I posted this question because I once saw a tweet that said something like:

“If you use adblock, you don’t care about creator’s point blank”

What is your opinion on this? Do you agree with them?

  • Hexarei
    1·
    1 year ago

    I use uBlock Origin on individual devices and a Pi-Hole on a network level.

    My reasoning:

    1. As a web developer, everything I make and publish is either for fun or for profit. The things I create for fun, I don’t expect to make money or even be financially sustainable. If I did, they would be things I create for profit. If I create something for fun, I try to either leverage a free hosting service or host it myself, to avoid outrageous costs. If I create something for profit, I tend to use a simple subscription model. If someone wants to use something I’ve created for profit, they can pay me for it. I would love to throw money at the sites I use on a regular basis to help sustain them. I do so with a YouTube Premium subscription, paid subscriptions to apps that I use, Github sponsorships, and several Patreon memberships.

    As such, by using an ad blocker, I’m not expecting anything of others that I wouldn’t do, myself.

    1. As someone with both ADHD and autism, I will never require someone to pay me using their attention. Some of us have a limited supply of that, and have to ration it as-is.

    2. I have never once seen an ad on a website, banner or otherwise, and thought “Wow, I should buy that.”

    3. They are a waste of my screen space, CPU cycles, network bandwidth, patience, attention, and time.

    4. I don’t want to be tracked.

    5. They often reduce performance of the content they are meant to compliment and support, which will make me less likely to stick around. A while back, I encountered some ads on a web game was built using WebGL. Any time ads would load, there was a half-second pause in the game, even on my rather substantially-spec’d PC (Ryzen 9 5950X, 64GB DDR4-3600, GTX 3080).