google is obviously the bad guy for being the mutli-trillion dollar company it is, I also recognize that they have always been an ad company and the thing about Google is that before it existed as a free to use service we relied really heavily on an open web that was pretty empty by comparison and very disjoined. Finding things was a problem. Web rings may give people nostalgia for a "better time", but they weren't efficient ways to find information.
I can understand being angry but paying for the things you use is the one way to create alternatives to these services that are literally taking advantage of their users for profit as you put it. Lots of web services that are big "gotta make money" companies started out offering us free or inexpensive alternatives to the companies that were overcharging us and gouging us.
The fact that they've got too big is an issue with capitalism not the concept that people shouldn't have to pay for the things they use.
The Internet is full of ads because ads pay bills and keep the lights on.
As with any devil's bargain, one must evaluate whether it's really worth it or not.
If all advertising on the Web disappeared tomorrow, would some valuable content be lost because the people putting it up are not willing to fund their site out of pocket? Certainly yes.
Would even more worthless garbage be lost? I think that's also a "yes".
I'm willing to accept a smaller Web with some losses in order to get rid of obnoxious advertising. So are many others. You appear to disagree, as is your right. In any case, it would take a major legislative movement and/or cultural change to cram the genie back into the bottle at this point, so the argument is most likely moot.
Yeah but the web has been this way since the mid 90's. It's been funded by ads the way that things that came before it were. Broadcast television is a good example. People switched to cable because of less ads and more channels with the expectation that there would be better content. That didn't last. Then we had tivo and DVRs and so many other products to get around ads. But the root of the problem is that people won't buy things they don't know about, won't use services they don't know about, will have a hard time looking for goods and services that they do want without some form of advertisement. Word of mouth is advertisment too when you get right down to it. The ads were often less intrusive but became more so over time because it's such a hotly contested area that pretty much every company small and large is throwing money at.
What's worthless garbage to some may be useful in a pinch to others. The point is that combating ads means taking away a source of revenue not just for ad aggregators and ad companies but for business full stop. I hate billboards. I'd be perfectly happy to never see a billboard again in my life. That being said, they have been effective ads for a long time, and have been used for good purposes occasionally (missing persons, unsolved crimes etc come to mind).
I'm not saying ads aren't more often than not intrusive, annoying, or lost on me. I actually do find them intrusive, run a pihole and a private DNS etc. But I also recognize that really laws to curtain what ads can do is a major problem, and that services have bills to pay.
And all that is to also say that worth is subjective.