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.
I believe my digital person is a part of me. Anyone collecting and owning any part of my person with intent to manipulate me in any way, is stealing a part of my person. I call that digital slavery.
The third pillar of democracy, as we all learned in early primary school, is freedom of information through a free press. The Press, does not mean corporate media owned by a few shitty billionaires. It means freedom of information. There are only 2 relevant web crawlers, Google’s and Microsoft’s. It doesn’t matter where you search the web, the query is going through one of these two crawlers directly or through the third party API. This is like if a hundred years ago, all newspapers were sold by one of two companies. The worst part is that, at the present, search results are not deterministic. If we both search for the exact same thing, the results will be different. This is a soft coup on the third pillar of democracy. The ads system is not about HTML headers like it was in the beginning. Anyone that is not running an ad blocker is more vulnerable to influence and manipulation. Ads are actually forcing you to open up a hidden browser page that visits the ad host’s website. They are able to fingerprint and use cookies, JavaScript and other nonsense just like you visited their website directly. If I go to a grocery store that forces me to walk through a Republican Klan meeting a car lot and a drug privateer’s lobby just to get to the food isles, I’m never shopping there again. This is not normal. This is not acceptable. I would love to return to the original web 1.0. I see the current web as a dystopian nightmare. I simply run a whitelist firewall on my network. I only visit the websites I wish to visit. Sites built on micro services and JavaScript simply don’t exist and I do not care; they are irrelevant to me. Most websites have backup alternative views they show when you do not let them run their stalkerware bs. Guilting you is part of the scam. I stopped uploading to YT when they forced monetization. All of my stuff is still on there. All of the best people I watched stopped making content too because none of us cared about that bullshit. It was about sharing advanced niche info and learning more efficiently. We have a right to a public commons that is free from manipulation and exploitation. That is why many of us are here.