nahneun
Uncle Nephew
- Joined
- Feb 25, 2009
- Messages
- 10,174
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It’s always easy to find some sort of justification to use an ad blocker. And I pretty much started my previous message saying that many (most?) ad-funded websites are to blame as they got greedy. They mostly brought this upon themselves.
However I do think that using ad blockers is not ethical, as simple as that. If you like a site and keep visiting it, you should support it. You don’t like it without an ad blocker? The honest option is to stop visiting it. I know it’s a controversial opinion.
When you visit Styleforum with an ad blocker, it’s not just that they’re not getting anything from you via ad impressions, you’re costing them money in infra costs (CDN bandwidth, hardware, etc.). To be frank in a forum it’s slightly different because we’re also (unpaid) content creators so potentially the forum might still get something from you if you create content that others enjoy, but obviously if everyone used an ad blocker (not even everyone, just above a certain %), it all falls apart and it’s not a viable business. SF no more.
Again, when in a few years virtually everything is paywalled behind a monthly subscription (at least everything that can survive on a paid subscription model, SF is not one of those) I’m sure the SF crowd will be fine spending a few extra bucks a month. But as I said, I worry that many people without the same resources will lose access to information (news, learning material much of which is in sites like YouTube, etc) and the gap will widen. Ads suck but they’re more democratic, for the lack of a better word.
BTW I don’t want to keep derailing this thread, this would be more fitting in the random thoughts one anyway.
this is literally one of the worst takes i've ever had the displeasure of reading. calling ads democratic lol jfc