Back in 2016, I reacted to an article on Apple Insider. They were reporting advertising companies complaints against ad blocking... i guess this is a good place to share my response.
Yet another sob story from the "capitalists" (specifically marketing warfare people) that saw a medium, invaded it, corrupted and hijacked it, and utterly ruined that medium for everyone but themselves. The Internet has gone from being an incredibly useful information utility, to being an incredibly slow, convoluted, obfuscated disaster of distraction and wasted bandwidth (and time).
Let me clarify: ad blocking tools are an invention to service a necessity. Stimulus - response.
Clarification of clarification: They did it to themselves!
If this leads to new pay sites with quality, curated content, and ads that aren't a burden to the reader and their Internet devices, then maybe we can finally move into some kind of maturity for this medium, after the unregulated free-for-all that went from "great free content for everyone" to "horrible and near useless for everyone but ad impression counters".
While we're at it, let's do the same with software and instill some damned warranty laws (in the USA there's nothing at all). Computers have been a Wild West of unrestrained abuse. While the corporations were busy complaining about intellectual property theft by their own customers, they were doing everything in their power to avoid having any and all accountability for their own products or behaviors. Capitalism has, historically and contemporaneously, repeatedly shown that it requires regulation in order to restrict it from limitless abuse of customers, employees, the environment, and markets themselves. There's no self-regulation. Ultimately, the people and/or their governments have to step in and say "actually, that's not ethical".
The irony here is how capitalists abuse and destroy the system and then have the audacity to tell us that WE are "morally reprehensible" by attempting to take back a little of the sanity they destroyed.
No, advertising industry, I wont disable my ad blocker. Your fault.
Yet another sob story from the "capitalists" (specifically marketing warfare people) that saw a medium, invaded it, corrupted and hijacked it, and utterly ruined that medium for everyone but themselves. The Internet has gone from being an incredibly useful information utility, to being an incredibly slow, convoluted, obfuscated disaster of distraction and wasted bandwidth (and time).
Let me clarify: ad blocking tools are an invention to service a necessity. Stimulus - response.
Clarification of clarification: They did it to themselves!
If this leads to new pay sites with quality, curated content, and ads that aren't a burden to the reader and their Internet devices, then maybe we can finally move into some kind of maturity for this medium, after the unregulated free-for-all that went from "great free content for everyone" to "horrible and near useless for everyone but ad impression counters".
While we're at it, let's do the same with software and instill some damned warranty laws (in the USA there's nothing at all). Computers have been a Wild West of unrestrained abuse. While the corporations were busy complaining about intellectual property theft by their own customers, they were doing everything in their power to avoid having any and all accountability for their own products or behaviors. Capitalism has, historically and contemporaneously, repeatedly shown that it requires regulation in order to restrict it from limitless abuse of customers, employees, the environment, and markets themselves. There's no self-regulation. Ultimately, the people and/or their governments have to step in and say "actually, that's not ethical".
The irony here is how capitalists abuse and destroy the system and then have the audacity to tell us that WE are "morally reprehensible" by attempting to take back a little of the sanity they destroyed.
No, advertising industry, I wont disable my ad blocker. Your fault.
