just that the TV commercial looks back at you through the TV and the TV follows you around everywhere, wherever you go, whatever you do, taking note of everything to get to know every single detail about you, every interest, every prejudice, every weakness of yours, to get to know you like no person, no matter how close to you does, like not even yourself do to use that information to influence you most effectively to the TV channel’s and the advertiser’s advantage, to manipulate you, to sell this information about you to other companies like insurances who use the power that this knowledge provides over you to extract every last cent of money from you, to sell you.
You know what’s immoral? Advertising medicine. Advertising surgery breakfast foods to kids. Advertising garbage fast food to kids.
That’s immoral, not adblockers.
I love a big bowl of surgery for breakfast
Mm delicious triple bypass
You know what’s immoral? Advertising
Just this would do.
It seems I’m stupid because I don’t understand what you imply when you say advertising medicine is immoral
Because people shouldn’t be convinced to take a medicine based on good marketing. They should get advice from a good source like a doctor.
Ohh, right, I see, thank you
It’s illegal in Europe for example. Because it’s big pharma basically pushing unnecessary drugs on people.
A reminder that this war isn’t new, even before the mass consolidation of TV stations, they got together to standardize commercial break timing so it didn’t matter if you changed the channel because you were just switching to commercials on another channel
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lovely exposition
Considering that everyone can be targeted by “bad actors” … by even ads on search engines (see https://www.darkreading.com/vulnerabilities-threats/-nitrogen-ransomware-effort-lures-it-pros-via-google-bing-ads ) adblockers are as immoral as a knight wearing armor because it’s an “unfair advantage”. Sorry, but no one I know wants ransomware installed on their computers.
The way I see it, they ruined ads for themselves and it’s not our fault for hating them enough to want to get rid of them. If ads didn’t make the web literally unusable, steal our data, consume more system resources than the site itself, and be a portal for malware, people would be more accepting of them to support websites.
This is a textbook greed leads to ruin tale, like cyberpunk Aesop.
Adblockers are self-defense technology by nature
We are in an asymmetrical arms race involving an abhorrent industry. They cannot feign to discuss morality when it’s common knowledge they have none.
It’s probably fine for a website to kindly request you unblock them, or better yet offer easy & private ways to donate or contribute. If they don’t offer the latter, they can’t really cry about it can they?
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Actually, I like watching TV commercials. But I think it’s just me.
I don’t think that’s quite right. The act of changing the channel wouldn’t have impacted the station’s ad revenue because the tech couldn’t tell if the ad was served. On YouTube you actually deprive the site of ad revenue with an ad blocker. And if enough people do it, you could also deprive creators of material earnings.
So fucking what?
So it’s not the best analogy.
Well, historically ad revenue for TV is based on viewership, right? I’m not 100% sure how that was calculated before streaming, but I would think that changing the channel would still affect those numbers, albeit in a more gradual way. It would still have a similar effect, just not as immediate.
It’s important to differentiate “immoral” from “consequences.” The consequences of adblockers/changing the channel is that it may impact content creators, but that doesn’t make it immoral.
The Nielsen company doing surveys of a percentage of households is how they know. Nowadays they even have a tracker you wear that reports back to Nielsen what you’ve been watching/listening to based on what it can hear, in the old days it was a form folks filled out saying what they watched or listened to
It was calculated by a sample of households with a tracker box
It is, because you don’t switch the channel, you decide to skip the commercials that are meant to finance it.
I think they are immoral beyond any doubt, but many websites are acting immoral as well, which justifies their use. I happily disable them for sites with an ethical approach to advertising and data collection.
