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Why so many people get triggered about ads nowadays?

Wherever I go, I often see the sentiment "This website has ads, so it's trash" pop up in conversations. And honestly I don't quite get why. 90% of the internet has always had ads, you just scroll past them and mind your business. At least they're personalized now so you can pick a topic you like instead of diapers and miscellanous spammy trash as there once were.

47 comments
  • Ads are the epitome of the enshitification of the internet. It corrupts the incentives to make anything online.

    At least they’re personalized now

    This is a whole other can of worms that makes it so much worse. From data harvesting to selling your information to third parties etc.. It is a privacy nightmare and rather malicious in nature. This is one of the things that FOSS (Free and open-source software) tries to remedy.

  • My personal take is that people start understanding the negative impact unhinged marketing can have on your well-being. Ironically, while following influencers and having their happiness and worldviews happily influenced by social media.

  • Personally, I don't mind ads that are not extremely obnoxious. A clickable link on the sidebar advertising something or a random picture here and there - no problemo, as they're easy to ignore.

    What I can't stand are the extremely intrusive ones - pop-ups that obscure half of the screen with such a tiny little X in the corner that you need to click it in a pixel-perfect manner so you won't "accidentally" open the ad itself. Ads that play music at full volume without warning. Unskippable ads in videos. Sites that greet you with "we noticed you're using an adblocker" and just won't let you view the actual site content. Ads that make the rest of the site lag like hell or freeze entirely. Rapidly flashing ads in neon colors that almost make you have a seizure by looking at them. Those can GTFO and if my adblocker isn't able to / allowed to hide them, I simply won't use the site in question anymore and that's it.

    To make an IRL comparison: I don't mind at all if there are advertisement brochures just lying around on a counter while I'm in a mall, because I can decide on my own whether or not I want to take one of those. But if there is an employee blocking my way, screaming at the top of their lungs and slapping me across the face with said brochure, and I am not allowed to knock them out cold, then I'll never set foot into that store again, ever.

  • Ads as a general concept are ok to me, otherwise a lot of the Internet that is free will either go away or cost money. It's just how many ads and what type. Pop-up ads are bad, too many ads are bad, ads that are deceptive are bad. They need to be small, curated, non-intrusive, and non-deceptive.

    • otherwise a lot of the Internet that is free will either go away or cost money.

      It's unfortunate, but this would be a much better internet in the long run. There are other business models besides ads. Like Curiosity Stream and NebulaTV as alternatives to Youtube. People who make video content simply get paid to do it. With ads the type of content you primarily fund is outrage content and whatever gets the most clicks regardless of whether the creator cares about what they are making or not.

      There would be some growing pains in an internet that isn't driven by ads, but it would be way better.

  • I get ads may be a necessary evil if you're using a website or service you aren't directly paying for, but 9/10 times it's because of how they're implemented and behave and advertisers and large publishers are out of touch with users and never learned or they simply just don't care.

    First off, it seems that ads always have to be presented in the most obnoxious ways and this is a problem that's almost as old as the internet. I remember going online back in the late 90s and early 2000s, you'd get those extremely obnoxious and seizure inducing "YOU'RE OUR 1'000'000 VISITOR" or "YOU WON A FREE IPOD" ads. Today though, ads are still as annoying or even worse to an extent since every website now insists having autoplaying videos with sound or if you're using a phone and trying to read an article, 3/4 of the page will be taken up by an ad and you have little room to view the actual content.

    Secondly, ads have been increasingly becoming a privacy issue. Advertisers want to know every little thing about us and have the ability to track us around the web. I really want advertisers especially to know as little as possible about me because they clearly can't be trusted with data wether they keep it internally or sell it to data brokers because some of the data they're able to collect is alarming.

  • Its a privacy issue as well as just an awful annoyance. Fuck you I dont want to watch your shitty ad I need to watch this video so I know how to fix my dishwasher.

  • No the internet has had ads during your lifetime but older people know exactly how it was before. :)

  • If I told you that you could see a movie for free, but every 20 minutes or so we'd pause the movie and slap you with a fish, would that be okay?

    Would it be better if we analyzed your website usage to choose the specific kind of fish that you'd prefer to be slapped with, would that be okay?

    That's what ads feel like. I hate them, and I've almost entirely eliminated them from my life.

  • Because I can't go two minutes without someone trying to sell me something, and it's infuriating. I can't even browse Lemmy without someone spamming my feed with their shitty Lets Play videos, or some random selfhosted project posted by the company who made it.

    It's disingenuine, and is to me one of the single largest reasons I've switched over to decentralized platforms.

  • I feel many people are so privileged on both sides of politics that they have nothing better to do than to create their own problems.

    • Wait until you learn that there aren't just two sides in politics.

      • Even in European countries there are two dominant parties that work with others on their side of the aisle. In fact the concept of a left and right comes from France.

        Polarization is universal in politics at the scales or democracy.

47 comments