Why is the internet overflowing with rubbish ads – and what can we do about it?
Almost all online ads are now automated. And they’re becoming more and more annoying.
Garbage ads have been a thing almost since the dawn of the Internet and we found a solution to them years ago. They're called ad blockers. If you are online and not using an ad blocker: Why? That's like finding a $2/night hooker and not using a condom.
Ew. Speaking of technological illiteracy, the author is irresponsibly contributing to it by insinuating that subscription fee ad blockers are somehow inherently better than free ones, which is not only absolute bullshit but also pretty much anti-Free Software propaganda.
My kids are not what I’d call tech illiterate but they are growing up with all of it taken for granted. They don’t really understand the terms “internet” as distinct from “website” as distinct from “your phone.” It’s just kind of all “on your phone” to them.
I was promised that surveillance capitalism would mean high quality ads that improved my quality of living. :blessed:
When I can’t block the ads, I always opt for the “non-personalized ads” option, since I know they are getting paid less. Also easier to ignore an ad when it is random.
Garbage ads predate the internet.
$2/a night? Okay Mr Moneybags, must be nice to be so rich!
Eloquently/elegantly put
Firefox plus uBlock Origin is what you can do about it. I hardly ever see any ads. SponsorBlock is great if you watch youtube too.
I never see any ads.
Yeah I see seeing ads as a skill issue tbh
For example, Google Chrome has stopped the use of auto-play video.
Even setting aside ads, that was virtually always something that I did not want.
If websites like CNN want someone to watch video, put the video up with autoplay off. If someone wants to watch it, they can start it playing.
But then they can't force you to watch claim that you watched the ad at the start of the video for that sweet advertiser revenue.
What ads?
🤷♂️
Advertising needs to become as socially acceptable as smoking.
It indiscriminately pollutes the environments it’s projected in to, and causes secondary harms to non-participants by incentivising the mass hoarding of personal information which is uneconomical to appropriately secure.
Because it's "too hard" for websites to have proper relationships with advertisers vs just signing onto an ad network.
I still think targeted ads should be illegal. I would accept static ads that are based on the content of the site rather than me as a compromise.
So like if I'm looking at example.com/cool-bikes you can show me bike ads. You don't need to know who I am or track me.
It's good enough for the past few decades (centuries?) it's good enough for now. The Superbowl doesn't serve a different ad to every viewer.
And targetted ads aren't that much more effective than context based. So the internet has been compromised, misinformation has run rife, and platforms hijacked to threaten democratic nations so some corporations can have 6% more effective advertising. What a deal. I believe thats the approx effectiveness difference.
Yeah or bike adjacent stuff.. helmet, chain lube.. hell even a biking vacation.. but stop with the profiling
Remember the purpose of ads is to advertise a product that might potentially sell. Quality control isn't always a priority it's capitalism after all. At the end of the day, if you just want to block ads, just block ads.
git
--- that might potentially sell +++ that is pushed with money
there are products that I would buy if I would know they exist but I don't because they don't have enough money to do advertisment. It's inherently an unfair competition. The only ads that I would like to see is a tematical search for all of the buyable products and services.
Here's what I do about it:
The AI generated car ads are just awful, I made a post about it:
The reason is programmatic advertising and Google has 90% market share there. Btw, it helps spreading misinformation too.
Unfortunately, it may be difficult to do much without some kind of intervention at a larger scale (i.e. government intervention) but so much money is made from these ads. Money talks. There are also people who don’t know about ad blockers or simply don’t care to run one.
I do agree with one comment below of static advertisements to promote a product or service . It reminds me something like tv commercials. The targeted ones is just asking for trouble for your privacy and getting scammed.
What can we do about it? Is this some grandpa's first time on the internet?
All ads are garbage. There's no such thing as a good ad. They are in place to push an entities will upon you, there is no upside to any ad for the viewer. Firefox and Ublock Origin for safety and sanity.
Don't people use ad blockers? If not, learn how to use one instead to complain.
Wanna know why prices everywhere went up so much? They had to pay all the advertising companies for the billions of ads they’ve been trying to force us to watch everywhere, from tv to internet to roadside billboards. So the consumer had to pay.
(No, not really, but it sure feels that way)
What really annoys me is the endless stream of scam, "earn money fast with 1 simple trick" ads
It's literally a scam every single time and trying to report those fall into deaf ears (or blind algorithms) because hey, they're paying to be shown, why should any high ranking executive care? "Oh, I can't be held responsible, sorry!"
Ads = revenue that keep sites and services running. What can you do about it? Pay.
Or let all the commercial sites go out of business and fucking die, so that the labor-of-love websites that dominated the net in the '90s can return to prominence. And nothing of value would be lost.
Anyone who wasn't around then can't really know what they missed.
That sounds wonderful. But I've been using the web a long time. I remember the time you're talking about when we first got web browsers etc. And let me tell you, the windows 95/98 time frame before Google and ask Jeeves etc was not a golden age. Ads were still on web pages, and while people with the right technical knowledge and access to a computer could create a server and a website and so on, they still had to get that website in front of people's eyes.
We had visitor counters and web rings and a rush to buy up domain names before everyone else, and so on. That still costs money though. The electric to run a server. The time to upkeep a website (even in html), and make it look/function the same across different screens and different brands of computers.
Google and even Jeeves and Alta Vista came at a time when we badly needed to connect the internet together in a way that the average new user would be able to find usable and.intuitive enough to get away from books and papers.
Search engines that ran on ads became one of the few good ways to do this. And a lot of the way the business of ad aggregation and web search have developed to make it easier to find what you're looking for for on the web makes sense when you give it any thought. But people spent a good couple of decades completing ignoring that to the point that now it's gotten out of hand and Google basically has a monopoly on search, and half the internet doesn't seem to even know they're not a search company but an ad aggregation company doing what makes them money.
I don't honestly care if you agree with what Google is doing or not. But I do wonder if anyone is thinking about how foss replacements and competition will gain any ground because honestly they either pay the bills with donations and ads, or they charge a subscription fee because these things cost money to run.
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.