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Should we gatekeep adblockers? (programming.dev)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/privacy@lemmy.ml
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Genuine question as I'm having a dilemma.

I've seen many of my friends using Chrome without any ad blockers. Most of them don't even know that there are things called extensions that can be installed. Whenever I use their laptops, I want to throw them away. I want to tell them about extensions and ad blockers.

But as much as we hate ads, they fuel the internet. Without them, the internet wouldn't be what it is today. If ad blocker users increase, there would be a massive change in the web, and everything may be paywalled.

So should we gatekeep ad blockers and enjoy an ad-free internet as a minority? It's not like they know what they're missing.

I advocate for FOSS, though. I will tell my friends to try Linux and dual-boot it, and suggest alternatives.

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[–] -2 points 2 years ago (1 child)

You should worry about audience capture / gifting from the patreon model for journalists. And the government control from public funded.

Idk the answer, but ads did give us more less biased news in broadcast news for a few decades.

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  • [–] 14 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 child)
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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    And the direct pay model has plenty of audience capture or the well known yellow journalism issues. IDK it seems to me like ABC of the 1980s was more trustworthy than cable news or social media of the 21st century. Lies of omission are better than straight up lies imo - no documentation is better than wrong documentation.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 child)

    If you'd rather have any amount of bad journalism over trying to fix things, then we hold such fundamentally different values that I don't actually know how to talk to you. You're also moving the goalposts a lot, you seem like you have your mind made up that somehow ads promote good journalism, which is just not true.

    And the direct pay model has plenty of audience capture or the well known yellow journalism issues

    This issue already exists and has for as long as modern sensationalist news has existed - decades.

    IDK it seems to me like ABC of the 1980s was more trustworthy than cable news or social media of the 21st century.

    You don't actually think that, you just weren't actually around for the media of that era so you don't know what it was like. You're blinded by rose-colored glasses. I'll remind you that Rupert Murdoch built his media empire in the 1980s, and Murdoch's one of the empires currently destroying media. There's also the bit where Reagan couped multiple countries and the USAmerican public still thinks it never happened because it wasn't covered.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    I guess not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good would be a fundamental different value. I used to think just pay for what you want because being a customer should lead to better results. The last 10 or so years has disabused me of the notion - so many companies are plenty willing to lie to us or treat us horribly and charge for the "privilege".

    My main point is you seem to be saying "Advertising driven journalism is worse than pay for access journalism." I'm saying "citation needed" - given how cable news and online sites are such echo chambers now (and widely accepted and studied to be so). Even more concerning is the drift of podcasts, substacks, and youtube channels that rely on donations or subscriptions to ever more extreme areas in "audience capture" where advertising has been less a direct driver than broadcast news. This leaves me wondering if the traditional broadcast media like ABC/NBC/CBS isn't less prone to conspiracy theories, outright lies, and also more likely to be willing to show me something I don't want to hear because I'm not directly paying them.

    Also sites like https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/center/ and https://adfontesmedia.com/interactive-media-bias-chart/ tend to rank traditional "boring" sources as most factual and least biased, especially local broadcast affiliates local newscasts. I.e. pretty traditional advertising driven news a la the 1980s.

    Maybe you dispute factuality rankings and bias rankings. Maybe you think conspiracy theories or shows like "The Daily Show" or Tuckers twitter show are better than choosing not to cover some topics that you feel they should have covered.

    I just think today it's far harder to bury a story - if you want to hear about it, someone is commenting. But it's far easier to flood the zone with bullshit, and the incentives with pay for access media seem to encourage being like Joe Rogan and not Barbara Walters for instance.

    And maybe your entire point is there's no good solution and news was worse in broadcast times vs today. I might agree with the first except for that means giving up on getting any news at all and I disagree on the second. It's also why I think having both currently known workable models as alternatives may help - the paid news sources will not be able to as easily be pressured by advertisers or the government funding to not cover topics and the advertiser sources will be more incentivised to report mainstream and boring news than the pay sites.

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