Welcome to the Unpopular Opinion community!
How voting works:
Vote the opposite of the norm.
If you agree that the opinion is unpopular give it an arrow up. If it's something that's widely accepted, give it an arrow down.
Guidelines:
Tag your post, if possible (not required)
Rules:
1. NO POLITICS
Politics is everywhere. Let's make this about [general] and [lemmy] - specific topics, and keep politics out of it.
2. Be civil.
Disagreements happen, but that doesn’t provide the right to personally attack others. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Please also refrain from gatekeeping others' opinions.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Shitposts and memes are allowed but...
Only until they prove to be a problem. They can and will be removed at moderator discretion.
5. No trolling.
This shouldn't need an explanation. If your post or comment is made just to get a rise with no real value, it will be removed. You do this too often, you will get a vacation to touch grass, away from this community for 1 or more days. Repeat offenses will result in a perma-ban.
6. Defend your opinion
This is a bit of a mix of rules 4 and 5 to help foster higher quality posts. You are expected to defend your unpopular opinion in the post body. We don't expect a whole manifesto (please, no manifestos), but you should at least provide some details as to why you hold the position you do.
Instance-wide rules always apply. https://legal.lemmy.world/tos/
What about services where you pay but still get ads? Netflix? Cable?
In UK people pay for TV if they have one. In Germany people pay for TV, Radio even if they have one. Does it stop ads? Nope! Except you can't block them on radio wave level unfortunately. At least on the web you can.
piracy implies you a stealing with out paying. when they offer it for free its not stealing, they have every right to have ads to pay for thier sites, but people have right to block things that could affect the computer.
Piracy is not stealing/theft. That is a corporate lie.
i agree; you're making copies: not displacing any original inventory
Ads are egregious attempts at brainwashing you into buying something. Blocking ads is morally correct. If something relies on ads, then its business model is broken.
There is no law that says "you have to load the ads that are being served when you access a website" (yet).
It goes against the wishes of the content provider, but not against any rule they can legally enforce.
It also doesn't even touch on copyright law.
Therefore, it's not piracy.
That's not unpopular, that's simply incorrect. No law bans me from blocking ads.
I don't HATE hate ads. When watching Twitch, sure I get an ad every 15 minutes I think. But the fact that there is technology for ANYONE in the world to see someone's computer screen in almost real time, have a chat room, and (almost) for free (well, for $0. I pay with my time watching ads)
But seeing the SAME AD, EVERY TIME, makes it annoying. I don't know why Twitch thinks I will watch FNAF 2, but seeing the ad 10 times will not convince me to watch it.
Change it up. Make me go "oh, what's this ad about" not "oh NOT THIS AGAIN". That is a gaurenteed walk away for a water break.
Sure, I'll take it. Can always do with more piracy.
We were never asked what kind of internet we wanted. Not now and not in the 90s.
The deal is between the person paying for the ad and the person displaying the ad.
I wasn't ever involved in the deal, I owe them nothing.
Yep. I don't recall signing any contract...
Ads are an unwanted local infection that brings malware and brainwash people. Blocking ads is the sane behavior, not piracy at all.
Unless you're giving food and shelter to every Jehovah's Witness that comes to your home, then you're the insane one.
upvoted for being actually unpopular
We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem
Ads flooding a page with garbage making it more difficult to read is absolutely a service problem. As is having to pay a subscription fee to a news outlet you may only check once a month.
Offer me a service where I pay per article read, a similar price to the ad revenue per article, and we can talk.
Working to avoid the excesses of surveillance capitalism isn't piracy, it's self-defense.
Time is our most precious resource and advertisers are here to waste it. I have no qualms telling them to fuck off.
When I ride my ad-subventioned subway and I look away from the ads, am I free riding the sub?
Downvoted cause I agree. Adblock is based and so is piracy.
Is throwing away unopened junk mail stealing from the post office? Its the exact same thing
post office gets paid either way, website doesn't. you're describing looking away from the website's ads while your ad-blocker's off.
Post office only gets paid because some portion of people do open them; they would make much more money if everyone did.
If everyone throws away junk mail there's no money, if everyone blocks ads there's no money. It's the same system but with better attribution for impressions.
the analogue there would be clicking on the ad. google ads, probably the most popular single platform, has two kinds of ad payment: per-click and per-impression. by just receiving it and throwing it away you get rid of the former, but by blocking ads you get rid of both. (there's also the fact that most people do not block ads, while most people do throw away junk mail)
and if everyone throws away junk mail, there's still money, because the post office got paid to deliver it. same goes for not blocking ads but not looking at them.
The fact you have more comments than up votes means this is a legit unpopular opinion, Good job 👍
Agreed. Though I don't think these people should be downvoting an opinion here simply because it's unpopular. Either that's my unpopular opinion, or there's some other reason they're downvoting.
It does not have anything to do with sea so it's not piracy, nor is it copying without license. You aren't in a contract with people that show you ads, there is no legal requirement to do it. I don't care about their commercial interests but care a whole lot about my time and interests, I feel no obligation to do it, nor care if some ad-supported thing will stop existing. Like fuck them lol.
Is it any different from when we used to record our shows and fast-forward through the ads?
My family always used to mute ads on the TV when I was growing up.
I guess that's piracy too, eh?
It isn't in any way piracy. I am under no obligation to pay attention to ads.
not paying attention to ads is very different from blocking the ads
Not to me.
but to the website's wallet
Or give them access to my network or my compute.
Content blocking is not piracy, at least when accessing government resources.
I’m the sole decision maker as to what content I download to my personal devices, and that goes for web content as well as other things. If I don’t allow content from domains like doubleclick.net then that’s my right and nobody can overrule that decision.
I reject your premise that ads are the payment for content. I would equate ads on websites to tipping; a completely optional form of income for the website.
I don't tip.