Third spruce tree on the left"An ad blocker is preventing this page from loading."
No, my #adblocker is preventing your #ADs from loading. The fact that the REST of your page refuses to load if the ads dont load, well that sounds like a YOU problem.
Pieter@tezoatlipoca As much as I hate ads, tracking, malvertising and websites trying to blame my adblocker... we are not entitled to free ad-free content.
We complain about paywalls. We complain about ads. And when websites that invest in high-quality journalism go out of business because they can't pay their staff, we complain that everything is AI slop and SEO spam nowadays.
The content industry is so weird.
Mad Engineering@superblox @tezoatlipoca Early internet spoiled us by being primarily academic, everything was free because tax money was used to pay for the required work in the first place.
@madengineering @tezoatlipoca The internet is more than just a collection of scientific publications to me though. If that's all you desire, that's still out there.
@superblox @tezoatlipoca The ideal was, I think the banner ad. Simple Image. Paid for the content, and there were limits to how much it could annoy you.
Back in the day when print magazines and newspapers where a thing - I dunno I haven't bought one of those in over 15 yrs - they were at least HALF ads and noone cared or commented, even when you were ALSO paying for the thing up front. Didn't want to read the ad, move your eyes!
I don't think anyone has issue with ads being present, just don't pull jank shit like modal capture popups or refusing to load at all unless you have JS active/disable blockers etc.
XocoLinguo@tezoatlipoca @madengineering @superblox But print ads were neither predatory nor parasitic. If you weren't interested, you could just turn the page.
@xocolatli @madengineering @superblox that's what Im saying, if the ads went back to being mostly passive (I think we'd also be ok with the odd banner add like mid 2000s style) we'd all be ok with that.
Also, the way out of this for ad networks is to provide the ads via cached API call and have the (passive, image only) ads added to the page at render/compile time not serve/proxy/client-agent time like they are now. You can't disable an ad if its just like any other image in the page.
@madengineering @tezoatlipoca Except advertisers don't pay squat for untargeted ads that are easy to ignore. That's the business reality we're ignoring.