No visible features were being launched (gold gated or general) that improved my experience, so it was hard to see what I was supporting. The reason for this was because I didn't see reddit improving much. I did whitelist reddit in my blocker again. However, in the end I've never purchased reddit gold again. I was, however, happy to be supporting reddit. There was obviously no point in me whitelisting reddit and then toggling the ads off in the settings. Removal of ads wasn't a big benefit to me since, as you know, I could achieve the same with or without reddit gold with ad-blocking. It's an information sharing platform, there was never a promise of it being a profit platform. The internet was just fine before it was taken over by corporate interests, and it will continue being just fine if most of them stop operating there because they're can't monetize it. If their business model is only sustainable through fucking their users in the ass, and they will go out of business if consumers don't bend over, then they shouldn't exist in the first place. There's this persistent sentiment of 'oh but if users continue blocking ads then these websites will go out of business'. There is no legal recourse here - visiting a website doesn't imply consent to downloading and displaying that website how the owner wants. Given all of the above, I don't think it's at all unreasonable for consumers to block and continue blocking digital ads as long as it remains technologically possible.

Anyone can advertise anything, which is why a huge portion of ads are for scams, and most of the remaining portion are for products and services that one cannot legally advertise on traditional media. This allows large ad networks like Google to track you virtually everywhere you go online - the ads shown are almost irrelevant compared to the value derived from this data.Īnd finally, as parent post mentions, there's a complete lack of checks and balances. You don't just get shown an ad, your browser receives a huge payload of javascript intended to track your behavior on and off the site where the ad was shown. Extra bandwidth to serve the ad, extra cpu/battery resources to display it, extra exposure to trackers and malicious js - all on the target. In addition to that, digital advertising is different from all predecessors in a couple of ways which make it very unpalatable to the target users.įirst off, it's the target who wears the majority of the costs.

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