Unpopular Opinion
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)
- If your post is a "General" unpopular opinion, start the subject with [GENERAL].
- If it is a Lemmy-specific unpopular opinion, start it with [LEMMY].
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/
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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.
? I agree but that doesn't make it not piracy. Are you implying piracy is not sane behavior?
if you're arguing this, it's probably already vanishingly rare for you to be clicking on ads or looking anything more than a glance at them. and on my work device, where i didn't install adblockers as an experiment, i don't recall ever seeing ads that ship malware, and i commit quite a bit of tomfoolwery on my work device.
if by malware you mean how viewing ads slows down your machine, that what people say of Denuvo.
(not sure what you meant by the jehovah's witnesses part. are they actually starving?)
I think you got the piracy part backwards. The ad companies are the thieves. Their ads ship with trackers that steal the consumer private information. It's an invasion on privacy and it's a security threat. I blog and don't implement any ads to protect my readers
It's a very good business and it exists.
It's good, because Denuvo and every DRM framework is malware too.
Since when is starving a requirement to accept harassment from every company out there? On my own computer nonetheless. It's basic protection. I don't install viruses because you ask for it.
i'm not asking you to accept harassment, i'm not saying piracy is bad. i'm just saying that ad-blocking is one form of piracy, just like how people pirate to reject DRM. and it surprises me that so many people insist it's not.
i don't understand why i would host a solicitor or how that is comparable to ads. when you see a solicitor you don't pay them bread and jam, their company does. when you see an ad you don't pay the website money, the ad company does.
Ads is a form of psychological harassment for many reasons.
Cult members are often not paid by their cults. You should give them your money then.
so is DRM.
money isn't what cult members want when they volunteer to evangelize. that's different from webmasters and ads.
How old are you?
That might be because your work device is protected by policies and applications installed by syssec team.
Imagine them getting teleported back to the days of Limewire's mp3.exes, pop-up ads, pop-under ads, audio ads, moving ads, activex bullshit, drive-by malware not even needing interaction, and...
BonziBuddy too, can't forget that. It's so cute, it can't be malicious! I'm going to install it on all my office computers, what's the harm?
curiously, the only time i've ever gotten infected (besides wannacry) was through a torrent
You don't have to click an ad for it to be a security threat.
It is possible to abuse the mechanics of a web browser to send a fullscreen ad that resists typical means of app closing, scaring a normal user into clicking to install something malicious.
The weakest link is always the user, and advertisements are literally meant to target users. Exactly how hard do you think it is for an ad network to target the kinds of people most likely to get scared and just click the [Fix] button that downloads the malware?
Your average user gets infected and they take a computer to a repair shop to get it fixed, which costs money.
If the ad network would accept liability for damages caused by malware ads their ad networks delivered to people, I could be more sympathetic to the position that blocking ads is unfair to the content creaters paid by ad views. But if I'm financially responsible for fixing damage caused by ads, then I reserve the right to block them.
Full stop.
these are as rare as non-tracking ads, and my approaches of<1. i don't use my web browser much on mobile (that distance probably fries my eyes anyways) 2. i use µBO and whitelist sites on my normal computer>probably help me avoid that anyways
A lot of ads are given permission to run unvetted, arbitrary code in your browser.
Every modern browser is supposed to sandbox that shit, but all they need is one security exploit to escape that sandbox and potentially be executing arbitrary code on your computer with full access to all of your files.
Some malicious ads can potentially infect/hijack your computer without you clicking on them at all.
Ads were a big source of malware around 2000.