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yes, because no ads basically means my antivirus software has nothing to do. Creators have no choice over what ads are served up with the content and 99% of ads are loaded with malware whether you click on them or not.
Creators need to come up with better ways to monetise their content instead of relying on them.
The story of internet ads is a classic greed to ruins fable. People put up with static picture and text ads for a very long time, and many, myself included, still don't mind them. In fact, self-hosting picture and text ads is almost guaranteed to get through adblockers.
But then the ads started moving. They started playing sound. They started executing code and phoning home to third party servers and collecting user data without consent. They started consuming more system resources than the webpage itself. Malware started being distributed through it, and there was even a recent breakthrough of ad cryptominers, because, again, they literally execute arbitrary code on your computer!
At this point our trust in ads are irreversibly broken. We will never tolerate ads again like we did when they hadn't done all this, even if they promises to clean up their act. Adblock was developed as not just something to remove unsightly ads, but also, and I do not exaggerate when I say this, as a line of defense for the security and usability of your computer. It's like an antivirus, but it kicks in before the virus even reaches your computer! For this reason, I think adblockers are not only okay to have, but essentially a mandatory item for browsing today's internet. If you want revenue in spite of that, maybe set up a tip jar and/or go back to self-hosted text and picture ads, I'm not disabling adblock and opening myself to harm because, no offense, I genuinely do not trust you.
I own my computer, and I control what is displayed on it. I can do anything I want to control what is and isn't on my screen. It is not my problem if the majority of content is reliant on an ineffective monetization method.
I do wish someone would make an ad block that faked impressions. But it would probably lose the advantages of fast load times, security etc.
Faking impression is extremely hard to do, there are billion dollar companies out there that exist literally to stop ad fraud as their primary purpose.
I'm not a hardcore capitalist. Also i can't watch all the ads the corporations would like to feed me every day. So i'm fine with using an adblocker. Don't give stuff out for free on the internet if you don't like this. But since you ask: I really don't like that strategy to commercialize everything, to finance everything by selling ads and user data...
undefined> capitalist
are you a capitalist tho? I mean, I consider myself a capitalist and let's just say people don't agree with me a lot here. anyways, how has this platform been treating you
lol. i watched way too much star trek when i was a kid. i would consider myself as someone who dislikes capitalism. but that's my private thing. i like having money available to buy food, eat nice noodles or go on vacation every now and then. but i wouldn't be sad if that somehow worked without the concept of money or some of the big companies.
i like this platform. i'm fine, thanks for asking.
I do everything under the sun pretty much. Ublock origin, NoScript, chameleon extensions on Librewolf (and others). I “subscribe” to YouTube channels via rss feeds. Open up the newsboat feed reader from my terminal and an extension called “Alter” redirects me to an invidious instance. NoScript blocks everything pretty much as I just need the url. Then I use yt-dlp with the sponsorblock flag.
I only visit YouTube when I have a bunch of new “subs” that I found through word of mouth (reading blogs, HN, Mastodon, Lemmy, etc). I could just use invidious rss feeds, but if the instance goes down I would have to start all over again. There are other ways of achieving this same effect, but this is how I choose to consume yt now.
I use adblock because it makes the internet usable. There's just so much crap shoved in your face these days. Not just ads that are blocked, but sponsored search results and SEO crap that you have to use your time and energy to filter out. I don't know how anybody actually buys stuff or responds to internet ads. I'm more and more on the Dead Internet Theory bandwagon.