Most free web sites pay for their upkeep with ads. It has been an unwritten agreement since forever (or at least as long as there have been ads on the web) that if you consume the content, you pay the creator by looking at the ads on their site.
Consuming the content without looking at the ads is like shoplifting because you don’t like the way a store’s checkout counter works and/or the fact that they want money from you at all.
You must log in or register to comment.
Upvoted for unpopular. check the sub, doods
If using a adblocker is theft then watching a commercial without buying the product is theft.
or not watching the commercial.
By what logic?
OP’s logic
Please elaborate. The connection between the two claims isn’t obvious to me.
What about people who pay for their internet by data used, is the website not stealing from the user by wasting data with the unwatned ads?
Counterpoint: The checkout counter at the store doesn’t follow me out into the parking lot, grab my license place number and sell it to whoever wants it, or follow me into other stores.
Definitely an unpopular opinion, though! Take my upvote.
They may grab your payment info though, and use it to build a profile of you that tracks your spending habits to share with others.
Source: was one of the people whose cards had been compromised by the massive data breach Target had about a decade or so ago, because Target had been saving payment information on every customer to build profiles from.
Now I think the newer chip-based cards and tap to pay have made it harder to track customers, but that’s basically why every company is trying to push its own app these days.
Unpopular indeed.
LOL
Not sure if the opinion is popular or not, but only ⅓ of web users even use ad blockers.
Honestly, that seems high
That’s mostly because at least 70% of web users nowadays have no clue what they’re doing.
I wholeheartedly disagree with you. I am so confused. Do I upvote or downvote?
Definitely up :)
Thanks
Do you read every billboard on the road? After all they’ve paid for that patch of sky, what obligation do you have to glance that way without paying them the courtesy of processing their inane drivel. Ever see the same ad more than once? Me neither. Every time I see an ad, like a stupid, happy cow, I am entertained once again.
I have (no kidding) taken u-turns to see an interesting billboard. Anyway, the analogy is flawed: You still see the billboard, even if you don’t read all of it - just like I see the ad, but may not really read it.
You ever hear the term “born sucker”?
Ever hear of "Can’t read half a sentence without
no.
Well, now you have. I also tailgate or pass annoyingly slowly to be able to read bumper stickers.
I agree. Applies to piracy as well. I still partake in both - I’m just not lying to myself about what I’m doing.
I find the mental gymnastics hilarious that people perform in order to justify doing that so that they can still feel good about themselves. I think it’s quite similar to eating meat. I know the animals are suffering and it’s hurting the climate and there’s no moral justification for buying factory farmed meat but I still do because it’s so good.
Someone gets it :) You may downvote me.
Using ads is theft (of my precious lifetime).
I call it brain time. Those fuckers are designed to stick. I really loathe everything in advertisement and if you work there you can rot in hell as far as I’m concerned.
Another translation of OP’s opinion: walking on the street without looking at storefronts is unfair. Stores pay a substantial rent to be there and a lot of money to renovate and pay people to put up stuff for you to look at. Anyone not looking at these store fronts are robbing people of their money. There should be traffic stops where people have to describe exactly the location, size and content of every ads on the street. Failing to do so should be punished by law.
Sssh. Don’t give them ideas.
Upvoted for unpopular and for making clear, legitimate points in favour.
That said, I partially agree. Serving content costs money, as does investigating, reporting and writing it. Paywalls are the Black Death of the Internet, so what else remains? A creator fee as provided by Brave in the past was nice but didn’t work. Donations are scarce, small and unreliable. Advertising has proven to work well for old school newspapers and magazines, so it’s an understandable choice.
However, from advertising it escalated extremely quickly into the Stasi-inspired tracking-snooping-profiling fuckfest it has become, not taking into account the disgusting ad-to-content ratio, pop-ups, pop-overs and yes, pop-unders, flashing banners, animated swf banners and the abuse of the ad markets by malware and espionage groups.
And I too, Gandalf, I was there, 3000 years ago, when my wizard wrote the OSF1 binaries on the securely aligned platters of oulde.
If you’ve ever managed or monitored a corporate firewall, you’re honestly doing yourself a disservice by not using an adblocker these days. The amount of malicious advertising that corporate firewalls block these days from employees on the internet is astounding.
Legitimate as traffic accounts are constantly hijacked by threat actors as its such an easy way to spread malware and compromise machines.
That right here is the problem with communities like this one
OP made a perfect post for this community, an extremely unpopular opinion, and gets downvoted
