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And they wonder why people use an ad blocker???
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The Bradbury quote is an evergreen one, but works at its best when it gets taken in a wider context: not only a push to monetize every possible space and block of time — both online, on screen, Cerveza Cristal — but also in our physical, everyday spaces and in our public spacing realms.
The long, wide plastered billboard of yore now yield to 5,000 to 10,000-nit LED billboards displaying motion and orders more distraction (away from drivers keeping their eyes on the road and/or even worsening temporary night blindness). Aggressive advertising now creeps up on the most mundane of objects and places in our lives in ways unimaginable just twenty years ago.
Fill one’s vehicle at a fuel pump today and be bombarded by a loud, sudden commercial on the UI screen.
Smart appliances, like commercial refrigerators, now blast sponsored suggestions on what the next set of eyeballs should buy.
At least down in the U.S., but to a lesser extent in Canada, the mushrooming of personal-use vehicles with full vinyl wraps turning a car into a moving billboard as a way to knock down the price of buying it.
The LED walls in public transit shelters, situated on public land, is yet another intrusion.
And, of course, the ICE cube trucks — that’s internal combustion engine, cube-form-factor trucks, not frozen water for your beverage — which have giant LED billboards plastered on two, if not three of the outward façades, driving around a busy part of a major city, whose entrepreneurs for this concept have no self-awareness (or care) of how their business model elevates risk to public safety on moving streets.
The monetization of everything is cancerous, and it has metastasized. In its wake, we are impoverished by a loss of public commons which were designed to be there for all, whose nooks and walls were not being sold to bidders constantly. The internet, with origins as a public commons, is just one vital organ this cancer spread to aggressively.
I feel like, if this thread had been posted just a few years ago, there'd be many responses talking of the immorality of ad-blockers and condemning and shaming those who use them. I guess even the holdouts have reached the limits of their tolerance since then, as certainly nothing has gotten better in terms of being bombarded with ads and prompts.
My main issues on this front are 1) ad-blockers simply don't work as well on Safari as they do on Chrome, and 2) the many websites that have figured out how to get around ad-blockers. What do you guys do to solve this?
My main issues on this front are 1) ad-blockers simply don't work as well on Safari as they do on Chrome, and 2) the many websites that have figured out how to get around ad-blockers. What do you guys do to solve this?
I use Mozilla-based browsers entirely across every device I use. I maintain all of them with a core of add-ons.
When I see people using the internet without ad blockers it astonishes me that they are able to use it at all
I use safari, both macOS and ios and see virtually no ads
Consumer: “All these ads bogging down my device is why I need to buy a new, faster device.”
Interviewer: “But you bought your current device less than two years ago.”
Consumer: “Yah but if I buy even faster now, it’ll improve.”
Rinse, repeat, ad nauseam.
Wow is right. As it happens, I never use as blockers. My philosophy is that, if I’m unable to navigate a site due to ad content, I simply don’t use the site. End-user experience to me is most important element for any company. If a site doesn’t understand this, then they’re not worth my attention. I can almost always find another usable site that provides the same information. Really, we should all adopt this strategy if we ever expect to bring about a better internet.
In psychology and behavioral finance, the "sunk cost fallacy" is a concept that describes the tendency of humans, both individuals and people making business decisions, to use money that has already been spent to justify current or future behavior. It isn't a strategy or tactic but a thought process, often rooted in emotions, that can distort decision making. As such, I don't view sunk costs as driving online advertising decisions; websites and apps are using their need for revenues and, in many cases, desire to go public or be acquired to determine their approach to advertising and advertisements.
For anybody interested, here are two good books about the development and uses of Prospect Theory, which includes sunk cost-related effects:
Why Smart People Make Big Money Mistakes and How to Correct Them
Protect and grow your finances with help from this definitive and practical guide to behavioral economics—revised and updated to reflect new econom...
www.simonandschuster.com
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I sympathize with organizations that need the revenue from hosting ads, and with the organizations that paid to advertise. But, the invasiveness and rudeness of the more recent ad tactics is just awful. The video or song I’m playing on my device should not be constantly paused because some website has 25 video ads ready to autoplay. I don’t even care so much about the insane banners that takeover the whole page and you can see it and then click out. But those videos are disgusting. And then the pop ups where you click the “x” and it pretends like you clicked the ad and it takes you to a new site? It’s just awful.
Yup.
And the concept extends beyond money. It also includes the psychology of previously expended sweat equity, energy, commitments, and aggregate efforts amassed to present — to rationalize continuing on over cutting away from what is (likely to be) an outcome in which more is lost than gained.
For anybody interested, here are two good books about the development and uses of Prospect Theory, which includes sunk cost-related effects:
Why Smart People Make Big Money Mistakes and How to Correct Them
Protect and grow your finances with help from this definitive and practical guide to behavioral economics—revised and updated to reflect new econom...
Good stuff. Cheers.
I've been using Safari with the Adguard and Vinegar for Youtube, no ads in sight.
I recently got a MBA M3 and I have began heavily using Safari over Edge. I am not seeing the UBlock Origin extension in Safari and that has been my go to. Is that not a thing on Safari? I tried a few adblockers through the app store and I landed on AdBlock. It seems to do the job fine, but it appears that Edge (arm version) with Ublock Origin is still faster.
What is everyone using for Safari? I want to use Safari as that is the native option for MacOS but I keep reaching for Edge as it is faster and offers many more extensions it seems. (Don't hate me for liking Edge, I have been a heavy Windows user for my whole professional life and I just recently got a personal MBA to go with my iPhone)
What is everyone using for Safari? I want to use Safari as that is the native option for MacOS but I keep reaching for Edge as it is faster and offers many more extensions it seems. (Don't hate me for liking Edge, I have been a heavy Windows user for my whole professional life and I just recently got a personal MBA to go with my iPhone)
Don't feel like you need to. That's the beauty of computers ... choice and power!
I use Firefox on macOS and Windows as I vastly prefer its native syncing of everything cross platform and the much better (than Safari) extension ecosystem
Safari is a browser on training wheels in too many ways for me personally
Adguard is all in all one of the best adblocker.
But, its updates were unstable. Recalled one which was said to revamp DNS lib ended up ruining the whole thing, not able to connect to App Store and a nos of web sites!
With safari, try AdGuard.
Sticking to safari becos it is the native browser, and the most of all, it would prompt me the Apple Pay for web purchases, not available when web shopping with other browsers.
This is, at least partly, what Gemini hopes to accomplish. It's nice to have a distraction-free alternative, but it is, of course, lacking a lot of content.
The cynic in me wonders whether Google gave its chatbot the same name in an attempt to bury it...
Thanks for the input! I have not used Safari heavily in probably about 5 years and it has really taken some getting used to. The biggest deal breaker for me is the lack of extensions. I want choices and I want to be able to do what I want with my browser. I think I am going to keep Edge around as it checks off all my boxes for now.
AdGuard was another one I tried but it seemed weird that it needed to keep running in the background. It definitely blocked all the ads, etc. but performance was not what I was used to with Edge (even on Windows).
AdBlock seems to be pretty lightweight and gets the job done so I will likely stick with that for a while. I say that as I am typing this on Edge though... 😂
They also cause more advertorial content (ads masquerading as articles)…
Not saying ad blockers aren’t useful, just saying it’s always going to be a game of cat and mouse for our attention.
Ironically, my first career was in Graphic Design & Advertising. I'm passionate about good design in any medium, though I have an affinity for 2D print because I'm old AF. I do design work for the web and long/short form video, but not ad content, although I would if someone showed up with a sack of cash (I mean, do you know how much one Micheline SuperSport 18-305/40 costs now?!). Then I'd block my own ****.
As media, modern web advertising destroys the medium. That is not okay. And there's no threshold where a site operator will just STOP cramming advertising onto a page. That aspect will just get worse. Dolla dolla bills, y'all...
It reminds me of that scene in Ready Player One, in the boardroom where the bad guy is explaining how much of the visual area can be occupied with ads until inducing seizures. This scene was obviously derived from a similar plot device in Max Headroom The Original Story.
But it's also worse than just ads. For example, I'm a paid member of MacRumors, ad free, but I STILL use a full suite of blockers because a full gamut of tracking is fully engaged (furthermore, I never daily drive the same account I use for business transactions.) Those little bugs up in the corner...
I can't bring myself to use an ad blocker. It makes me feel like I'm stealing from web developers who provide a service for free.
Smart
I'll admit I do occasionally pop open Safari if I need to figure out why a site isn't working perhaps due to my extensions in FF -- also if I see a site allows Apple Pay and I'm about to buy something I just copy/paste the URL over to Safari and do the Apple Pay buy real quick
But for everything else, it's all Firefox for me
Safari just doesn't have the power features and extensions I've come to really rely on