It's never been a problem with people ad-blocking for the last 20 years, why is it suddenly a problem now?

We've been celebrating denying creators revenue for decades...

Maybe this is just the internet hypocricy of "When I do it, it's good, when they do it, it's bad".

Total sleight of hand.

Ad blocking has always been a problem for creators but it's aimed at big corps - non-creators. The creators asked people to support them other ways or turn off the blocking. And it's not like the little independent creators wanted this version of commercialized internet in the first place.

The ai marketing teams are spinning everything they can but no AI companies are the conscript, the vultures. No question about it.

	▲	WarmWash 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The conversion from viewer to donator is around 1%. This is true from wikipedia, to twitch, to podcasts. The number of people who will not ever load your ads is around 30%. I can tell you that creators talk about this a lot in private, but will not publicly because the internet has a mass delusion on how creation and compensation works. It's like trying to convince christians that jesus obviously didn't come back from the dead days later, depsite there being no logical system available that would explain it. If we were to try and map out a functional internet where everyone wins, users and creators, there is no example where ad blocking is anything other net harmful. You either get volunteer net where 0.01% share hobby posts on their own dime for the other 99.9% or you get IRC where 99% of the population doesn't really benefit (ala 1993).

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vharuck 26 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I use ad blockers on my personal computer and phone to avoid tracking. My work computer doesn't have a blocker, but I only visit "professional" sites and major blog aggregators on it, so those ads aren't egregious. Ad blockers wouldn't have become a thing of it weren't for ads causing terrible layout, poor performance, and annoying interruptions when playing sound. Not every website does it, but the ones that do have poisoned the well.

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u_fucking_dork 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

People usually point at the scale when this discussion comes up, in my experience. These companies are doing something at a huge scale spending tons of money to do it so the potential harm is greater.

People can easily justify their own piracy because it’s small scale. Even when they organize, create a whole software and tooling ecosystem around pirating media to stick into jellyfin or plex. AI still did it bigger and worse and is bad, what I’m doing is not so bad because I wasn’t going to buy the movie anyway, etc.

	▲	WarmWash 3 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		On the whole, about 35% of internet users are ad-blocking. In the tech space it's upwards of 70%. It's in no way, shape, or form "small scale", and has fundamentally changed the the very nature of the internet for the worse (opinions/views of ad blocking people don't matter).
	▲	52-6F-62 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Don't forget that the money being spent to do said scraping has, in great sums, come from subsidies paid by taxes from public coffers.

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onedognight 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Choosing not to look at something is not denying anyone anything.

	▲	WarmWash 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Choosing not to look at an ad, and blocking it are different things. One is totally ok, the other incurs a monetary loss on the creator. Those services aren't free to run, and the content doesn't take zero time to create. It also incentivizes creating content focused on those who cannot figure out ad blocking.

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zetanor 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I am in favor of severely limiting both copyright and advertising, but for the benefit of everyone, not just for the benefit of a few "AI" companies.

	▲	omnimus 3 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		And you will not get it. As the AI pump money into lawyers and politicians - they will be the ones profiting from copyright. Total regulatory capture as US AI companies make it illegal to train AI on their output.
	▲	WarmWash 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		The answer is to simply pay for stuff. There is no viable model where "have stuff but not pay for it" works out.

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theamk 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

There is more to life than money.

Many of the websites I read do not collect any appreciable amount of money from ads, or have no ads at all (one example: news.ycombinator.com :) ). They want a recognition, or to share the knowledge, or community, or they are building their brand... And AI is destroying this all - the first result of "zx80" is an AI overview with a link to wikipedia and some youtube videos. If person stops there , they will never get to computinghistory.org.uk link, and won't see any related information about the variants and models.

	▲	WarmWash 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		This website is an ad for Ycombinator. It's in no way, shape, or form a charity place for devs to hang out. It's a feeding ground to lure tech people into a mega VCs pastures. When you click "news.ycombinator.com" you are clicking on the ad. :)

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mixmastamyk 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Interesting. I suppose the main difference is that we’re ants compared to an 800 pound gorilla.

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qotgalaxy 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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