this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2023
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Technology
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They outright said in their own press release it's primarily to increase ad visibility by breaking ad blockers.
There's no scenario where this makes the web better
The irony is that I wasn't that against ads until they got super intrusive and started causing performance issues and breaking web pages. And of course the privacy problems with tracking cookies. But yeah, fuck all ads now, and fuck Google for trying to wring as much ad revenue out of me as possible. I switched to Firefox with uBlock.
I cant remember internet ads being good ever. From the malware and infinite popup spawning sites of the 90s and early 00s, to those old obtrusive flash based ads(PUNCH OSAMA BIN LADEN AND WIN A FREE GBA!). That said there were those sites that just had some tasteful banner ads here and there that kept things running and it feels those are getting less and less common with ads even on mainstream sites being intrusive.
Internet ads have been a cesspool for so long and then webowners wonder why people block them.
I feel like some responsibility also lies on the way ads are delivered. Even on the more respectable web they use ad services that use a combination of targeted tracking, and random nonsense that gets spooned in by the ad company without much input from the actual website.
Some people would still be entitled and complain, but I feel like most people would be more likely to whitelist sites and live with it if ads were like simple banner ads.
A simple banner ad.
Every single paragraph.
Would still make me turn to ad blockers.
they could easily just put them on the side or top and bottom, but yeah a lot of sites do that thing where the article loads and then the javascript catches up and you lose your place as the article shifts around and ads and videos start loading
Every now and then, I try to browser without an ad blocker.
That generally lasts until I encounter something that's bad enough that I don't really have a choice, and then I turn it back on.
The page needs to actually function. It needs to be possible to click on something and actually be clicking on the thing that you're intending to.
And it can not have stuff that blinks in a manner that causes a segment of the population (which includes me at times, but not 100% of the time) significant neurological problems.
That last one has been the driving force behind stuff getting reenabled a fair bit.
Oh, and if it's ads on video content, they need to be at least vaguely reasonable in regards to interruptions and length. Youtube is way past that at this point.
Most of the time, it's not the ads that bother me. Instead, it's the sale of my personal info, autoplaying videos, and possible risk of malware that bothers me if I turn my ad-blocker off. I've tried several times to find a "fair" ad-blocker.
Yup. This won't be used just to serve up unblocksble ads. If you're signed in to Google, this DRM will be used to track you, as well. VPNs will be useless because the tracking won't be done through your IP address, but through your browser, identified by DRM and tied to your Google account.
That's what this is really about. Knowing who you are, where you are, where you go, what you see, what you buy, who you associate with. Forcing you to watch ads is just the icing on the cake.